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Frued's Analysis of Dream & Sex-Related
Symbols
The Interpretation
of Dreams (1900)
Provider: Kate Liu /¼B¬ö¶²
- dreams-- the royal road
to the unconscious.
- Other avenues--slips
of tongue, dreams, art, and irrational behavior that motives most
of our actions.
In the condition
of sleep the force of repression...is relaxed, because there is no
immediate likelihood of unconscious impulse being carried through
into dangerous action.
...the energizing force of dreams springs from an unconscious impulse
seeking fulfillment, a desire not fulfilled in waking life.
Unable to find expression in action, the impulse gathers to itself
material both from recent experience, such as the effects of present
bodily need plus the recollections of the previous day, and from distant
memories involving infantile sexual wishes.
the 'censorship'--under
the influence of this censorship, the material is transformed into
a series of images, that is the dream.
"A dream is a (disguised)
fulfillment of a (suppressed or repressed) wish'
--a 'compromise' between the demands of impulse and the intensity
of the repressing force. The more intense the force of repression,
the more obscure the encodings...
¡@
The dream-work
transforms the 'latent' content of the dream, the 'forbidden'
dream-thoughts, into the 'manifest' dream stories--what the dreamer
remembers....
The operation of
the dream work, its subversion and distortions, take four forms: condensation,
displacement, consideration of representibility, and secondary revision.
1. condensation:
--'overdetermination': several latent wishes converge on one manifest
item, or the reverse, where one wish is represented a number of times
in the same dream-sequence. The result in each case is a superimposition
of elements.
e.g. a joke: his uncle gave him a kiss in an automobile.--autoeroticism.
old people tend to fall into their 'anectotage'--anecdote, dotage
onsolidate one's anger at a variety of people and objects
into a simple sentence
2. displacement:
transvaluation of psychic values. e.g. switches a person's
hatred of Mr. Appleby to a rotting apple.
This transvaluation is achieved by the elements in the manifest
dream replacing elements in the latent dream-thoughts via a chain
of associations for the purpose of disguise.
--the associative links that depend on likeness (similarity) and
those that depend on proximity (contiguity).
It is only after Freud that similarity and contiguity have been
singled out as the two fundamental poles of language...
Sexual symbols:
(Frued's notion
of symbolism: the whole world can be absorbed narcissistically, the
sexual drives can attach themselves to anything the senses perceive.)
 e.g. "To His Coy Mistress"; "To the Lighthouse";
"Sick Rose "
a, worm--death and phallus; flying--sexual intercourse; darkness,
storm--the unconscious
b. marble vault--fleshless pelvis; worms; fire
(external)
Literary
Criticism Databank Psychoanalysis
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