Freud's (1900) dream theory

Freud's (1900) dream theory

1. Unconscious thoughts guide a lot of our behaviour

2. 90% of our thinking is unconscious

3. Dreamwork

   • What the unconscious mind is doing whilst dreaming to protect an individual from undesirable thoughts
   • Condensation
     • Many ideas appearing as one symbol in a dream
   • Secondary elaboration
     • Something unimportant shifted to being important to take away focus from true meaning
   • Displacement
     • Added things to a dream during recollection in order to have the cream make sense

4. Repression is a way of forgetting undesirable thoughts by pushing them into the unconscious

5. Strengths

   • Used unique methods to find difficult to access data
     • He considered that phobias could be the cause of mental problems.
   • Gathered qualitative about real life (valid data)
     • Rich detail about real life (valid) over a long period of time was used for dream analysis

6. Weaknesses

   • His sample was biased
     • Worked primarily with rich Viennese families
   • His concepts were unmeasurable
     • There is no way it can be measured, and cannot be proven
   • He interpreted his findings, meaning they could be biased
     • This means they could be subective
   • There is an alternative biological theory, the activation-synthesis theory

7. Dream Analysis

   • Freud's way of interpreting dreams is known as psychoanalysis
     • Free association
       • A method of asking a patient to say their thoughts out loud in order to try and find links
     • Slip of the tongue
       • An accidental use of a word analysed in order to identify unconscious thoughts
     • Dream analysis
       • A way of using free association to understand a person's unconscious thoughts
     • Strengths
       • It can access hard to reach information
       • It is usually accepted by the client
       • It uses the information from the client directly
     • Weaknesses
       • There may be ethical problems
         • The participant may be given false memory
       • It involves interpretation which is subjective