Sample #1

Sample #1

This is a doctoral-level, psychiatry dissertation of 218 pages (60,000 words).

Our writer incorporated SPSS data, graphs, tables, diagrams, and charts.

Title

Dream Content as a Therapeutic Approach:  Ego Gratification vs. Repressed Feelings

Abstract

This study reveals how a therapist can use dreams in a therapeutic environment to confront a patient's unconscious feelings, and how the therapist should engage the patient in discussion to reveal the relevance of those feelings to the patient's present, waking life.  It also discusses the meaning of repetitious dreams, how medication affects the content of a dream, and if therapists actually "guide" their clients in what to say.  This "guidance" might be the therapist "suggesting" to their clients that they had suffered some type of early childhood trauma, when, in fact, no such trauma occurred.  The origin of psychiatry is not--as many of those in the field would have others believe--medicine, therapy, or any other remotely scientific endeavor.  Its original purpose was not even to cure mental affliction.

Working hard behind the scenes is the psychiatrist, dispensing everything from his pernicious "insanity defense" in the courts--thereby helping dangerous criminals escape justice--to his mind-numbing drugs within the prisons.  Of course, with high rates of inmate illiteracy and drug abuse, it is reasonable to assume that educational psychiatry was on the scene years before the inmate committed any crimes, busily "helping" the child with an earlier promise to improve education with, of all things, addictive, mind-numbing drugs.

This study also examines the effects of sertraline (Zoloft ) on the dream content of a young woman with generalized anxiety disorder and panic attacks.  The study uses the major categories of Hall and Van de Castle's (1966) system of content analysis to compare dream reports before and after drug treatment.  Prior to diagnosis and treatment, the dreamer had high levels of aggression and low levels of friendliness in her dreams.  The post-medication dreams more closely approximate female norms.  This pilot study suggests a new direction for research on the effects of medication on dream content.

Dreams reflect people's thoughts; therefore, if the psychiatrist tells a client that he or she experienced a "horrible trauma" in his or her early childhood, the client will think about it, reflect on it, and, in turn, dream about it--whether or not the trauma actually occured.  This study also makes recommendations about therapeutic approaches and future studies involving dreams and subconcious feelings.

Table of Contents

Abstract

1. Introduction
   • Statement of Goal Achieved
   • Relevance to the Field
   • Barriers and Issues
   • Elements Investigated
   • Limitations/Delimitations
   • Definition of Terms
2. Review of the Literature
   • Historical Overview
   • Research Literature Specific to Dream Content as a Therapeutic Approach
   • Summary of the Known and Unknown
   • Contribution to the Field
3. Methodology
   • Research Methods
   • Specific Procedures
   • Presentation of Results
   • Resources Used
   • Reliability and Viability
   • Summary
4. Results
   • Data Analysis
   • Findings
   • Summary of Results
5. Conclusions, Implications, Recommendations, and Summary

Reference List

Chapter 1

Introduction

Statement of the Problem/Goal Achieved

It was a weird dream-- he contemplated divorcing her, because she was too sick for him to take care of anymore.  They decided to try to work it out at their son's and his family's place.  But then, they didn't have anywhere else to stay, because they were from out of town.  But a friend of the man's son told them that he had a posh apartment in a very nice apartment tower that they could use, much like the ones in the big cities, such as Chicago.  But when the son and his family went to check out the apartment, they found out that it was very trashy and completely run down . . . in the meantime, the son's wife, the dreamer Tina, found her father-in-law very attractive, and tried to seduce him.  Then the dreamer woke up.

This dream was from a dream journal of Tina from the dream.  She had dreamed that she was the main character in the dream, and set forth seducing her father-in-law.  Now obviously, she did not want to seduce her father-in-law in her waking life, and never wanted him to divorce his wife.  The son of the dream, the dreamer's husband Stephen, had worked with that friend with the apartment, who had recently started a business directly in competition with Stephen.  Currently in their waking lives, that friend is acting very deceitful and using unethical business practices.

Tina determined that she had been a little upset with this person, so she dreamed that he had deceived them about the apartment in the dream.  Her mother in law is actually sick, and Tina is having intimate issues with her husband.  However, she does not want to have any physical relationship with her father-in-law, and has been showing signs of depression lately.  The feelings behind this dream were fear of the husband's "friend" making it hard for her husband to find any work, as he is currently facing unemployment, and frustration that she doesn't feel that intimate with her husband.  She realized that she shouldn't worry about her husband not finding work, and that it's okay to be intimate with her husband.

This dream, and the feelings analysis, is an example of how feelings that surround a dream can be therapeutic, when the dreamer, as well as the therapist, is aware of how to do this.  Tina was able to recognize how much she was obsessing about issues in her daily life, and immediately stopped worrying about them.  Once she stopped worrying about her waking issues, she was able to focus on making her life better and stopped showing signs of depression.  Theoretically, when a therapist can take the feelings of the client's dream, turn them around so that the client can see where their real issues are, the client is able to help themselves feel better.

A recent "20/20" TV broadcast featured dream-worker and radio host Kathleen Sullivan.  Kathleen, author of Recurring Dreams , described her dream of an eagle caught in a web.  She interpreted her dream eagle as a symbol for herself, caught in the web of alcoholic addiction.  She was able to use that insight to change her life, to stop drinking and, as a result, her recurring dreams disappeared.

On the same program, another dream-worker, Gillian Holloway, spoke with four people who were suffering from recurring nightmares.  Like Kathleen, she used symbolic interpretation in an attempt to match dream content with current life.  Afterwards, two of the people interviewed felt that the use of metaphor and pun unlocked their dreams' meaning and revealed helpful information.  But the other two weren't so convinced.

That symbols reflect current life is only one possible meaning for dreams, and to pinpoint the "meaning" of nightmares doesn't necessarily settle upset feelings and emotions.  Even those dream-workers who usually take a passive approach to dreams will agree that a nightmare is cause for action.  Some examples of behavioral dream-work techniques are: re-entry dream-work, senoi and lucid dreaming.  Furthermore, to focus solely on 'symbolic interpretation' can miss the literal cause of the trauma.  Just as with any type of dream, each possible stimulus for nightmare must be considered in order to match it with the appropriate action.  When dreams are multi-layered, several methods might be used in conjunction.

There are several possible explanations for nightmares and suggested responses: One, it could be a metaphor for current life attitudes and activities.  When someone has a change in life, the dream changes.  For example: that person is getting married, and a drowning dream starts.  Once they realize that marriage isn't that bad, the dreams change.  Two, it could be a metaphor for a bio-chemical glitch or surge.  For example: one might dream of his or her own body's dismemberment, as the pictorial equivalent of intrusive thoughts.

Because this sort of nightmare is the result of the mind-body system not functioning at optimum, and expressing mental or physical illness instead, it can require physiological intervention such as diet or drug therapy.  Conversely, drugs and normal hormonal changes can trigger it.  For example: a woman might dream of tidal flooding just prior to her menstrual period.  A light touch of behavioral dream-work techniques can shift content to a more positive metaphor to describe the sensation.

The third factor could be that the nightmare/dream is a psychic copycat of a current situation.  For example: a parent has repeating nightmares, and the child "dreams his dreams " because the child is in a psychic resonance with the parent.  The child's dreams end when the parent's does.  Four, it might be a repetition of a past traumatic event in current lifetime.  For example: a person might dream of a recent rape, a childhood assault or a wartime battle.  This type of nightmare is so deeply etched in the psyche that it can require heavy use of behavioral dream-work techniques to modify the content and emotional intensity.

A fifth factor could be that the dream is a depiction of a past or probable life.  For example: a client might dream the last events prior to a violent death.  A request for new information may provide additional dreams to shed light on the events surrounding this nightmarish experience.  Treatment involves behavior modification techniques that are used for traumatic nightmares.

And last, it might be a depiction of the future.  Confirmation occurs either when the dream comes true or when the client makes life changes so it won't come true.  For example: the client repairs their car brakes so he or she won't literally slide off the highway, as he or she keeps doing in their dreams.  Methods that determine meaning plus techniques that modify behavior comprise the full tool set to resolve a nightmare, recurring or not.  But selecting the appropriate tool depends on what is actually stimulating the nightmare to occur.  There is no one-size-fits-all tool for nightmare work.

According to Richard Corriere and Joseph Hart, who "borrowed" it from Carl Jung, dreams are "letters the unconscious sends to the ego".  ( The Dream Makers , paraphrased ) Events in dreams, at times, evoke feelings about daily events in the waking world.  It is these feelings that a therapist focuses on in a therapy session to help a client overcome issues that may be bothering them.  Though dreams are not meaningful in themselves, the feelings behind those dreams--emotions and intellect--are what is meaningful.  Feelings behind the dreams have meaning, while the events and images are background noise.

For example, when a client dreams about a boat ride, with someone else driving, it could mean that the dreamer doesn't feel in control of his or her life.  Or, it could mean that he or she wants someone else in control, because he or she has been in control of everything and wants to relax for a little while.  But the fact that the dreamer is in a boat is just the background, or environment.  Being in a boat has nothing to do with the feelings behind that dream.

Corriere, Hart, and others discovered through their work in their therapeutic community that "dreams are pictures of feelings." Unfortunately, their work was lost in a freak accident that caused their center to implode and crash . . . dreams are art in the dreamer's mind.  A person can direct it like a movie, star in it like an actor, watch it like a casual observer, or play a supporting actor.  The dreamer is the writer, and there is no writer's block in the dream.  Ideas, settings, and plots flow smoothly from one scene to the next, with not censoring.  It's too bad that writers couldn't somehow tap into these dreams when they were stuck at a certain spot in their novels.

Dreams are actually pictures of what is in the mind.  People's feelings about what is occurring in their lives generate the images and events in their dreams.  Feelings of fear generate fearful dreams, feelings of desire generate dreams about things we desire, such as sexual desires or longing to move to a larger or better house and location.  People are not always honest about what they fear and what they desire, either in their waking or dreaming life, but the feeling in the dream is an honest reflection of their true feelings.  That is why comprehending dreams is so crucial to an understanding of the self.

When Jung developed the term "Archetype", he used it to show how dreams reveal the True Self to the dreamer.  Most people's rationality and egotism promote the false notion that their identity is monolithic: that they know who they are; that they know what they like and what they don't like; and that they know how they feel about this and that.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Typically everyone, at one time or another, experiences inner conflicts about how they should act and speak, whether they should control their behavior or live from their impulses, whether they're really in love or just living a lie.

Freud analyzed his own psyche and came up with the ego, the id, and the superego.  Jung looked within, discovered the dark side of his "self," and called it his "shadow." Eric Berne taught that there are three patterns of conflicting thought and behavior--Parent, Child, and Adult.  Undoubtedly, inner conflict is one of life's most frustrating and painful challenges.  Like a high-priced lawyer, a rationalizing intellect will argue for either side on any issue.  The best that friends and advisors can do is tell someone how they would handle such a conflict, but how does someone decide what's right for him or herself?

  Keying in to what is important about the dream, rather than obsessing on the details is like separating the wheat from the chaff.  If a dream is terribly mixed up and confusing, the dream is mixed up and confused.  It's much more useful to look at the recent events in a client's waking life that created the feelings reflected in the dream.  This is how he or she can see past the machinations of their rationalizing intellect, vanity, and denial to see what they are really feeling and figure out what they need to do differently so that they can feel better.

Content is not as important as the feelings behind the entire dream--what is going on in a client's life? Why is that client dreaming about racing in a boat with someone else at the controls? Is this significant, or are there deeper meanings to that? It is the therapist's job to help the client figure out for themselves the answers to these questions, and that is the focus of what this report is all about.

This study also examines the effect of medication on dream content.  The second purpose of this study is to present a case study of 33 pre-medication and 40 post-medication dream reports from a young woman who entered outpatient psychological treatment at age 18 and at age 20 was placed on sertraline, an anti-depressant selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor.  Moreover, it is their conclusion that "the lack of standardization of methods of assessing quality of dream content has resulted in isolated bits of information that do not yet form a coherent picture" (Roth et al., p.  221).

The percentage of perfect agreement was above 90 percent for each category.  When the codings differed, the codings by Schneider were used.  The individual codings were entered into Dream-SAT, which calculated a subset of the Hall/Van de Castle indicators along with significance levels and effect sizes (Domhoff, 1996, 1999; Schneider & Domhoff, 1999).

Relevance to the Field

How is this study relevant to the clinical psychology field? When a therapist understands how the psyche balances repression of feelings and ego gratification, such as sexual urges, aggression, etc, with acceptable methods of expression, the therapist will then be able to better help the client.  They will be able to take the feelings the client has during a dream, direct them back to the client, and help that person overcome issues in their lives.

Examples of this theory is played out in people who have experienced trauma in their waking lives, then re-experience it repeatedly in their dreams.  For instance, soldiers who came back from the Vietnam war--their dreams had no function, except to make the dreamer relive the experiences repeatedly.  Feelings behind these dreams revealed the underlying issues and traumas of real life waking experiences.  Therapists can take these feelings and help that person try to deal with those traumatic issues.

Despite the dramatic and overwhelming nature of traumatic dreams, they have not been at the center of theoretical attention, and are often seen as atypical and peripheral.  Freud's thinking may be the ideal example on this point.  Although he was well aware of the role of infantile trauma in neuroses almost from the outset of his work, traumatic dreams did not figure at all in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900).  Instead, he came to his insights there through analyzing free associations to everyday dreams that were complex and puzzling.  Just how far traumatic dreams were from his attention can be seen in the fact that he began his theoretical argument about dreams as wish fulfillments by pointing to the most simple of dreams, namely, children's short dreams of things they longed for the day before.

The most systematic studies on traumatic dreams concern Vietnam veterans because they can be studied in large numbers due to their common experience; then too, they also make themselves available to researchers through VA hospitals.  It is this work that makes it possible to go beyond a mere summation of a wide variety of individual instances in a search for generalizations.  Traumatic dreams, then, reflect a preoccupation with problems that has not been resolved.

Not so long ago, it was believed that demons or possession were the causes of psychological dysfunction.  This perspective held for centuries, and there are still those whose understanding and beliefs of mental illness are founded in these archaic views.  Others took this perspective one step further, believing that people became mentally ill as a result of sins they committed or from witchcraft.  The early forms of mental facilities were mostly prisons, in which patients/prisoners were restrained with chains, restraint jackets, and padded cells.  It seems that the idea was not to cure these sick people, but to confine them and keep them out of the public eye.

However, in 1905 it was discovered that General Paresis was caused by a physical infection (syphilis), rather than by witchcraft or demonic possession.  This finding gave rise to the belief that mental illness was more like physical illness in the sense that there were organic causes.  The 1940s began the era of utilizing drugs for treatment of mental illness.  These drugs were somewhat successful and were used more regularly as time passed.  Drug therapy is still a huge part of therapy, and today, treatment is a very diverse, very complex process with many issues.  Drugs have become an integral part of therapy, but now, there is talk therapy, behavioral therapy, cognitive therapy, and dream therapy that can be used in combination or in the place of drug therapies.

Many people seem to think that a person must be mentally ill or "out of it" to seek help from a psychologist or other expert, but this is not true.  Therapists can provide assistance with all sorts of problems from the struggles of "regular" daily life, to parenting, relationships, to the more extreme psychological illnesses such as schizophrenia, agoraphobia, and more.  Therapists are there to help with problems of varying levels, not just with the extreme.

Dreams pervade every type of therapy in one form or another.  But if the reader is to understand how dreams, and the feelings from those dreams, can help in therapy, then different types of therapies should be discussed first.  Some of these therapies will be discussed further in detail in the next chapter.

Psychoanalysis, which is often called "Freudian therapy", is the classic "lie on the couch and tell me about your childhood" approach.  The main idea behind psychoanalysis is that there is a constant struggle between the conscious and unconscious, which often results in maladaptive behaviors, problematic, conscious thoughts, etc.  Any observable symptoms of an illness or problem are signs of conflict between different aspects of personality (i.e., struggle between the id, ego, and superego).  For example, a person may feel stress due conflict between the id, which may want to pursue some attractive person for sexual pleasure, and the superego, which reminds the person that they are married and it would be wrong to do such a thing.

The goal of psychoanalysis is accomplished by some of the following techniques.  One is free association, which says that the therapist will present a word or phrase to which the client should just say anything and everything that comes to mind without any filtering of thoughts.  The therapist then tries to identify the problems from the associations made.  For example, if a therapist says "mother" and the client responds with "overbearing, caring, disciplinarian, tells me I don't do anything right, etc..." it would be easy to identify a problem.

The second technique of psychoanalysis is dream analysis.  Freud believed that dreams were the windows to the unconscious.  To understand what is going on in the unconscious mind and what could be causing conflict with the conscious mind, one should examine the content (both latent and manifest) of the dreams.  The next technique is interpretation--once a therapist has acquired enough information from the client using the techniques above, the therapist can then begin to try to make sense of it all and figure out what the causes of the problems may be.  Thus, the therapist attempts to "interpret" the information.

Another technique of psychoanalysis is transference.  Often a client begins to relate to the therapist in ways that mimic critical relationships in the client's own life, and he or she may begin to "transfer" anger toward spouse onto the therapist and act angrily toward the therapist.  This is actually a good sign, indicating that the therapist is on the right track and making progress toward the true problems.  If the therapist were not getting close to the real problem, then the unconscious would have no reason to react.

The last technique of psychoanalysis is resistance, which says that the client's unconscious defense hinders the therapeutic progress.  This is somewhat similar to resistance in that both are methods used by the unconscious to block progress.  But why is that? The main reason is that it is difficult to confront painful ideas, feelings, etc., so the unconscious, in its efforts to avoid pain and to protect itself will block the progress of the therapy.

The next therapeutic approach is the Person-centered Therapy, or client-centered.  This says that the emphasis here is to provide a supportive, emotional climate for the client who plays a major role in determining the pace and direction of therapy.  Instead of the therapist dictating the pace and direction, Rogerian therapy assumes that since the client is the one with the problematic thoughts, behaviors, etc., then it is also the client that has the answers.  As such, the client is given the lead in determining how quickly they move from one topic to another, what topics to address, etc.

According to Carl Rogers, the founder of this approach, " It is the client who knows what hurts, what directions to go, what problems are crucial, what experiences have been deeply buried.  It began to occur to me that unless I had a need to demonstrate my own cleverness and learning, I would do better to rely upon the client for the direction of the movement in the process." Rogers believed that personal distress is due to inconsistency or incongruence between a person's self-concept and reality.  For example: the client thinks he or she is a hard working person (self concept), but people tell him or her that they think they don't work hard enough.  Thus, the client receives contradictory feedback from others.  This inconsistency is what causes problems.

Rogers believed it is vital to create a positive therapeutic climate so that the client feels comfortable enough to open up and explore personal issues.  This climate is achieved by many ways, which will be briefly discussed now.  The first way was to establish genuineness--the therapist must be genuine and honest with the client.  No "noble lies" (lying to the client for a "good" reason or to get the client to feel comfortable enough to open up).

Another way was to show unconditional positive regard--the therapist also needs to show that they are nonjudgmental & accepting of client.  This does not mean that the therapist has to agree with everything the client says, only that the therapist indicates that he/she does not view the clients feelings, thoughts, and behaviors as wrong, bad, silly, etc.  Empathy is the next method, which is achieved by the therapist trying to understand the client's world and client's point of view.

Also, it is not enough just to do this, the therapist must also be able to communicate this understanding to the client.  For example, a therapist treating a physical abuser, may despise the actions of the client and have no personal experience with abuse, but the therapist must be able to try and understand the views of the client from the client's own perspective.  The therapist can't always view things from their own perspective or the client may feel that the therapist is judging them and looking down on them.

The role of the therapist is to use rephrasing (paraphrasing), mirror, positive regard, acceptance.  The therapist does not tell the client what is right or wrong, but tries to take what the client says and say it back to them in a slightly different, more clear and focused way.  This does several things, such as showing the client that the therapist understands what the client is saying and feeling, and helps the client hear some of their own thoughts from someone else's mouth, which can have a clarifying effect.

Another therapeutic approach is Behavior therapy.  Behavior therapists help their clients to unlearn abnormal behavior and learn adaptive ways of thinking, feeling, and acting.  Among the techniques used by behavior therapists are (1) systematic desensitization and flooding, two commonly used methods of fear reduction; (2) social skills training and developmental skills training, two approaches that teach new, adaptive skills using operant conditioning; (3) assertiveness training, techniques to increase assertive rather than aggressive ways of expressing feelings; and (4) aversive conditioning, a controversial technique that uses unpleasant, negative stimuli to eliminate abnormal habits.

Behavior therapy applies Skinnerian and/or Pavlovian conditioning to treat maladaptive behaviors.  The primary goal is to change unwanted behavior and solve the problem....not get insight into the causes or underlying foundation of the problem.  Two assumptions are that behavior is the product of learning (If a person is engaging in some maladaptive behavior, such as smoking, then they had to learn that behavior somewhere along the way), and what has been learned can be unlearned (If a person learned to smoke all the time, they can unlearn to smoke all the time).

Systematic Desensitization is another component of the Behavioral therapeutic approach.  The premise of systematic desensitization is to reduce the client's anxiety responses through counter-conditioning; a person who learned to be afraid of something is associating fear with that object or behavior, and the way to eliminate this is to teach the person to associate feelings of relaxation with the object or behavior.  This approach is based on conditioning relaxation with feared object, object of anxiety.

The last component of this therapy is Aversion therapy.  This therapeutic technique involves having the client associate an aversive stimulus with a stimulus that elicits an undesirable response or action.  For example, let's say a person smokes but wants to stop.  (smoking is the undesirable response) The therapist may have the client go through their normal smoking routine (getting the pack of cigarettes, getting one out, tapping it on a table, etc...) and then presenting an aversive stimulus along with the smoking (e.g., presenting a vomit smell as the client goes through the routing).  In this way, the client begins to associate this horrible smell of vomit with smoking until the very thought of lighting a cigarette becomes aversive.

Cognitive therapy is similar to behavioral therapy, but it employs both cognitive (insight) and behavioral aspects.  This says that most problems caused by irrational thoughts lead to emotional turmoil.  Solutions then focus on changing cognitions, such as the client must learn to monitor the way they talk to themselves, their thoughts, and to develop self-control, they must learn to replace irrational beliefs with ones that are more rational, they must learn to avoid "errors" in thinking, such as blaming self for failure, and they must identify positive goals, and means to achieve them.

Cognitive therapy assumes that faulty cognitions are the cause of abnormal behavior.  Other models of therapy include feminist psychotherapy, which has evolved from the philosophical foundation of feminism.  The basic principles of feminist psychotherapy are increasingly being integrated with other forms of therapy.

This study will show the relevance to the field in that therapists will further their knowledge and research efforts to better their practices in helping those with traumatic experiences recover through their dreams, and the feelings surrounding those dreams.

Barriers and Issues

A barrier to this study is that dreams are not easy to report.  The test subjects recalled approximately half of their dreams, and some dreams were changed the second time it was retold, etc.  Another potential problem with dream reports is the honesty of the subjects in reporting their dreams.  There are three reasons to believe subjects are reporting honestly.  First, the subjects in most non-laboratory studies to date provide reports anonymously, reducing any tendency to misreport out of embarrassment or fear of self disclosure.  Second, most people think of dreams as an experience that happens to them, and express a lack of responsibility for their dreaming, making them willing to report what they experience in the dream state.  Third, the consistency of findings from sample to sample suggests that most people are reporting honestly, or else they are all misreporting in the same way, which is somewhat less likely.

If the above arguments based on reported findings are valid, then it is possible to obtain useful samples of dream reports from representative subjects outside the laboratory.  Such studies are not a substitute for laboratory research, and can make little or no contribution to an understanding of the process of dreaming, which requires awakenings throughout the night under laboratory conditions, but they can suffice for studies relating dream content to waking concerns, interests, and preoccupations.  The main issue thus becomes one of obtaining large samples of dream reports from large numbers of subjects in a consistent and efficient manner.

Another problem is that analysts will sometimes "lead" clients to a conclusion, which might skew dream reports considerably.  "Suggestive" therapy, as this practice has been named, is an intervention intended to influence the patient by suggesting a thought or idea.  This might be synonymous with psychoanalysis, as it sometimes "suggests" a particular way for the client to feel, think, or act.  In the U.S.A., The American Psychological Association's Working Group on the Investigation of Memories of Childhood Abuse also issued a report in 1995.

The report notes that recovered memory is rare.  It also states that "there is a consensus among memory researchers and clinicians that most people who were sexually abused as children remember all or part of what happened to them although they may not fully understand or disclose it....  "At this point," according to the APA, "it is impossible, without other corroborative evidence, to distinguish a true memory from a false one." Thus, says the APA report, a "competent psychotherapist is likely to acknowledge that current knowledge does not allow the definite conclusion that a memory is real or false without other corroborating evidence." 

A false memory is a memory that is a distortion of an actual experience, or a confabulation of an imagined one.  Many false memories involve confusing or mixing fragments of memory events, some of which may have happened at different times but which are remembered as occurring together.  They involve an error in source memory.  Some involve treating dreams as if they were playbacks of real experiences.  Still other false memories are believed to be the result of the prodding, leading, and suggestions of therapists and counselors.

Some therapists who are still engaged in Recovered Memory Therapy believe that adult problems, such as depression, anxiety, eating disorders, relationship problems, sexual dysfunction, insomnia, etc.  are often caused by a specific form of childhood abuse.  They believe that these abuse memories have been repressed so that they cannot be recollected during adulthood.  Even though the abuse is not remembered in regular memory, it generates some of the above symptoms in the adult.  Through RMT, some therapists believe that the repressed memories can be recovered.  Further, they believe that they must be recovered in order for the patient-client to regain mental health.

Many therapists use a checklist of symptoms likely to surface in adulthood because of the repressed memories.  Unfortunately, some of these checklists include so many symptoms that they include most of the adult population as suspected victims/survivors.  Therapists use a variety of methods to "recover" these memories, including hypnotism, free association, and dream therapy (analyzing dreams for suggestions of abuse).  All of these suggestive therapeutic techniques have been criticized for their ability to create false memories of events that never happened.

Another method by which memories are recovered is through participation in a mutual support, self-help group.  These groups often include some individuals who have recovered memories and others who suspect that they have been abused during childhood and have not yet been able to recover any recollection of the events.  Some investigators believe that intense peer pressure on those who cannot remember causes them to begin to imagine images of abuse.  These images later coalesce into what appear to be memories.

A third technique for recovering repressed memories involves the study of self-help books.  They describe methods of recovering memories that individuals can use by themselves.  Campbell Perry, Professor of Psychology at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, wrote in an article: " While generalization requires caution, the most common way in which such memories enter conscious is through reading a book The courage to heal: A guide for women survivors of child sexual abuse by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis (1988) as a part of a specific psycho- therapy program.

There are cases of a person reading this book alone (Nelson & Simpson, 1994) and subsequently reporting visualizations of being abused sexually during childhood.  It is more common to find, however, that reading the book occurs in conjunction with what has become known as 'recovered memory' therapy." Often multiple techniques are used to recover memories.  A therapist may give an individual recovered memory therapy, may suggest that they join a support group, and that they read and follow a self-help book.

Richard Webster has traced the history of RMT to a group of therapist in the Boston, MA area in the early 1980's.  Inspired by Judith Herman's 1981 book Father-Daughter Incest , they formed support groups for incest survivors.  The book contained the description of one woman who, during therapy, reconstructed her formerly repressed memory of sexual abuse.  At first, the groups were made up mostly of people who had always remembered their childhood abuse.  But slowly, the composition changed, as more patients seeking recovered memories entered the sessions.  " ...women with no memories would often begin to see images of sexual abuse involving father or other adults, and these images would then be construed as memories of 'flashbacks.' "

Ellen Bass and Laura Davis published The Courage to Heal in 1988, This book helped readers recover memories by following methods of self-therapy.  As of early-2000, the book is still in print, and still stocked by many bookstores.  Over 750,000 copies have been sold.  It is often referred to as the "Bible" of the repressed memory industry.  RMT therapists frequently recommend that their clients read it.  Michael Shermer commented on the authors' estimate that a third to one half of all women were sexually abused as children.

Adding 42.9 million child victims to 42.9 perpetrators, and including, also a smaller number of spouses and family members of the abusers, he concludes that over 100 million Americans would have been involved in child sexual abuse, which is almost 40% of the population--a number that Shermer considers impossible.  (Actually, his computations are unrealistic, because some adults abuse multiple children.)

When a client first comes to a RMT therapist, she/he sometimes has disconnected partial images of static scenes that are disturbing.  It is like having a few pieces of a black and white photo; not enough to show what the scene is all about.  If the client has no memories or images at all, then these partial images often appear during therapy.

Through the above RMT techniques, additional pieces of the pictures often materialize, until an entire scene (often involving abuse) is recovered.  Further therapy recovers more scenes, and images in detail.  Finally, complete pictures of years of abuse are often pieced together.  These pictures are often believed by both patient and therapist to be memories of real events.  Some therapists help their patients recover memories of horrendous abuse extending over a period of years in 80% or more of their clients; a few report 100%.  Among patients who recover memories of abuse, about 15 to 20% go on to find memories of Satanic Ritual Abuse.  A smaller percentage are diagnosed with Multiple Personality Disorder or Disassociative Identity Disorder.

During the 1990s, there was a great deal of controversy among mental health professionals and within their professionals associations over RMT.  A consensus existed about the process of RMT: the appearance of visual images, sounds etc.; the gradual development of these elements into abuse sequences; the coalescence of these into what feel like normal memories of real events.  However, there was no consensus on the reality of the memories:

Some believed that recovered memories are as reliable as those who have been continuously present from childhood to the present time.  Some details may have been lost; memories of individual episodes of abuse may have been combined into a single memory; but the overall picture of abuse is believed to be quite accurate.

Other therapists believe that at least some of the images recovered are based on events that never happened to the individual.  They might be based on recollections of horror movies, comic books, nightmares, TV shows, etc.  And by concentrating on the recollections, a full story emerges which may be a fictional account, even though they feel like memories of real events.

There is anecdotal evidence that people who recover repressed memories of childhood abuse are often artists, writers, or exhibited levels of creativity above the norm.  One source states that "only a few did not fall into that category." We have been unable to find any formal study of this phenomenon.  Perhaps the combination of high creativity and suggestive therapeutic techniques combine to make their recovery of memories more likely during therapy.

By 2001, recovered memory had largely become an abandoned therapy.  Few therapists still practice it.

If those memories are not real, then why do people want them brought "back"? Supporters of RMT often suggested that there were only two possibilities with respect to recovered memories: they were accurate memories of real events, or they were the delusions of a mentally-ill mind.  There is a third possibility - that the memories are an unintended creation of the therapy process itself.  That is, a client who is hypnotized or is engaging in other suggestive therapies is particularly open to suggestions from the therapies.  These suggestions created images that turned out to be memories.

RMT supporters sometimes point out that nobody would intentionally create horrific recovered memories unless they were real.  To recover such memories requires the client to experience the agony of reliving the abusive events.  Again, there is an alternate explanation.  Almost everyone has terrifying nightmares from time to time.  One could ask why people's minds create such horrible images and situations.  Perhaps some recovered memories (those which are not based on real events) are as "real" as nightmares.

Psychiatry and psychology once promised to cure so-called mental illness.  Today, in spite of record levels of mental health expenditure, their statistics claim to measure burgeoning mental illness.  Psychiatry also promised to end crime.  Today, in spite of record expenditures, the United States prison system alone is bursting at the seams, as individual prisons are forced to operate beyond their mandated capacity.  Since 1980, the United States prison population has more than tripled.

As a point of reference, the U.S.  Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that a survey done of female state prison inmates in 1996-97 found that some 36 percent said they had been sexually or physically abused at age 17 or younger.  The terms 'sexual abuse' and 'physical abuse' were not clearly defined; however, one-third reported they had been raped before incarceration.  By comparison, 16 studies of child abuse in the general population found that from 12 percent to 17 percent reported they had been "abused" as children.

Furthermore, people who have experienced traumatic events usually do not forget them.  Severely traumatic experiences are typically forgotten only if (a) the person is rendered unconscious at the time of the trauma; (b) the person is brain damaged before or by the trauma; or (c) the person is too young to make the necessary neural connections needed for long-term memory.  Memories are not stored in some mysterious dark cellar, but in a complex network of neural connections involving several parts of the brain.  Memories are lost because neural connections are lost.

Using guided imagery or visualization in therapy can also be dangerous.  Hines came to believe she was molested by her father and became so depressed she attempted suicide.  She is now out of therapy and believes the memories were false and created in therapy.  In Repression Memory Therapy, or RMT, rather than help the patient separate truth from fantasy, the therapist encourages the patient to 'remember' more about the alleged trauma.  And when the patient has an image--a dream or a feeling that something may have happened--the therapist is encouraged, praises the patient's efforts and assures him or her that it really did happen.  This kind of therapy confuses the differences between real and fantasized abuse and encourages destruction of families.

One thing the RMT group has accomplished in these Memory Wars is to divert attention from the questionable mechanism of repression and their predetermined, unscientific methods of interpreting symbolic meanings of recollections, to the issue of whether the RMT therapists are planting memories in their patients.  This was not intentional, but was the result of a number of lawsuits against RMT therapists by former patients, all of whom recanted the memories of childhood abuse uncovered in therapy and blamed their therapists for ruining their lives by planting false memories of abuse in their minds.

But the issue over whether a particular memory has been planted by a particular therapist is mainly of importance because the alleged memories are of horrible things and they are very disruptive and destructive of peoples' lives.  If therapists were planting all kinds of good memories in patients' minds, helping them enjoy more satisfying lives and relationships, it is doubtful that there would be such a negative response to these findings.

Some of the memories recovered in RMT are extraordinarily bizarre, so bizarre that one would think that a reasonable person could hardly take them at face value.  But RMT therapists are not put off by bizarre "recollections." They either take them at face value, or they take them as "artifacts" of the mind, which therapists must analyze as if they were archaeologists who must infer the truth from the artifacts.  Or they might take fantastic memories as symbolic of real experiences.  Laura Brown, for example, a Seattle psychologist in the forefront of RMT says that fantastic memories are "perhaps coded or symbolic versions of what really happened." What really happened, she's sure, was sexual abuse in childhood.  "Who knows what pedophiles have done that gets reported out later as satanic rituals and cannibalistic orgies?" asks Dr.  Brown.

In the past, Brown has criticized the False Memory Syndrome Foundation for being unscientific, but her emphasis on the symbolic nature of fantastic memories has little scientific credibility itself.  Where is the scientific evidence that a fantastic memory can be distinguished from a delusion? How are memories of real cannibalism distinguished from symbolic memories? Most people usually know what a crucifix or a swastika symbolizes, but what does eating an infant symbolize?

Perhaps "repression" is not to be taken literally, but symbolically.  Perhaps each therapist must develop a subjective truth for concepts such as "repression" and "therapy." If this is so, then therapy is a dangerous weapon to be feared by everybody rather than a blessing to be sought by those with psychological problems.  History is replete with examples of what happens when any group of authorities do not have to answer to empirical evidence but are free to define truth as they see fit.  None of the examples has a happy ending.  Why should it be otherwise with therapy?

"Trauma" related dreams might not be related to a personal trauma, but as a reaction to what a person may hear on the news, see in the newspaper, or even hearing about someone else's trauma.  When this person goes to therapy about a certain issue, and then tells the therapist about the nightmare, that therapist may wrongly assume that there is some "hidden" trauma the client is not aware of, and will therefore "suggest" that the client is repressing some childhood trauma.  Dream therapy can be very helpful, but if the therapist suggests things that haven't happened, the client may become depressed, and even try to commit suicide.  So, as the reader can see, "suggestive" therapy can be very dangerous.  

Hypnotic practices employed by psycho-therapists increase the patient's confidence in their dreams and fantasies, but decrease the accuracy of what is recalled.  Psycho-therapy can itself be viewed as a form of hypnosis in that it involves relaxation and suggestion by an authority figure and yields similar results to formal hypnotic induction.  The involvement of hypnosis and hypnotic practices is why so many patients report similar bizarre stories.  Therapists and clients as a group tend to believe and relate these stories to one another as hypnosis tends to transfer the mindset of the therapist to the client.  This explains why therapy clients fervently defend both their therapist and the false abuse stories they have concocted in their imaginations.  The fantasized stories begin to seem like memories to the patient because of the methods used in therapy, which confuse the client's sense of reality with what was only imagined.

Because the client doesn't realize that the therapist encouraged them to concoct a totally false abuse scenario, and she wants to be healed and made whole again, he or she tends to place total faith in the erring therapist.  Of course, no one is ever made whole by thinking on vile things like rape or incest.  Wholeness comes with thinking on true, pure, admirable things of good report; praise-worthy things.

Elements Investigated

This study will focus on a few questions that came up while researching this topic.  Do dreams have functions, other than being a reflection of daily activities? Famous theorists claim that dreams do have one or another purpose (although they disagree on just what those functions are), but the best current evidence suggests otherwise.  Dreams probably have no purpose.  (Domhoff) The first and most famous dream theorist of the modern era, Sigmund Freud, said that the function of dreams was to preserve sleep, but that theory is contradicted by the fact that dreams happen very regularly at least five or six times per night in an active stage of sleep called REM sleep.  Dreams don't just happen as a person is about to wake up due to hunger pangs, sexual urges, or the need to go to the bathroom, as he thought back then, before REM sleep was discovered in 1953.

Another famous dream theorist of the modern era, Carl Jung, an early follower of Freud, claimed that the function of dreams is to compensate for those parts of the psyche that are underdeveloped in waking life.  Calvin Hall's studies of two-week dream series from students and longer dream journals from adults of all ages strongly suggest that dream content is continuous with waking thought and behavior.  That is, if a person is outgoing and active in his or her waking life, and not very introspective and reflective, then so too in their dream life, which contradicts Jung's view.

Dreams supposedly deal with problems unable to be solved in waking life and then offer solutions.  But a variety of systematic studies find precious little support for this view.  Looking at them in the light of waking day, and believing that they may be full of insight, one may sometimes come up with new ideas or insights while studying them.  That is, a use for dreams may have been invented, but that doesn't mean that problem solving is a psychological function of dreams built over evolutionary time.

This doesn't mean that dreams have no "meaning," and that they make no sense.  To the contrary, dreams correlate with age, gender, culture, and personal preoccupations, as evidence later in this report may suggest.  "Meaning" has to do with coherence and with systematic relations to other variables, and in that regard, dreams do have meaning.  Furthermore, they are very "revealing" of what is on peoples' minds.  It has been shown that 75 to 100 dreams from a person gives a very good psychological portrait of that individual.  Take 1000 dreams over a couple of decades and a profile of the person's mind can be almost as individualized and accurate as his or her fingerprints.

Even if dreams have no physiological or psychological functions, human beings gradually invented uses for them.  Dreams have an "emergent" function that develops through culture.  An example would be that in many societies, dreams were used by shamans to diagnose illnesses, which were often thought to be caused by evil or angry spirits, and to enter the spiritual world.  In that sense, shamans were the first psychoanalysts, while Freud and Jung are modern-day shamans.  In other societies, dreams were used to find game, predict the weather, or prophesy about the future.  Most recently, however, at least since about 1900, they have been used in psychotherapy, although not as much in recent years when the emphasis is on short-term therapy and on thinking sensible thoughts.

Dreams can be an "occasion" for a reticent patient to talk more personally, especially when people do not take as much personal responsibility for their dreams as they do most of their other thoughts, making dreams easier to talk about.  Most dream researchers think it is worthwhile to remember dreams, and they have tips for improving the recall.  But the evidence presented here suggests something else: they are not important, so perhaps not worth remembering.

What about repetitious dreams? Do they send messages, or do they occur because of repetitious themes in one's life? Though dreams may not have any functions, repetitious dreams may have some psychological function and meaning.  The repetition principle says that dream types and experiences are on a continuum, which runs from repeated dreams to repeated themes to repeated dream elements.  The continuum begins at one extreme with traumatic dreams that reproduce repeating overwhelming experiences, to those that puzzle or frighten people, and then to those that have repetitive themes within long dream series.  The continuum ends with everyday characters, activities, objects and places that show up throughout the course of one's lifetime.

Recurrent dreams have not been studied with the depth and intensity of traumatic dreams.  Most of the studies have been clinical-anecdotal in nature or based on brief surveys.  They are often reported to begin at times of stress, such as the death of a loved one, separation from parents, or the divorce of parents.  However, the content usually does not reflect the stress situation directly.  Of course, there is reason to believe from clinical studies and surveys that recurrent dreams often disappear when the problem is resolved.  the fact that all recurrent dreams cannot be tied to obvious stressors, as in the case of posttraumatic stress disorder dreams, presents a problem for linking the repetition dimension with emotional preoccupation.  In some instances, the stressors may be buried, but findings from a study of an unusual type of recurrent dream suggest a new angle: what is ordinary for some people may be stressful for others.  The unusual recurrent dreams to which is referred are the nightmares of the small number of people who suffer from lifelong nightmares.

The findings on recurrent dreams thus seem to reinforce the idea that dreams relate to people's emotional preoccupations.  However, a theory based on traumatic dreams and recurrent dreams is not broad enough--too many people do not report having either of these types of dreams, and have too many dreams that are neither traumatic nor recurrent.  It is therefore necessary to search for the repetition principle in the everyday dreams of everyday dreamers.

Clinical researchers, especially Jungians, have given some intimations of the degree to which certain themes may repeat themselves in dreams.  However, it was Hall's systematic work with long dream series, some stretching over several decades, which revealed just how pervasive and consistent repeated themes are in dreams.  Dream themes continue throughout a person's life, and only change a few times when their lives change.  Events, such as getting married, having children and just starting out in life as an adult, contains certain repetitious themes and elements present in that person's dreams.  Later in life, that same person will have different repeating themes reflecting current events in their life, such as the kids growing up and getting married.  Clearly, more work needs to be done on the connection between repetitive themes and specific traumas within long dream series.

Most clinical theorists tend to focus on one dream at a time, and they attempt to understand each dream in terms of material from outside of it, such as events of the previous day, biographical information, free associations, or amplifications.  This approach does not lend itself to finding that a person dreams consistently about certain elements or has higher frequencies for some dream elements than most people.  The quantitative content analysis system takes a different tack.  By constructing carefully defined categories for settings, objects, emotions, characters, activities, social interactions, and many other elements in dreams, and then tabulating frequencies for each of these categories, this method provides a way to study dreams without going outside the dreams themselves.

Quantitative content analysis has led to many reliable and interesting findings simply by comparing dreams with other dreams, either other dreams in a long dream series or with norms derived from the dreams of many different people.  The repetition of elements in dreams can be demonstrated in two different ways.  First, there is repetition in long dream series, where the comparison is of earlier with later dreams.  Second, it is possible to compare the dreams of an individual, or a class of individuals, with normative findings on people in general.  In this case, the norms are for American college students, but there is evidence that they are useful with older adults as well because dreams changes very little with age, except possibly for aggressive interactions.

These kinds of findings on individuals and groups, and many more that could be recounted, are all provocative, and they all point in the same direction--people most often dream about their emotional preoccupations, about what concerns them.  More specifically, there is continuity between waking concerns and dream content.  This continuity suggests there is a "continuity principle" that works alongside the repetition principle to determine a significant portion of a person's dream life.

If dreams do reflect our emotional preoccupations, then it can be argued that dreams can come to have a psychological "function" in some cultures for those people who remember and study their dreams.  Dreams were not conserved by natural selection to be problem resolvers, or anything else for that matter, but they nonetheless can be used to understand people's unfinished emotional business.  Dreams, whether in REM or NREM sleep, have no function, but can be "useful" to waking consciousness in a variety of ways.  In that sense, people in many cultures, including Western civilization, have invented "functions" for them.  From that angle, dreams have an "emergent function" that develops through culture and history.

How do sex dreams contribute to the therapeutic approach? In Freudian theory the libido, or life force, is conceived of as sexual in nature.  The purpose of dreams is to allow the disguised fulfillment of a repressed wish, often sexual in nature, which must not be gratified directly.  The presence of a psychic censor which does the work of disguising the sexual content so that the dreamer will not be awakened by the rawness of his or her own impulses and desires.  This is how the dream functions as the guardian of sleep.

Freud himself sought to explain sexual dreams--those dreams which have sexual content at the manifest level, that is, the dream as remembered--as the result of a break-down of the dream mechanisms.  In other words, because sexual dreams did not fit the theory, they must be aberrations.  The theory could not be wrong; nature must be defective.  Even today, the Freudian analyst might argue that there is more open sexual content in dreams, because there is less repression of sexuality in modern society than in Freud's day.  There is less repression precisely because Freud had such an impact on current attitudes toward sexuality.

The type of sexuality expressed is important.  For example, oral sexual motifs may express: a "forbidden" sexual activity that has been repressed on the instinctual side; or, an impulse to "take in" and incorporate aspects of phallic masculine energy or feminine yin energy on the archetypal side.  Perversions may also reflect a severely damaged instinctual element in the dreamer's personality, or be a passionate attempt to integrate something symbolized by the image.

For example, dreams of sexual bondage may demonstrate a dream-ego, which is desperately attempting to be in touch with sexuality without having to accept responsibility for it.  Homosexuality may either: reflect a latent instinctual impulse or desire , generally a frightening notion to the consciously heterosexual individual, yet one that must be taken very seriously in order to hold the tension of the opposites; or express an important need to bridge to qualities possessed by someone of the same sex as the dreamer.  These dreams often express the genuine emotional response of what it is like to integrate aspects of one's own shadow.

All in all, sexuality is but one aspect of the whole personality.  Therapists cannot make sexual dreams happen any more than they can make them disappear.  They may be the "royal road" to observing the vicissitudes of this sometimes wily instinct.  And yet, one must always stay aware that the unconscious is quite capable of using sexual imagery to symbolize the non-physical processes of union, connectedness, and integration.  So, as should be remembered with all dreams, the key to the analysis of the sex dream lies in keeping it in perspective with the uniqueness of the total personality--in all of its many facets, feelings, and forms.

Limitations/Delimitations

Accurate reporting may not be so accurate--patient may report different aspects of the dream than what happened.  Medication in dreamers may effect what gets reported.  Power of persuasion--Some therapists may "suggest" an early childhood trauma that never happened, or was worse than what actually happened.  This may affect what the dreamer may tell the researcher or therapist.

Definition of Terms

Activation-Synthesis model --This states that dreams do not bear deeper meanings and are simply responses to the body's active physiology that occurs during sleep.  Summing it up in a two-part process, the researchers proposed the activation-synthesis model of dreaming.  The first part, the activation aspect, suggests that parts of the brain become very energized during REM sleep and create random information.   The activation that generates this information blends with a person's own memories, which are already in storage.  The blending of the activation and the stored memories, in turn, synthesize a dream.  Contrary to the more commonly held view that dreams initiate REM sleep, this view proposes that REM sleep, or the brain's physiological activation, causes dreaming

Anima and animus --Anima (for the man) or Animus (for the woman) represent the complementary sexual polarity.  The dreams pass by Anima/Animus, like all the problems resulting from the complex of Oedipus.

Archetype --An archetype simply means is that it is typical in consciousness for everyone.

Condensation --This idea states that many different ideas are condensed into one.  A single figure can be turned into a collective image, combining often contradictory elements.  Condensation is brought about by latent elements that have something in common being combined and fused into a single unity in the manifest dream.

Defense Mechanisms --These "mechanisms" are techniques that the ego uses to defend itself against the demands of reality, the id, and the superego.  It does so by unconsciously blocking the impulses or distorting them into a more acceptable, less threatening form.  These mechanisms are discussed below:

Denial involves blocking external events from awareness.  If some situation is just too much to handle, the person just refuses to experience it.  As one might imagine, this is a primitive and dangerous defense--no one disregards reality and gets away with it for long.  It can operate by itself or, more commonly, in combination with other, more subtle mechanisms that support it.

Repression , which Anna Freud also called "motivated forgetting," is just that: not being able to recall a threatening situation, person, or event.  This, too, is dangerous, and is a part of most other defenses.  Note that, to be a true example of a defense, it should function unconsciously.

Asceticism , or the renunciation of needs, is one most people haven't heard of, but it has become relevant again today with the emergence of the disorder called anorexia.  Preadolescents, when they feel threatened by their emerging sexual desires, may unconsciously try to protect themselves by denying, not only their sexual desires, but all desires.  They get involved in some kind of ascetic (monk-like) lifestyle wherein they renounce their interest in what other people enjoy.

Isolation (sometimes called intellectualization) involves stripping the emotion from a difficult memory or threatening impulse.  A person may, in a very cavalier manner, acknowledge that they had been abused as a child, or they might show a purely intellectual curiosity in their newly discovered sexual orientation.  Something that should be a big deal is treated as if it were not.

Displacement is the redirection of an impulse onto a substitute target.  If the impulse, the desire, is okay with one person, but the person they direct that desire towards is too threatening, that person can displace to someone or something that can serve as a symbolic substitute.

Turning against the self is a very special form of displacement, is where the person becomes his or her own substitute target.  It is normally used in reference to hatred, anger, and aggression, rather than positive impulses, and it is the Freudian explanation for many people's feelings of inferiority, guilt, and depression.  Many people, Freudians and non-Freudians alike accept the idea that depression is often the result of the anger that most people refuse to acknowledge.

Projection , which Anna Freud also called displacement outward, is almost the complete opposite of turning against the self.  It involves the tendency to see your own unacceptable desires in other people.  In other words, the desires are still there, but they're not your desires anymore.

Altruistic surrender is a form of projection that at first glance looks like its opposite: Here, the person attempts to fulfill his or her own needs vicariously, through other people.

Reaction formation , which Anna Freud called "believing the opposite," is changing an unacceptable impulse into its opposite.  So a child, angry with his or her mother, may become overly concerned with her and rather dramatically shower her with affection.  An abused child may run to the abusing parent.  Or someone who can't accept a homosexual impulse may claim to despise homosexuals.

Undoing involves "magical" gestures or rituals that are meant to cancel out unpleasant thoughts or feelings after they've already occurred.  Anna Freud mentions, for example, a boy who would recite the alphabet backwards whenever he had a sexual thought, or turn around and spit whenever meeting another boy who shared his passion for masturbation.

Introjection , sometimes called identification, involves taking into your own personality characteristics of someone else, because doing so solves some emotional difficulty.  For example, a child who is left alone frequently, may in some way try to become "mom" in order to lessen his or her fears.

Identification with the aggressor is a version of introjection that focuses on the adoption, not of general or positive traits, but of negative or feared traits.

Regression is a movement back in psychological time when one is faced with stress.  A child may begin to suck their thumb again or wet the bed when they need to spend some time in the hospital, or when a new baby comes home to their family.

Rationalization is the cognitive distortion of "the facts" to make an event or an impulse less threatening.  For many people, with sensitive egos, making excuses comes so easy that they never are truly aware of it.

Sublimation is the transforming of an unacceptable impulse, whether it is sex, anger, fear, or whatever, into a socially acceptable, even productive form.  So, someone with a great deal of hostility may become a hunter, a butcher, a football player, or a mercenary.  Someone suffering from a great deal of anxiety in a confusing world may become an organizer, a businessperson, or a scientist.  Someone with powerful sexual desires may become an artist, a photographer, or a novelist, and so on.  For Freud, in fact, all positive, creative activities were sublimations, and predominantly of the sex drive.

Displacement --This term means that the dreamer replaces a latent element by a well-concealed allusion to it, so the psychical emphasis is shifted from an important element to a relatively trivial one.  Those elements, which stand out in the manifest content (the dream itself) are usually not important with respect to the dream-thoughts (the distorted wish).   The essence of the dream thoughts need not be represented in the dream at all.   Displacement refers to the fact that an idea's emphasis, or its interest, or its intensity, is liable to be detached from it and to be passed on to other ideas, which were originally of little intensity but which are related to the first idea by a chain of associations.   The energy runs along pathways allowed by censorship.

Dream-work --This is one of Freud's psychotherapy theories, which states that dreams are the key to the unconscious.  Dream-work can provide a direct connection to the unconscious.  Working with dreams in a therapeutic setting, whether one on one or in a group format, can be a very safe and effective way of moving deeper into the unconscious.

Existential therapy --This theory focuses on freedom of choice in shaping one's own life. It teaches that people are responsible for shaping their own lives, and that they have a need for self-determination and self-awareness. The uniqueness of each individual forms his / her own unique personality, starting from infancy.  Existential therapy focuses on the present and on the future, as the therapist tries to help the client see they are free, while looking at the possibilities for their future. They will challenge the client to recognize that he / she themselves were responsible for the events in their life. This type of therapy is well suited in helping the client to make good choices or in dealing with life.

Free association --Free association means that the client talks about whatever comes into mind without censoring or editing the flow of ideas or memories.  When used in dream therapy, the client will use the dream content/elements as a starting point to freely talk about the problems in a client's life.  Free association allows the client to return to earlier or more childlike emotional states ("regress").  Regression is sometimes necessary in the formation of the therapeutic alliance.  It also helps the analyst to understand the recurrent patterns of conflict in the client's life.

Latent dream thought --This is an unconscious set of thoughts.

Manifest dream thoughts --This is the dream content.

Psychotherapy --Psychotherapy focuses on the unconscious and that it influences human behavior. It is believed that a person is driven by aggressive and sexual impulses, and focuses mainly on the first six years of human life and how the events of this time period determines later personality.  Repressed conflicts from childhood lead to personality problems later in life.  Anxiety is a direct result of the repression of those conflicts.  Psychotherapists believe that the unconscious motives along with unresolved conflicts lead to maladapted behavior. They believe that to develop a normal personality, a person should successfully go through Freud's five psychosexual stages.

Regard for representability --This theory, as part of the dream-work theory, states that dreamers transform thoughts into visual elements ("I was in a tower above the audience" might mean "I towered above the audience intellectually").  Considerations of representability consists of transforming thoughts into visual images.   They comprise the essence of the formation of dreams.  The dream-work reduces the content of the dream-thoughts to its raw material of objects and activities.

Secondary revision --Secondary Revision refers to the ways in which the dream work will utilize aspects of coherent narrative to help disguise the fact that there are contradictions--the film-like sequences (often taken straight out of part of the waking day) are patched in to get away from the otherwise contradictory material.   In other words, it is a second order of disguise.   The first order disguises the wish (displacement and condensation), the second order disguises the obviousness of the disguise.   It is manifested in waking life by our failure, for instance, to catch all the typographic and spelling errors when we read through our own work--secondary revision will convince us that the errors are just not there.

Chapter 2

Review of the Literature

Historical Overview

Dreaming has always been the subject of controversy.  It is interesting to see that even Egyptian papyrus documents discuss dreams and their interpretations.  In Ancient Greece, the dreamer was believed to be in contact with the gods.  For instance, in Homer's book, "The Iliad" , dreams were believed to be messages from God.  However, in succeeding centuries, scientists, such as Hypocrites, Aristotle and Galen, believed that dreams held physiological information about future medical illnesses.  Galen, a Greek physician born in 129 AD, emphasized the need to observe dreams carefully for clues to healing.  He was so trusting of dream messages that he carried out operations on the basis of his dream interpretations.

On the other hand, Artemidorus maintained that symbols in dreams did not have one universal meaning.  But all of these scientific ideas were abandoned and there was no improvement in dream study until the late 1800s, which will be discussed shortly.

The earliest recorded dreams are derived from materials dating back approximately 5000 years, in Mesopotamia.  The Sumerians, the first cultural group to reside in Mesopotamia, left dream records dating back to 3100 B.C.  According to these early writings, deities and royals, such as the 7th century B.C.  scholar-king Assurbanipal, gave careful attention to dreams.  Within Assurbanipal's archive of clay tablets, portions of the story of the legendary king Gilgamesh were found.  In this epic poem--one of the earliest known classical stories--Gilgamesh reported his recurring dreams to his goddess-mother Ninsun, who made the first recorded dream interpretation.  His dreams were taken as prophecy and used to guide actions in the waking world.  These attitudes recorded in the Gilgamesh epic provide a valuable source of information about ancient dream beliefs.

In many of the ancient civilizations, dreams were highly esteemed, and many cultures had temples where people would travel many miles for dream healing, problem solving, and guidance.  One of the most famous, Epidaurus, near Corinth, was known for people representing those who were unable to travel, due to their debilitating illnesses.  This temple, begun as a center of worship for Aesculapius (the revered Greek god of healing), was later fitted with beds, and became one of the first hospitals.  Even his staff with the winding snakes was adapted as the symbol for healing, which is used now even today.

The practice of dream incubation was at least as important to the Greeks as it was among Mesopotamians, Egyptians, and Chinese.  Aesculapius was a Greek healer who was believed to be the son of Apollo.  He was linked with cults that began the practice of incubation.  He visited sleepers, and miraculously cured them.  A shrine to Aesculapius was established at Epidaurus in the fifth century B.C., which is still open for visitors and tours.  There are thought to be around 410 Aesculapian sanctuaries near Athens, generally being active from the sixth century B.C.  until the third century B.C.

Human beings have always been tuned in to their dreams.  But in different epochs, concepts of their essence, origin and significance have varied. The first data comes from Mesopotamia, from the epic of Gilgamesh--the oldest known record of a historic person who lived around 2700 B.C., and it relates the heroic deeds of the ruler of Uruk.  At the same time, it contains the most ancient documented dreams.  In the epic, dreams serve to announce the plans of the gods to people, so that they can act accordingly.

Not only in Mesopotamia, but also in Babylon, Assyria and Egypt the dream is of heavenly origin and its function is mainly prophetic.  This attitude is deeply rooted in the thinking of those times. One example is the dream of Thutmosis IV: he fell asleep under the Sphinx, which was covered to the neck in sand.  Thutmosis had a dream that the Sphinx spoke to him and promised that if he would clear the Sphinx, Thutmosis would be destined to become king of Egypt.  Thutmosis cleared the Sphinx, became king of Egypt and erected a stela between the paws of the Sphinx. 

There are over 700 dreams and visions mentioned in the Bible, all showing an important connection to the lives, problems, and well being of those involved.  The first two chapters of Matthew alone contain five dreams, which gave warnings or advice.  Every major Christian writer in the first four centuries regarded dreams as one way God offered healing, and guidance to people.  In the following few centuries, theories began to stray from the importance of dreams.  The religious and educational thinkers of the time believed dreams were useless meanderings of the mind.

The Babylonians divided dreams into two categories: 1.) good dreams were sent by the gods, and 2.) bad dreams were sent by demons, with Mamu as their goddess of dreams.  The Assyrians believed in dreams as omens; for example, if a person flied in their dreams it indicated all would be lost.  The Egyptians believed that the gods showed themselves in dreams, and they believed dreams were based on real things.  In the Egyptian culture, three main types of dreams were thought to exist: those that happened as a result of ritual, dreams that contained warnings, and dreams where the gods were demanding some type of action.

Ancient Hebrews believed dreams were connections with God.  The biblical figures Solomon, Jacob, Nebuchadnezzar and Joseph were all visited in their dreams by God or prophets, who helped guide their decisions.  It was recognized and accepted that the dreams of kings could influence whole nations and the futures of their peoples.  The Talmud , which was written between 200 and 500 AD, includes over two hundred references to dreams.  It states that "dreams which are not understood are like letters which are not opened."

Hebrews believed their dreams were the voice of only one God, while bad dreams were the work of demons.  Hindus believed that the time when a prophetic dream occurred, indicated when the event would take place.  In the Muslim culture, a distinction is made between true dreams from God and false dreams, and that rituals were used to create good dreams.  Many Indian tribes believed that dreams revealed the hidden wishes of the soul, which seems to parallel Freud's work later.

The earliest Greek view of dreams was that the gods physically visited dreamers, entering through a keyhole, and exiting the same way after the divine message was delivered.  The fifth century B.C.  marks the first known Greek book on dreams, written by Antiphon, an Athenian statesman.  During this century, the Greeks developed the belief, through contact with other cultures, that souls left the sleeping body.

The transition from the religious-transcendental concept of dreams to attempts at scientific explanation takes place in Ancient Greece.  For Homer, and his book Iliad, dreams are still "messengers of the gods", and for Hesiod "children of the night living in the world beyond".  Similar ideas are found in Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides.  Dreams were not internal experiences or a state of mind.  A person did not "have" a dream; he or she "saw" an objectified agent delivering a communication from a deity.  However, not all dreams were significant, there were "true" and "false" dreams.  Only "true" dreams were interpreted as divine visitors.

Hippocrates (469-399 BC), the father of medicine and Socrates' contemporary, wrote On Dreams .  His theory was simple: during the day, the soul receives images, and during the night, it produces images.  Therefore, people dream.  Aristotle (384-322 BC) thought that dreams could be indicators of conditions within the body.  He did not believe they were divinely inspired and hypothesized that external stimuli are absent during sleep, so dreams are manifestations of a profound awareness of internal sensations, which are expressed as dream imagery.

The views of Aristotle are the culmination of dream hypotheses in Greece.  To this day some of them remain subject to discussion, in the absence of more convincing hypotheses.  He considers dreams to be the life of the soul during sleep and interprets them as a psychological phenomenon, and maintains that a person dreams every night, but cannot always remember his dreams.

Aristotle is also the first to observe the fast movement of the eyes during dreams.  Today this phenomenon is called Rapid Eye Movement, or REM, and is the basis of physiological sleep research.  Unlike the Ancient East, the differential approach of the Greeks to the problem of dreams is a result of the high level of philosophy, for which the mind-body problem occupies an important place and which becomes a premise for a theoretical treatment of phenomena through the discovery of "general ideas" by Socrates.

The transition from myth to logic is best seen in Pythagoras: on the one hand, he believes that nightmares are caused by certain foods, and on the other hand, he still does not exclude the possibility that dreams have a heavenly origin.  Even to this day, certain foods are thought to give people nightmares.  For example, with children, nightmares are thought to occur after eating sugar, spicy, or exotic foods before bedtime.  Eating sugar before bed are thought to occur as a result of high blood sugar for a short while, then after the person goes to sleep the body becomes low in blood sugar and this is thought to contribute to nightmares.  In adults, eating sugary, spicy or exotic foods, drinking alcohol or taking drugs before bedtime seems to precipitate nightmares.

The Chinese considered the dreamer's soul to be the guiding factor of dream production.  The Hun, or spiritual soul, was thought to leave the body and communicate with the land of the dead.  They also practiced incubation in dream temples, which served a political purpose through the 16th century.  Any high official visiting a city reported to a temple the first night to receive dream guidance for his mission.  Judges and government officials were also required to visit dream temples for insight and wisdom.

The Sacred Books of Wisdom , or Vedas , were written in India between 1500 and 1000 BC.  In the Vedas , dreams of violence were thought to lead to success and happiness if the aggression was pro actively handled in the dream, even if the dreamer gets hurt in the process.  If the dreamer remains passive and becomes hurt by his own passivity, however, it was considered a bad omen.  Dreams might be more indicative of the dreamer's character than prophecy, since those who take an active role in their dreams are likely to be more active, and therefore, more successful, in their daily lives, which is the premise of this study.

The Upanishads , written between 900 and 500 BC, articulates two perspectives on dreams.  The first maintains that dreams are merely expressions of inner desires.  The second closely resembles the Chinese belief of the soul leaving the body and being guided until awakened.  It was also thought that if the sleeper was awakened abruptly, the soul might not return to the body quickly enough and the sleeper could die.

During the European Middle Ages, dreams were often studied in the context of their relationship to God.  Questions typical of the period were "Are dreams sent by God to a person of superior virtue? Or are they sent by demons to a person who has fallen from grace?" Beginning with the dawn of the Christian era until the time of Sigmund Freud, dreams were not regarded as important.  As society became more "structured," dreams fell into disrepute, and churches had little appreciation for the use of dream interpretation.

The dream vision was frequently used as a moralizing allegory, also known as the veiling of truth in images, in popular writing.  Within the dream was a battleground where God competed with the Devil for possession of a man's soul, and stories written about this were endorsed by the Church to enforce its beliefs.  "Dante's Divine Comedy" is a good example.  Dreams were received as revelation, prophecy, or as the conflict between good and evil in the self.

Like many other sciences, the science of dreams was at a relative standstill during the Middle Ages.  The examination of dreams is reduced to symbolic interpretations through analogies, and encyclopedia-type dream-books come into existence.  They only show that dreams of those times are similar to that of today.  There are, however, some exceptions like Saphadi (investigating the dreams of the blind) and Augustinus (discussing the responsibility of the individual for his own dreams).

The significance, and science, of dreams surfaced in other modern cultures as well.  The Mekeo beliefs concerning dreams are varied, and their roles for interpretations are very flexible so that dreams can always be linked to reality.  According to their beliefs, if a dream seems to have no correlation to real life, then the dreamer is just not understanding it right.  Dreams are concerned with the secret world of the spirits and of personal thoughts and desires; they reveal esoteric knowledge to the dreamer.  The sense of self is anchored in the waking life, but there is an awareness of a self that is not physical and is not located in the material world.  Dreaming shows that there is more to the individual than people are consciously aware of.  The functions of their dreams can be seen in the aspects of life that dream interpretations frequently pertain to.  They are usually warnings of death, sickness, or healing; encounters with spirit beings or figures from Christianity; the success or misfortune of plans of action; omens concerning the outcome of rituals; revelation of ritual knowledge , and erotic matters.

Some dreams literally predict what will happen in the future, while others are obscured or veiled.  Many dream events are widely accepted as indicating the same thing, such as a dream of falling might mean that there will be sickness or misfortune in the future of the dreamer.  Dream interpretations are commonly subjective, or vary, depending on if a man or woman dreamed it.  Men are thought to use charms to make a woman dream about him.  If a woman dreams of a particular suitor it means she will no longer be able to resist him, and to tell people about the dream is the same as accepting him.  Men's erotic dreams are thought to be caused by their own use of love charms on desired women or else are considered signs that they will have good luck in an upcoming event, such as gambling or hunting.

From an ethnography written in 1974, the Iban from Asia believe that dreams can be divided into three categories: dreams that are a direct message from a spirit, dreams that pertain to current events in an individual's life, and dreams that are obviously about daily life and therefore have no significance.  Ambiguous dreams are good or bad depending on the reaction they get from the dreamer.  The majority of dreams seems to pertain to the individual's life, and is used to predict future events.  A flying dream, or one about being chased means that the dreamer will live a long time.  Bad dreams where the dreamer feels embarrassed means that the individual may become injured the next day.

Sometimes dreams are not properly understood until subsequent events have happened that appear to relate back to the dream, and then dreams are regarded as advice on what a course of action should be.  The most important dreams occur right before a major undertaking.  Leadership is associated with constructive dreaming.  Constructive dreams appear relevant in the first place, as well as lend themselves to easy interpretation.  An insightful and discriminating person will know when to follow the advice that spirits give him in dreams.

During the Renaissance, the striving toward knowledge was directed toward the immediate reality of things.  There was an intense development of methodological problems and the scientia experimentalis was at the heart of all science.  But centuries had to pass before those principles could be applied to the investigation of dreams.  Unlike physics, experimental dream research began in the middle of the 19 th century.  Dreams could not be controlled by the intellect and therefore were not a reliable source of knowledge.  The scholars of this era really did not put much faith into the meaning of dreams.

There were three different periods of dream investigation after the nineteenth century.  (1861-1900; 1900-1953; and 1953-present) Until the nineteenth century, scientific investigations of dreams, dream content, and the meaning of dreams in the dreamer's life were non-existent.  Prior to this time, it was a popular theory that dreams were divine messages with a prophetic intent.  Theorists claimed that messages in dreams were coded, and that it took a special person with the talent of interpretation of dreams to decode the messages.  (Corsini) (This could be seen in the story of Nebuchadnezzar and Daniel.  Daniel 1:17, 4:5-35) Later, books were compiled that listed dream elements and their supposed meanings.

In different cultures, different elements of the dream content mean different things.  Beautiful women who come to the dreamer to make love are sickness women, and fill the sleeper with fat to make them ill or liable to be attacked by a jaguar or snake.  (Tukano, South America) A man dreaming that his wife is sleeping with other men is evidence that she really is.  He will become angry with her, he may or may not punish her depending on whether she admits or denies her guilt.  (Tarahumara, northern Mexico) Dreaming of sexually available women, in general, are omens of bad luck or illness.  But some men consider such dreams to be good omens.  (Skolt, Lapland)

Then, in the mid-nineteenth century (1861-1900), Alfred Maury, a French Scientist, published the book, Sleep and Dreams .  This book investigated the effects of external stimuli on dreams, such as daily activities and past events.  According to him, this stimulus triggered a sequence of memories that constructed the dreamer's dreams.  Other scientists of the time suggested that organic conditions, such as genetic makeup, effected the formation of a dreamer's dreams.  These scientists investigated why dreams were forgotten, the meanings of dream content, the relation of dreaming and thinking, and the function of dreaming.

An accomplishment of the period occurred when Henri Bergson, a French philosopher, published the book Dreams in 1901.  He hypothesized that external or internal stimuli was not enough to explain the formation of dreams.  This idea stated that "the most secret depths of the unconscious will be the principal task of psychology in the century that is opening." Early results were inconclusive, but provided a framework for the next investigative period.

The biggest name in the second period is Freud, who published The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900.  It contained nearly all his fundamental observations and ideas.  "Dreams," Freud said, "are invariably the product of a conflict ...  [they help sleep] releasing tensions that come from unattainable wishes".   But it is not just from dreams that a trained psychoanalyst might take his or her clue; just everyday behavior of the subject might be revealing.  For instance, Freud said that to forget a name means that one unconsciously dislikes that person; if someone misses a ride to work or school, it is because he or she unconsciously dislikes going to school or work; or if a man forgets his house keys, it is because he has an unhappy marriage (whether he thinks it or not).

Before continuing, an understanding of Freud's life should be discussed.  Sigismund Schlomo Freud was born on May 6, 1856, in Freiberg, Moravia.   He had seven younger siblings.   Freud's father, a Jewish wool merchant, moved the family to Leipzig, Germany in 1859, and then settled in Vienna, Austria in 1860, and remained there until 1938.  In 1877, he abbreviated his name to Sigmund Freud.   In 1886, Freud married Martha Bernays. Together, they had six children (Mathilde, 1887; Jean-Martin, 1889; Olivier, 1891; Ernst, 1892; Sophie, 1893; Anna, 1895).

One of the interesting things about Freud was his ethnic background.   There is some difficulty in establishing his true citizenship and identifying his nationality.  The obvious answer would be Austrian, but Austria had only been created by the Treaty of Saint Germain in 1919, and disappeared in 1938.   Some say he was a Czech since he was born in Moravia.   But, at that time, it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  At times, Freud saw himself as a German, and at other times, in response to his upbringing and the anti-Semitism he encountered along the way, he identified as a Jew.  So we have a German-identified, culturally assimilated Jew, born in what is now the Czech Republic and living in Vienna, a town he claimed to detest with an almost physical loathing.   It's no wonder Freud spent so many years doing self-analysis.

Freud was deeply influenced by several diverse factors that interconnected with each other to shape the development of his thought.  Both Jean-Martin Charcot and Josef Breuer had a direct impact upon him, but they were other factors of a different nature.  First, Freud himself was very much a Freudian--his father had two sons by a previous marriage, Emmanuel and Philip.   Freud's own self-analysis--which forms the core of his masterpiece The Interpretation of Dreams --originated in the emotional crisis which he suffered on the death of his father, and the series of dreams to which this gave rise.

This analysis revealed to him that the love and admiration he had felt for his father were mixed with contrasted feelings of shame and hate.   Particularly revealing was his discovery that he had often fantasized as a youth that his half-brother Philip was really his father.   This along with certain other signs convinced him of the deep underlying meaning of this fantasy--that he had wished his real father dead, because he was his rival for his mother's affections (Freud 1911).  This was to become the personal basis for his theory of the Oedipus complex.

Secondly, an account must be taken of the contemporary scientific climate, in which Freud lived and worked.  In most respects, the towering scientific figure of nineteenth century science was Charles Darwin, who had published his revolutionary The Origin Of Species when Freud was four years old.  This evolutionary doctrine radically altered the prevailing conception of man.   Whereas before man had been seen as a being different in nature to the members of the animal kingdom by virtue of his possession of an immortal soul, he was now seen as being part of the natural order, different from non-human animals only in degree of structural complexity.

This made it possible and plausible, for the first time, to treat man as an object of scientific investigation, and to conceive of the vast and varied range of human behavior, and the motivational causes, from which it springs, as being amenable in principle to scientific explanation.  Much of the creative work done in a whole variety of diverse scientific fields over the next century was to be inspired by, and derive sustenance from, this new world-view, which Freud, with his enormous esteem for science, accepted implicitly.

Third, an even more important influence on Freud came from the field of physics.  The second 50 years of the nineteenth century saw monumental advances in contemporary physics, which were largely initiated by the formulation of the "Principle of the Conservation of Energy".  This principle states, in effect, that the total amount of energy in any given physical system is always constant, that energy quanta can be changed but not annihilated, and consequently that when energy is moved from one part of the system it must reappear in another part.  The progressive application of this principle led to the monumental discoveries in the fields of thermodynamics, electromagnetism, and nuclear physics that, with their associated technologies, have so comprehensively transformed the contemporary world.

When Freud first attended the University of Vienna, he worked under the direction of Ernst Theodore Brucke, who in 1874 published a book setting out the view that all living organisms, including humans, are essentially energy-systems to which the principle of the conservation of energy applies.  Freud, who had great admiration and respect for Brucke, quickly adopted this new 'dynamic physiology' with enthusiasm.  From there, Freud was able to take on the view that there is such a thing as psychic energy.   He stated that the human personality is also an energy-system, and that it is the function of psychology to investigate the modifications, transmissions, and conversions of 'psychic energy' within the personality, which shape and determine it.  This latter conception is the very cornerstone of Freud's psychoanalytic theory.

One of Freud's initial theories on the levels of consciousness was that there were two states: the conscious and the unconscious.  He described the mental processes of the unconscious as being responsible for the aspects of human behavior.   For instance, a man might think consciously that bumping into a woman was purely accidental in nature, but actually, it may have been a manifestation of his unconscious sexual desire for her, as he managed to invade her intimate space and brought his body into a sort of forceful contact with hers, perhaps as an act symbolic of sexual intercourse.

Freud came to find this "black or white" definition of consciousness to be unsuitable, however, and redefined his theory on consciousness, incorporating a third level: the pre-conscious.  The conscious level of mental activity is the level on which all thought processes occur.  What one thinks, conceptualizes, or understands takes place on this level of activity.  The pre-conscious is where information is stored away, but is easily obtainable.  Fond memories and the knowledge of how to perform day-to-day activities are examples of information stored at this level.  The unconscious is where memories and information are stored which cannot be accessed readily.  Most of a person's history is stored on this level of consciousness, as well as those thoughts and stored memories in order to preserve a person's mental stability and/or to prevent pain.

Another aspect of Freud's early research led him to conclude that the human personality contains three major components: the Id, the Ego and the Superego.  The id is the unrestrained, primitive, pleasure-seeking component with which each child is born.  The Ego develops out of the Id as the child grows.  The ego develops through the reality of living in the world and helps manage and restrain the Id's need for immediate gratification.   The Ego is not so inward seeking and recognizes that there does exist a world beyond.   It recognizes the larger picture.  Conflict between the Id and the Ego can result in a person having neuroses.

The third state is the Superego.  The Superego is the highest state at which a person has arrived in their evolutionary progress.  The Superego is an overseer, the conscience; and, like the Id, is something of which one is not conscious.  The superego develops through interactions with parents and other significant people and represents the development of conscience and the moral rules that are shared by most adults.  Though people are not aware of the struggle, according to Freudian theory, there exists a continuing battle between the Id and the Superego, while the Ego is in the center trying to keep them apart.

All three segments of the personality are in simultaneous operation.   If these components are properly balanced, a person can lead a normal life.   If one aspect of the personality becomes dominant at the expense of others, however, the individual exhibits neurotic or even psychotic personality traits.  The following graph, taken from http://www.ship.edu/~cgboeree/freud.html , which discusses Freud's life and theories, illustrates this theory:

It appeared to Freud that the infant found its greatest pleasure in sucking, especially at the breast.  In fact, babies have a penchant for bringing nearly everything in their environment into contact with their mouths.  A bit later in life, the child focuses on the anal pleasures of holding it in and letting go.  By three or four, the child may have discovered the pleasure of touching or rubbing against his or her genitalia.  Only later, in their sexual maturity, do they find their greatest pleasure in sexual intercourse.  In these observations, Freud had the makings of a psychosexual stage theory.

The oral stage lasts from birth to about 18 months.  The focus of pleasure is, of course, the mouth.  Sucking and biting are favorite activities.  The anal stage lasts from about 18 months to three or four years old.  The focus of pleasure is the anus.  Holding it in and letting it go are greatly enjoyed.  The phallic stage lasts from three or four to five, six, or seven years old.  The focus of pleasure is the genitalia.  Masturbation is common.  The latent stage lasts from five, six, or seven to puberty, which is somewhere around 12 years old.  During this stage, Freud believed that the sexual impulse was suppressed in the service of learning.  The genital stage begins at puberty, and represents the resurgence of the sex drive in adolescence, and the more specific focusing of pleasure in sexual intercourse.

Any trauma that occurs during any of these early life stages may have a lasting effect on the child's personality.   For example, premature weaning during the oral stage may cause an individual to be fixated on oral pastimes such as smoking and drinking alcohol.   If toilet training is a frightening or frustrating experience, the child's superego may be damaged and sometimes a sadistic and cruel anal personality will develop.

For Freud, the sex drive is the most important motivating force in a person's life.  In fact, Freud felt it was the primary motivating force not only for adults but also for children and even infants.   Freud noted that, at different times in people's lives, different parts of the skin give the greatest pleasure.  Later theorists would call these areas erogenous zones.

During his research, Freud discovered that his patients would talk about experiences associated with their childhood and their relationships with their parents.   Freud also utilized hypnosis as a means of recovering unconscious desires and feelings from his, mostly neurotic patients.   The technique of recalling these repressed feelings was called "free association".   In 1896, out of this groundbreaking research, Freud coined the term, "psychoanalysis".  Dream content is also used in this manner.

Consciousness is not co-terminus with the physical, which means that the unconscious is also physical.  It is not some mystical, transcendent or occult phenomenon, but is simply a part of the psyche.  Secondly, "the complete truth of the assertion" as Freud says in the Outline of Psychoanalysis , "that the child is psychologically a father to the adult".  Third, and most important, is the primacy and inevitability of psychic conflict.   Fourthly, the insistence that the equation, perception = reality, does not hold; desires and fears distort the perception of the world.  Fifth is the insistence that the basis of this conflict is 'instinctual life' in its widest sense and its indissoluble link to anxiety.

To continue the basic tenets of psychoanalysis, Freud introduced, at the age of 82, some entirely new concepts, such as the idea of the splitting of the ego in two.  So, at the same time Freud restates his basic principles, he is introducing fresh concepts and new avenues of research.  This was Freud's answer to the problem of tradition--he demonstrated that creativity in science is only fruitful on the basis of fundamental principles.  Psychoanalysis is not a philosophy.  It does not advance through speculation of the individual ego, with its illusion of free will and its tendency to think whatever pleases it or brings solace in the trials of life.  Psychoanalysis is constrained by its connection to experience, to a social practice, and through a submission--being held accountable, one might say--to basic tenets.  "When anything is possible, then nothing scientific can really develop." This was Freud's answer, and this was Freud's work.

Freud's theories about dreams have been, and still are, under dispute.   There are people who cannot forget a name, make a slip of the tongue, or feel depressed, or who cannot begin a love affair, or end a marriage, without wondering what the Freudian reason may be.   Despite his popularity in worldwide culture, intellectual journalists and the media frequently feature new exposes concerning Freud's therapeutic mistakes, and attack his personal idiosyncrasies and theoretical limitations.  Freud is declared in many of these articles to be profoundly limited by his own neuroses, gripped by biases and unable to practice what he preached.

Even some of Freud's colleagues in psychoanalysis were not content with simply being followers and developed various ideas that did not fit with his own.  Adler and Jung, for example, de-emphasized sexuality in favor of other unconscious forces.  Freud was faced with controversy from within the psychoanalytic movement and from critics from various fields in medicine, humanities and social sciences.  The main complaint about the science in which Freud researched was that it was too general.   Freud seems to explain everything after the fact, but predicts nothing beforehand.  There is the accusation that Freud intentionally technicalized his language to give it an air of scientific authenticity.  A term like repression points to no independently known reality but merely gives a name to the questionable survival of traumatic memory traces in an unconscious, which itself remains uncharacterized.

Moreover, incompatible burdens are placed upon the term, indicating that the theory behind it is fatally muddled.  When repression is then invoked as an explanatory factor in new contexts, true believers may feel that fresh territory is being conquered, but the scope of Freud's circularity is simply being widened.  The same flaw of empty conceptualization appears in virtually every feature of his system, from the preconscious through the ego, introjection, the death instinct, and so forth.   They aim at the intellectual structure of the system.  Freud himself, and many other Freudians, when these ideas of his were first proposed, claimed that psychoanalysis had achieved the status of a science.

Critics have attacked Freud at the very heart of his theories.   A theory should not create its own facts.   Critics claim that psychoanalysis, however, does so at every turn.  For example, repression is invoked to account for the delayed effect of childhood trauma in producing adult psychoneuroses, but the only reason for believing that such an effect occurs is a prior belief in repression.  A dream is regarded as a disguised representation of its latent content, the dream thoughts, but such thoughts can be detected only by Freudian dream interpretation.  So, too, castration threats, real or fantasized, supposedly trigger the onset of the male latency period, but the latency period is itself a pure artifact of the theory.  Freud also invoked penis envy to explain female submissiveness, masochism, and incapacity for cultural strivings, but in this instance, the theory and the "facts" alike derived from cultural prejudice.

A theory should be falsifiable.   Often, however, Freudian tenets are scarcely challenged, much less refuted, by unexpected outcomes.  The vagueness of the theory is such that it can withstand almost any number of surprises and be endlessly revised according to the theorist's whim, without reference to data.   Indeed, Freud drew on the same pool of evidence in offering three incompatible etiologies for homosexuality, and he did the same in proposing three incompatible paths for the overcoming of narcissism.

Throughout his whole career of theoretical development, rhetorical guile, and not much more, established the linkage between evidence and theory.  Hypothetical entities or processes should be characterized, which says that they ought to possess attributed properties that lend themselves to confirmation outside their immediate role in the theory at issue.  If they lack this quality, they are only placeholders for mechanisms that may not exist at all.  This is just what the critics claim to find in the case of psychoanalytic postulates.

In the criticism of Freud and his personality testing and theories, critics claim that he overstressed the early personality formation and failed to consider adult personality changes.   One of the negative consequences of focusing on the importance of early childhood is that, while gaining insights, some people just stay there, and blame irresponsible behavior on childhood experiences, never seeming to move forward.   These people become permanent victims stuck in the past and unable to move beyond it.  They blame their parents or someone else for their problems without seeing their own responsibility.

Freud also heavily emphasized the past as a deterministic system.  Here he was simply assimilating the prevailing nineteenth-century model of causality and applying it to human behavior.  He did not excuse their behavior as the result of experiences, but he provided logic for the notion that we are not responsible for our behavior.  One of the things psychology, psychotherapy, and psychoanalysis have done is to introduce the idea that people are not responsible for a large amount of their behavior.  This takes away any formal judgment of irresponsible behavior.

Many believe that Freud had an obvious bias against females.   Freud's negative attitudes towards women colored his theory.   An example of this speculative and globalizing argument is that Freud and various colleagues persistently and mistakenly diagnosed hysteria in great numbers of women, the majority of whom were, in fact, suffering from epilepsy.  The heterogeneity and vicissitudes of past and present psychiatric diagnoses is at least as likely an explanation for most mistakes made, rather than the claim that all, or nearly all, "hysteria" can be accounted for by organic brain disease.

These proponents held that Freud's themes were an application of the natural scientific tradition to the realm of the mind.  Those pretensions are gone now and today, virtually no one believes that Freud's understanding of the mind has had any impact whatsoever on traditional science. Some of the critics have said that psychoanalysis is really an "interpretive" science rather than an empirical science, a so-called "applied philosophy of life".  In fact, even most psychoanalysts have given up trying to claim that they are practicing science.

Freud's dream theories state that "the interpretation of dreams is the 'Royal road' to the discovery of the unconscious." This seems to mean that dreams set the stage to what we really think and feel in our unconscious state.  His four basic arguments build on each other: 1.) "Dreams are the fulfillment of a wish ", 2.) "Dreams are the disguised fulfillment of a wish", 3.) "Dreams are the disguised fulfillment of a repressed wish", and 4.) "Dreams are the disguised fulfillment of a repressed, infantile wish".

The first basic argument is that a wish is fulfilled by the dream.  This idea has been much criticized as being reductionist.  However, it is also part of the theory that accords mostly with common-sense and popular ideas about dreams.  People say 'I can only dream of such a thing' to describe something they really yearn for but are unable to have, and they all recognize that in their dreams they often make the world a better place for themselves where their wishes are fulfilled.  In this sense dreams, in Freud's view, have much in common with daydreams, or stories in which the hero or heroine win out in the end and achieve their heart's desire.

But what is a wish? Well it is not too hard to understand really.  If a child says "I wish I had a new toy', then that's a wish.  The only thing is that if she says 'I wish I had a new toy' it means that she has asked for a new toy and been told that she can't have one.  There is a 'want' and a prohibition.  A wish is the result.  As people get older, the prohibition becomes 'internalized' and the forbidden wishes become unconscious.  The child's unruly impulses are controlled and his egoism is curtailed.  Freud calls this function the 'censorship'.  Children's dreams display the wish-fulfilling character of dreams most clearly.

The contentious issue is that Freud insists that all dreams are fulfillments of wishes.  He argues against the idea that dreams may primarily be concerned with the solution to an intellectual problem, for instance, or with representing a 'worry', or an 'intention', or some other mental product.  Even when Freud allows the possibility of anxiety dreams or 'punishment dreams', he still incorporates these within the category of 'wish'.  There is something fundamental for Freud about the 'wish'.

This leads to Freud's second argument--a disguised wish is fulfilled with dreams.  Dreams often do not seem to 'make sense'.  They may appear like a jumble of disconnected images, which do not follow a logical structure.  Therefore, if dreams are the fulfillments of wishes, they must be disguised in some way.  Hence, they have to be 'interpreted' because their 'manifest content' (as Freud calls it) is not the same as their hidden or 'latent' content (the instigating and underlying 'dream thoughts').  Freud's theory therefore proposes two levels in the structure of dreams (the manifest content and latent dream-thoughts) that are nevertheless tied together in some way.  One is also reminded of the difference in genetics between the manifest 'phenotype' of an organism and the underlying 'genotype'.

The third argument is that a repressed wish is fulfilled in a disguised dream.  According to Freud, the dream is constructed out of two conflicting forces, an unconscious wish or desire on the one end of the spectrum, and a force that opposes it, on the other end.  Freud calls this opposing force the censorship, and he compares it to the censorship of political newspapers or works of art.  The techniques of the dream work are in a sense in the service of the censorship, although from another perspective they could be called the means by which the dream gets around the censorship. 

"Dreams are the disguised fulfillment of a repressed, infantile wish" is the fourth and last argument Freud used to explain dreams.  What is repressed and forbidden are wishes from childhood--grandiose fantasies of ambition that adults learned were unacceptable in the social world, and sexual fantasies, which they learned were not allowed. Many students will be surprised to find out that Freud's theory is not all about sex.  In fact, half of the dreams discussed in the dream book are dreams of ambition (egotistic dreams one might say) or aggressive wishes to other people.  So, if the wishes that construct dreams are repressed then t