Freud's Dream Research Articles

THINKING THE DREAM: DREAM AND DREAM THINKING IN SIGMUND FREUD, HANNA SEGAL, AND WILFRED BION.

In the dream and its interpretation, psychoanalysis, in its founding period around 1900, identified the "royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious in the psychic life." But already in the development of Freud's work itself, the dream lost its central position: As early as in the 1920s, psychoanalysis ceased to be a theory and practice defined by dream interpretation-a caesura in a process which completed itself in 1950. Two further developments proved, up to the present day, particularly momentous for the conception of the dream: Melanie Klein's development of the concept of "unconscious phantasy" and the extension of psychoanalytic treatment to psychosis, originally declared inaccessible to psychoanalytic therapy by Freud. This article draws an itinerary of this path and the subsequent fundamental changes in the psychoanalytic reflection on the dream affecting the whole of psychoanalysis until today, by casting spotlights on essential stations: conceptions of the dream developed by Hanna Segal and Wilfred Bion, the latter's theory perpetuating Freud's dream theory as well as it conceptualizes dreams, dreaming, and thinking in a fundamentally new way.

The Manifest Content dan Al-Ru'ya: Kondensasi Mimpi dalam Cerpen “Perempuan Patah Hati Yang Kembali Menemukan Cinta Melalui Mimpi”

This study focuses on the same events that repeatedly appear in the main character's dreams. The contents of the dream are interpreted as instructions, so the main character carries out the instructions according to the contents of her dream and hopes it will come true. This study aims to discover how the manifest content and Al-Ru'ya appear as condensation of dreams in the short story Perempuan Patah Hati Yang Kembali Menemukan Cinta Melalui Mimpi by Eka Kurniawan. The method used in this study is qualitative, utilizing Sigmund Freud's dream interpretation theory. The data used are sentences that show the dream events experienced by the main character. The data analysis technique describes the condensation of dreams experienced by the main character. The study results show the condensation of dreams that first includes the manifest content, namely the repetition of dreams that appear clearly and are easy to remember due to the influence of physical products. The dream recurrence occurs due to a mental disorder characterized by hard feelings of trauma and sadness. Second, Al-Ru'ya, namely the belief in dreams that come true, such as finding a beach location on Pangandaran beach, meeting a handsome man and loving her, then becoming her future love, and the last is meeting the man's dog. Dreams come true because dreams are believed to be a realization of wishes, fulfil desires, perceptions and beliefs, and magical instructions.

Converging theories on dreaming: Between Freud, predictive processing, and psychedelic research.

Dreams are still an enigma of human cognition, studied extensively in psychoanalysis and neuroscience. According to the Freudian dream theory and Solms' modifications of the unconscious derived from it, the fundamental task of meeting our emotional needs is guided by the principle of homeostasis. Our innate value system generates conscious feelings of pleasure and unpleasure, resulting in the behavior of approaching or withdrawing from the world of objects. Based on these experiences, a hierarchical generative model of predictions (priors) about the world is constantly created and modified, with the aim to optimize the meeting of our needs by reducing prediction error, as described in the predictive processing model of cognition. Growing evidence from neuroimaging supports this theory. The same hierarchical functioning of the brain is in place during sleep and dreaming, with some important modifications like a lack of sensual and motor perception and action. Another characteristic of dreaming is the predominance of primary process thinking, an associative, non-rational cognitive style, which can be found in similar altered states of consciousness like the effect of psychedelics. Mental events that do not successfully fulfill an emotional need will cause a prediction error, leading to conscious attention and adaptation of the priors that incorrectly predicted the event. However, this is not the case for repressed priors (RPs), which are defined by the inability to become reconsolidated or removed, despite ongoing error signal production. We hypothesize that Solms' RPs correspond with the conflictual complexes, as described by Moser in his dream formation theory. Thus, in dreams and dream-like states, these unconscious RPs might become accessible in symbolic and non-declarative forms that the subject is able to feel and make sense of. Finally, we present the similarities between dreaming and the psychedelic state. Insights from psychedelic research could be used to inform dream research and related therapeutic interventions, and vice versa. We propose further empirical research questions and methods and finally present our ongoing trial "Biological Functions of Dreaming" to test the hypothesis that dreaming predicts intact sleep architecture and memory consolidation, via a lesion model with stroke patients who lost the ability to dream.

Arab Psyche, Indian Dream, and the Ethics of Psychoanalysis

Arab Psyche, Indian Dream, and the Ethics of Psychoanalysis

Freud's dream analysis of "Tell Me Your Dreams" by Sydney Sheldon

As humans, our minds are divided into various different parts, and it is often our experiences that help shape the person we are. "Sigmund Freud viewed dreams as "the royal road" to the unconscious and developed dream analysis, or dream interpretation, as a way of tapping into this unconscious material." (Aurora, 389-410). This paper tries to analyze the different identities that reside within Ashley Patterson, the protagonist in "Tell Me Your Dreams," a masterpiece by none other than Sydney Sheldon, how Freud's dream analysis help us understand the chaotic state of Ashley's mind and bring us closer to the origin of her nightmares. This paper will closely review the novella by Sheldon. Keeping it as the primary source, the report will uncover the various conditions that can trigger the defense mechanism of our ego and create multiple personalities as a result. It is a descriptive paper as the writer obtains information from reviewing earlier works and the novel at large and draws a conclusion using it. The research technique used for the report is an extensive study of various library and scholarly articles on similar topics, information is gathered in the forms of books, articles, encyclopedias, or literary reviews that may have related to this study are collected and taken as the sources.

The Doctor and Mrs. A.: Ethics and Counter-Ethics in an Indian Dream Analysis by Sarah Pinto

Reviewed by: The Doctor and Mrs. A.: Ethics and Counter-Ethics in an Indian Dream Analysis by Sarah Pinto Sean M. Dowdy Sarah Pinto, The Doctor and Mrs. A.: Ethics and Counter-Ethics in an Indian Dream Analysis. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. 256 pp. Sarah Pinto's latest book, The Doctor and Mrs. A., is a soaring re-analysis of a psychoanalytic case study, a mere 40 pages lodged in an obscure text published in Lahore during India's Partition. Dev Satya Nand's The Objective Method of Dream Interpretation: Derived from Researches in the Oriental Reminiscence State (1947), though largely forgotten, argues for a regenerative process of transforming and reconceiving one's desires through their re-experience in dream states. As Pinto in turn argues, the experimental nature of the text, especially in its accidental ambulations and openness to new ways of living, affords a framework for theorizing the flipside of ethics, or what she dubs "counter-ethics"—i.e., departures from or reversals/reorganizations of ethical formulations. Pinto's entire book can be read as a fleshing-forth of this concept in its gendered, decolonial, and socio-cosmic implications—all the while keeping its defining contours fluid and open enough to do the work that counter-ethics is supposed to do. Being "indifferent to content…a position not a set of principles" (193), a counter-ethic responds to ethical claims with a modest, yet indomitable rejoinder: "Don't get too comfortable" (181). So, let's get a little uncomfortable and dive into the voices of a small and strange conversation once lost to the archives… The Doctor Dev Satya Nand was an Indian psychiatrist trained at the University of Edinburgh who later assumed psychoanalytic training under the supervision [End Page 163] of Owen Berkeley-Hill. While employed at the Punjabi Mental Hospital in the early 1940s he began work on his "objective method." Satya Nand's effort to re-work Freudian dream analysis—unscientific "mumbo-jumbo," in his words (89)—was meant to be both a correction and an elaboration. A correction in the sense that Satya Nand was trying to bypass the partial insights of free-association in order to impartially observe the rock-bottom truth of psychical reality. For the eponymous case re-analyzed by Pinto, the case of Mrs. A., Dr. Satya Nand had the analysand "promise to tell 'the whole truth and nothing but the truth' about whatever 'came into her mind during our investigations'" (7). This overhaul of Freud's "fundamental rule" in the incongruous language of legalist oath-taking removes the "free" from "association," but in doing so it—almost ironically, and perhaps counter to the intentions of Satya Nand—shifts analytic attention away from intrapsychic content and toward the dynamic forms of mutual interpretation. Thus, as an elaboration, elements of Satya Nand's approach were way ahead of their time. His technique for analyzing dreams (a day-dream in the case of Mrs. A.) was to parse and fragment "stories" of the analysand into "dream smudges," divide them up with elliptic gaps of silence (which he called "dream spaces"), then offer an interpretation with the intention of encouraging the analysand to reflect on the soundness of his interpretation as well as its unvoiced connections. Interpretation as an anti-authoritative offering, a proposal for the analysand to accept, refute, reinterpret, or fill in the blanks—this is a technical innovation most often attributed to D. W. Winnicott (1976), a quarter of a century later! And while Satya Nand's approach seems to avoid the transference/countertransference—i.e., the analytically essential, unconscious tango of projections, identifications, etc. stirred up between therapist and patient—his dialogical and narrativefocused technique is strikingly original enough to hold our attention. For Pinto, this technique became central to her conceptual development of counter-ethics. Mrs. A.'s "small arguments," her rebuttals and refutations of Satya Nand's interpretations, all demonstrate counter-ethics through "the choreographies of transformation, the forms taken by ethical imaginaries in their encounters with one another and with the world…often in moments when the terms of ethical formulations are revalued, or their meanings parsed" (27–28). Additionally, as Pinto historicizes in...

The Courage to Dream: A Beginning Psychotherapist Encounters Bion

In this paper, a psychotherapy student is given an assignment to analyse one of her own dreams using Freudian dream theory. She struggles to engage with the task until she discovers the ideas of Wilfred Bion. The notions of alpha function and beta function offer a framework for the student to understand why she has had so much difficulty in staying connected to her dreams or delineating in a culturally appropriate way between what is reality and what is her dreamworld. The student questions whether her early life, taking place within the political and ideological conflict of apartheid‐era South Africa, may have influenced her ability to stay in reality, and wonders about her own ability to contain the affects of her children. She presents a vignette of a dream of her own in which she has to free a naked baby who is stuck in a wall in a bathroom. The writer and her therapist construct the dream as aligning with her own psychoanalytic work to integrate the very young part of herself. In coming to this understanding with the ideas of Bion, the student experiences her own reality in a more vivid and present way.

Such stuff as dreams are made on: John Bowlby and the interpretation of dreams

ABSTRACT In this paper, newly uncovered archival material from the Bowlby archives is presented on Bowlby’s own dreams and dream interpretation. Although he was critical of orthodox psychoanalysis, Bowlby appears to have been seriously involved in Freudian dream interpretation in the 1930s and 1940s. Here, we present in annotated form his own interpretations of several of his dreams from that time and a series of lectures on dreams. In Attachment and Loss, classic dream interpretation is absent and Bowlby used the content of dreams as a reflection of the influence of real-life experiences on the representations of attachment relations, with a clear focus on grief, loss, and mourning. Bowlby’s shift from psychoanalysis to a more behavioral approach and the introduction of the concept of “defensive exclusion” to supplant Freud’s concept of “repression” may have led him to think about how grief and mourning may affect the content of our dreams.

Battered and sexually abused children: connections with the Freudian theory of seduction and its rejection

It refers to what Masson says about Freud's abandonment of the theory of seduction. Then two different versions of Freud's dream about "closing one's eyes" are analyzed, as well as recent criticism of Freud by Miller, Krüll and Bowlby, and past criticism by Ferenczi. Finally, the importance given to real traumatic events in recent literature is highlighted.

"I May Allow Myself to do This": Conflict in Freud's Writing of The Interpretation of Dreams.

An autobiographical interpretation of latent meanings in Freud's Interpretation of Dreams is undertaken in order to explore oedipal themes in Freud's writing and their role in his resistance to writing the book. By looking at how the book performs its message, in presenting a collection of Freud's personal dreams that talk to each other and inspire meaning-making, we can see how readers are drawn into the role of interpreters/analysts. This process makes the oedipal myth palpable long before Freud mentions it. It also illustrates an analytic process that analysts are all required to follow. Finally, the process reveals something in Freud that could be apprehended only after his ideas were conveyed-the unending process of interpretation, in which every conclusion gives rise to new ideas, inspiring new conclusions.

Freud's Dream Interpretation: A Different Perspective Based on the Self-Organization Theory of Dreaming.

Freud's Dream Interpretation: A Different Perspective Based on the Self-Organization Theory of Dreaming.

Entre « concessions en profondeur » et « dédommagement ». Krokowski, personnage complexe et stratégique dans La Montagne magique

In a short article published in 1925 Thomas Mann addresses his “unsimple” relation to psychoanalysis, suggesting that in his latest published novel, The Magic Mountain, the character of Dr. Krokowski could be read as “indemnification” [“Schadloshaltung”] for “deeper concessions” [“tiefere Zugeständnisse”] which the author made to psychoanalysis “inside his work.” He thus invites us to analyse this character not only as such (i.e. in the straightforward process of characterisation), but in terms of a strategy within the “artistic economy” of the novel. Krokowski’s repeated mythical identification as the infernal judge Minos makes him simultaneously a master of the labyrinthine space structure of the Berghof sanatorium, of its cyclic time, and of the theories that reign there. He notably plays a key role in contrasting successions of scenes in which refusal or denial of psychoanalysis alternates with Freudian dream sequences which present themselves as narrative confirmations of the actual validity of psychoanalytical theories. In this game of giving voice to both validation of and attacks upon psychoanalysis (“deeper concessions” and “indemnification”) – culminating in the diptych of sections Hippe and Analyse – Krokowski is a central piece and personifies both the possibility and the limit of a psychoanalytical reading of the novel, thus opening a space of playful relationship to the text.

"Ma, kan Ma dan nie sien dat ek aan die brand is nie?" Enkele opmerkings oor wat ons vandag is

Die huidige nasionale krisis in tersiêre onderrig in Suid-Afrika, gesien teen die agtergrond van 'n korrupte nasionale regering wat geen leiding neem om die krisis te bestuur nie, noop filosowe om 'n indringende analise te onderneem van ons tyd. In 'n poging om sin te versin begin die artikel met 'n soort denkeksperiment waarin ons land, Suid-Afrika haar op die spreekwoordelike praatbank bevind in gesprek met die outeur-terapeut. In die loop van die terapie-sessie kom Freud se bekende droomscenario aan bod oor die oorlede kind wie se doodskleed aan die brand slaan en die droom wat sy/haar ouer op basis van die tragiese gebeure het. In hierdie essay word die droom met sy brand-motief gekoppel aan die heersende toestand in Suid-Afrika wat deur koerantopskrifte beskryf word as 'n land wat brand van woede. In 'n poging om sin te versin word die Freudiaanse droom sorgvuldig vanuit Lacaniaanse perspektief geanaliseer. Vervolgens poog die essay om na te speur waarom die huidige woede van die jeug op hierdie spesifieke historiese tydstip so vurig is. Die speurtog bring die outeur op Mbembe se spoor en spesifiek sy oortuiging dat die fundamentele vraag rakende die herstel van sosiale bande wat vernietig is deur mensehandel en die eindelose oorloë nie vooropgestel word in die postkoloniale diskoers rondom die identiteit van die Afrika-subjek nie. In plaas daarvan figureer die Afrikaan primêr as passiewe slagoffer oorgelewer aan magte buite sy/haar beheer, onbewustelik geteken deur die onderdrukte trauma van die broedermoord wat mede ten grondslag van die slawehandel lê. As die vrygebore generasie in die teken staan van 'n oorspronklike trauma wat alle daaropvolgende traumas hulle trefkrag gee en wat irrasionele emosie-gedrewe reaksies tot gevolg het, hoe kan ons hoop op 'n uitkoms wat nie vooraf bepaal is deur dieselfde regressiewe spiraal van ons en hulle, van geweldpleger en slagoffer nie? Op 'n hoopvolle wyse wend die outeur haar tot Lacan om die vraag te beslis. Lacan dring aan op 'n minimale dog weerbarstige keusevryheid wat die historiese voorafbepaaldheid kan deurbreek. Daar word bevind dat die sogenaamde keusevryheid allesbehalwe 'n eenvoudige antwoord op die dilemma bied.

On Dreams and Motivation: Comparison of Freud's and Hobson's Views.

The merits of Freudian dream theory continue to be debated and both supporters and critics appeal to empirical evidence to support their respective positions. What receives much less attention is the theoretical coherency of either Freudian dream theory or alternative perspectives. This paper examines Freudian dream theory and J. Allan Hobson’s alternative position by addressing the role of motivation in dreams. This paper first discusses motivation in Freudian theory and its relation to dreams and disguise-censorship. The role of motivation in Hobson’s theory is then considered. Hobson’s claim that dream plot and content selection is random and based on design error and functional imbalance is then discussed in relation to the protoconsciousness theory proposal that dreams serve an adaptive function. While there are apparent inconsistencies in Hobson’s position, his appeal to emotions and instincts provides a preliminary platform for understanding the role of motivation in dreams that is consonant with the Freudian position.

Persisting Myths Surrounding Sigmund Freud's Dream Theory: A Reply to Hobson's Critique of the Scientific Status of Psychoanalysis

This article replies directly to the two cornerstones of Hobson's legendary transposition of Freud's dream theory, that is, the theory's presumed empirical untestability and its scientific obsolescence or replaceability in the scientific arena. After an outline of Freudian dream theory, empirical data coming from two research paradigms (“children's dreams” and “drug dreams”) are reported. From a theoretical-epistemological point of view, the studies show that Freud's dream theory includes clear “potential falsifiers,” that is, in Popper's terms, certain events, which if found to be true, would unequivocally show Freud to be wrong. This challenges Hobson's accusation concerning the empirical untestability of Freud dream theory. From an empirical viewpoint, these studies show that Freudian dream theory is not even remotely scientifically outdated and obsolete. The results of these studies are consistent with the cornerstones of Freudian dream theory (e.g., the hypothesis of dreams as wish-fulfillment, the disguise-censorship model) and suggest the viability and worth of further investigation in this arena. Indeed, Freud's dream theory is alive and useful in explaining the phenomenon of dreams in various fields of application. These authors believe that J. A. Hobson's dismissal of Freudian dream theory is thus misguided and premature because, to date, the findings indicate that Freud was essentially correct.

Georges Bataille, Gender, and Sacrificial Excess

Excess cannot be philosophically founded, since exceeds foundation: is the very thing for which being is, first and foremost, beyond all limits. Georges Bataille, Madame Edwarda There are likely few authors for whom the concept of is more singularly significant than Georges Bataille (1897-1962). All throughout his diverse writings, which include political and philosophical essays, fiction, poetry, and letters spanning more than three decades and twelve volumes of collected works, excess is a notion characterizing everything from his mystical ontology in works like Erotism his spectacularly graphic erotic fiction in works like My Mother and Story of the Eye. Indeed, his multivolume work Accursed Share presents a veritable cosmology and world history of excess, tracing the ineluctable operation of useless consumption or unproductive throughout human history and civilization, which is be found principally in those perennially prodigal human actions with no greater purpose, like play, art, luxury, and even religion. For Bataille, these forms of wasteful activity represent not only desirable pursuits for humanity, but indeed the purpose and ultimate end of all human endeavors, representing even the defining element of human identity itself. Man is the most suited of all living beings, he writes, to consume intensely, sumptuously, the energy offered by the pressure of life conflagrations (Accursed Share 37). prodigal waste of one's own energy and resources, therefore, finds its natural conclusion in the expenditure of life in the assent exceed even life itself, above all, in death. It is for this reason life's intimacy, he writes, not reveal it's consumption until the moment it gives out (Theory of Religion 47). As a spectacular and shared revelation of life's intimacy in the moment of its dazzling consumption, sacrifice for Bataille represents the quintessence of life itself expended and consumed unproductively, precisely in the manner of gifts and luxuries. wasteful excesses of luxury are analogous sacrifice insofar as they, like a gift, give up or give away the use-value and exchange-value of some precious commodity and transmute it into a form of useless expenditure, not unlike excremental waste. As he explains in an oblique reference Freudian dream symbolism in his 1933 essay The Notion of Expenditure: Jewels must not only be beautiful and ... : one sacrifices a fortune, preferring a diamond necklace; such a sacrifice is necessary for the constitution of this necklace's fascinating character ... When in a dream a diamond signifies excrement, it is not only a question of association by contrast; in the unconscious, jewels, like excrement, are cursed matter flows from a wound: they are a part of oneself destined for open sacrifice. (Visions 119) Having been delivered from what he terms a of conservation, exchange, growth, and accumulation, luxury represents a form of expenditure occupies what he terms a of gifts, prodigality, expenditure, and excess. Thus, luxurious excesses possess an inherently sacrificial character. This is so clearly the precise meaning of sacrifice, he writes, that one sacrifices what is useful; one does not sacrifice luxurious objects ... Depriving the labor of manufacture of its usefulness at the outset, luxury has already destroyed labor; it has dissipated it in vainglory ... To sacrifice a luxury object would be sacrifice the same object twice (Theory of Religion 50). Once delivered into a general economy of wasteful excess, therefore, the sacrificial object cannot be reappropriated into a restricted economy of usefulness and productivity, despite the usefulness implied in its manufacture. Such would contradict both the very purpose of the sacrifice itself and the object's destructive transformation into useless excess. …

From Freud to acetylcholine: Does the AAOM suffice to construct a dream?

Toward illuminating the structure of Llewellyn's dream theory, I compare it in formal terms to Freud's dream theory. An alternative to both of these dream machines, grounded in the distribution of cholinergic activation in the central nervous system, is presented. It is suggested that neither "high" nor "low" dream theory is sufficient to account for the properties of dreams.

Consciousness

For decades Allan Hobson has proclaimed Freud's dream theory as thoroughly mistaken. He has also suggested that Freud's use of the mistaken tenets of 19th-century neurology undermined not just that theory, but also the fundamental psychoanalytic propositions of Freud's (1900/1950b) mental apparatus as conceptualized in Chapter 7 of The Interpretation of Dreams. He is wrong on both accounts! Freud's theory of dreams remains an accurate general framework in which to understand and explore the origins, nature, and meaning of dreams. In addition, embodied within Freud's model of the mental apparatus are inferences about brain processes not just relevant to dreams but also to conscious perception, memory, reality testing, and creativity that are remarkably consonant with modern neuroscientific understanding.

Ego Ergo Sum

Modern sleep and dream science not only fails to support the central tenets of Freudian dream theory but raises serious questions about other strongly held psychodynamic assumptions including the nature of the unconscious mind, infantile sexuality, the tripartite model of the mind, the concept of ego defense, free association and the analysis of the transference as a way of effecting adaptive change. This article summarizes a radical revision of psychodynamic theory in terms of the neurobiological findings of the last half century and proposes an alternative theoretical model which posits a virtual reality generator for the brain that arises late in evolution and early in the development of thermoregulating animals. The author's training and clinical experience are used to highlight these theoretical considerations and inform a forthcoming treatment-oriented book in progress entitled EGO DAMAGE AND REPAIR.

Freud's “Primary Process” versus Hobson's “Protoconsciousness”

After many years of radical criticism of Freudian dream theory on the grounds of his and others' neurophysiological findings, Allan Hobson now proposes a new model of the dreaming brain that is remarkably consistent with Freud's. This revision was necessitated by recent neuroscientific findings. Hobson is to be commended for his openness to the new evidence, but he does not make sufficiently clear how closely his new model resembles Freud's. The main focus of my article is to make these parallels explicit, so as to clarify the remaining points of difference. Fortunately, it appears that these points can now be resolved experimentally.