Chapter Commentary of The Interpretation of Dreams - Study Guide by Sigmund Freud

of being realised in dreams. Furthermore, to children, he argues, 'dead' means little more than 'gone' so is not such an evil wish.

Dreams of death of a parent, often apply to the parent who is of the same sex as they dreamer, and in the context of infantile sexuality their same sex parent is therefore a rival in love, whose elimination could not fail to be to their advantage. This is immortalised in Oedipus rex and Freud's identification of this phenomenon as the "Oedipus Complex".

(c) Other Typical Dreams

For example the dreamer finds himself flying through the air to the accompaniment of agreeable feelings or falling with feelings of anxiety. Freud concludes that these dreams too, reproduce impressions of childhood, i.e. relating to games of movement, which are extraordinarily attractive to children.

He rejects the theory that these dreams are provoked by our tactile feelings during sleep or sensations of the movement of our lungs and so on. Conversely Freud argues that these sensations themselves are produced as part of the memory to which the dream goes back, i.e. they are part of the content of the dream rather than its source.

(d) Examination Dreams

Most people have at some stage, had anxiety-dreams of failing an exam or being obliged to take an exam again, turning up late, missing the day etc. Freud proposes that these represent intensifications of the same childhood fears that we recall for punishments suffered for our evil deeds in childhood. So, once out of the discipline of parents, or teachers, we feel the burden of responsibility ourselves so whenever we have done something poorly, or insufficiently, we expect to be punished by the event. Furthermore, Freud found, interestingly that we only dream of failing exams which we have successfully passed, and never ones which we have failed. Freud also suggests that the dreams' latent content could be of self-criticism and consolation, and returning to a psychosexual view, Freud points out that the has a lot of material conforming the view of Wilhelm Stekel who suggested that examination dreams relate to sexual tests and sexual maturity.

VI. THE DREAM-WORK

Freud, individual, in distinguishing between the dream as we experience it – the 'manifest dream contents' - and the stimuli which act together to produce the dream, the 'latent dream thoughts'. The process by which the latent thoughts are transformed into to manifest dream content is known as the 'dream-work'. Freud found that there were four dream-work processes : Condensation, displacement, representation by symbols and reversal. Therefore this chapter is best summarised accordingly.

(1)The work of Condensation

This is the process by which two or more associations to the latent dream thought are compressed into one image. An example from his own dreams:

The Botanical Monograph dream

I had written a monograph on an (unspecified genus of plant. The book lay before me and I was at the moment turning over a folded coloured plate. Bound up in the copy there was a dried specimen of the plant.

The botanical monograph, related to the work upon cocaine that Freud had once written. The coloured plate led to a new topic – Freud's fascination, especially as a medical student with the coloured plates in journals, and also to an occasion when as a child he had pulled to pieces a book with coloured plates. The dried specimen of the plant touched upon an episode of the herbarium as Freud's secondary school. Thus dreams, in their manifest content condense several latent (indifferent, but recent and/or infantile impressions) into a single dream.

(2)The Work of Displacement

Freud saw this as a process of censorship, that is we don't want to admit to the real object of the latent thought and so the desire is displaced onto another object which alludes to it. Freud saw this process also working in the waking life of neurotics with perversions whi displace their object of sexual desire onto something else that alludes to it, such as cross- dressing or ejaculating while kissing. These sort of displacements can also occur in dreams.

(3)Representation by Symbols

This occurs when complex or abstract thoughts are converted into an image. Freud cites the examples of the concept of `possession' (in German `besitzen') being represented by sitting (`sitzen') on the object, or of the concept of `adultery' (`ehenbruch') being represented by a broken leg (`beinbruch'). So in trying to interpret a rather vague concept into an image the mind can often use a linguistically similar word that is more concrete and readily converted into images as a symbol for the desired concept.

(4)Reversal

Freud held that the mind often treats opposites as the same thing and will often replace one for the other in a dream, for example `weakness' can become `strength' or `small' `large' in dreams. To support this belief he uses examples of this occurring in language. In ancient Egyptian for example `ken' meant both `strong' and `weak'. The two meanings were only differentiated by inflection in speech and in writing by the addition of a pictograph of a man either standing or squatting. It was only later that the two distinct words `ken' (`strong') and `kan' (`weak') were developed. Or, to take an example from English, the word `with' once had meanings of both `combining' and `separating' which can still be seen in words such as `withdraw' and `withhold'. The mind then has no problem with using interchangeably opposites such as `strong-weak', `light-dark' or