Explain the significance of dream analysis for Freud. What is the difference between the manifest and the latent content of a dream? What is meant by dream work?
Freud could not impose free association on himself. To overcome this, he used another tools for empowerment of self-analysis. He noted that the content of dreams could be imagined in the same way as that of the hysterical symptoms. Thus, hysterical symptoms and dreams could be considered as an entity of symbolic manifestations of repressed traumatic thoughts that overcome the cause of the problem by analyzed it in a modified manner.
Thus, Freud observed the phenomena known as dream analysis that was considered as a second way of identifying the unconscious mind in a better way and also was suitable for the characteristic features of self-analysis. According to Freud’s hypothesis, dream analysis was considered as the major tool for studying the contents of the unconscious mind. He thought that the symbol dreams contain enough information about the repressed memories that could provide information about the hysterical symptoms.
Dreams require a sound knowledgeable property of goal of interpretation. During sleep, a person’s defenses are least but not eliminated, so a repressed experience reaches to the level of conscious state in a disguised form. Therefore, a moderable features exists that overcomes about telling what a dream appears to be about it is known as manifest content and what a dream is actually about it is known as latent content.
According to Freud, dream interpretation is a complex phenomenon that is well versed to deals with psychoanalytic theory to accomplish the task. So, he focused on the understanding of dream work that refers to the mechanism that distorts the meaning of a dream that makes it more tolerable to the dreamer in gaining a valuable dream. It includes the property of displacement and condensation.