In Freudian dream analysis, content is both the manifest and latent content in a

dream A dream is a succession of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations that usually occur involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep. Humans spend about two hours dreaming per night, and each dream lasts around 5 to 20 minutes, althou ...

, that is, the dream itself as it is remembered, and the hidden meaning of the dream. Dreams-The_Royal_Road_to_the_Unconscious

Dreams embody the involuntary occurrences within the

mind The mind is the set of faculties responsible for all mental phenomena. Often the term is also identified with the phenomena themselves. These faculties include thought, imagination, memory, will, and sensation. They are responsible for various m ...

throughout various stages of sleep. Throughout the early part of the twentieth century, psychologist

Sigmund Freud Sigmund Freud ( , ; born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating psychopathology, pathologies explained as originatin ...

made incredible advances in the study and analysis of dreams. Freud's ''

The Interpretation of Dreams ''The Interpretation of Dreams'' (german: Die Traumdeutung) is an 1899 book by Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, in which the author introduces his theory of the unconscious with respect to dream interpretation, and discusses what w ...

'' (1899) used an evolutionary biological perspective to infer that these nightly visions are a product of one's individual

psyche Psyche (''Psyché'' in French) is the Greek term for "soul" (ψυχή). Psyche may also refer to: Psychology * Psyche (psychology), the totality of the human mind, conscious and unconscious * ''Psyche'', an 1846 book about the unconscious by Car ...

. As the "

royal road The Royal Road was an ancient highway reorganized and rebuilt by the Persian king Darius the Great (Darius I) of the first (Achaemenid) Persian Empire in the 5th century BC. Darius built the road to facilitate rapid communication on the western ...

" to the unconscious, dreams allow for accessibility to parts of the mind that are inaccessible through

conscious Consciousness, at its simplest, is sentience and awareness of internal and external existence. However, the lack of definitions has led to millennia of analyses, explanations and debates by philosophers, theologians, linguisticians, and scien ...

thought.

Definitions

Manifest content

The manifest content can be interpreted as the information that the conscious individual remembers experiencing. It consists of all the elements of actual images, thoughts, and content within the dream that the individual is cognitively aware of upon awakening. Illustrated through iceberg imagery, the manifest content would be identified as the "tip": it is barely exposed above the surface with an enormous portion still hidden underneath. According to this theory, what is observed on the surface is only a partial representation of what lies beneath. Although images may initially appear bizarre and nonsensical, individual analysis of the dream can reveal its underlying meaning.

Latent content

Related to yet distinctly separate from manifest content, the latent content of the dream illustrates the hidden meaning of one's

unconscious Unconscious may refer to: Physiology * Unconsciousness, the lack of consciousness or responsiveness to people and other environmental stimuli Psychology * Unconscious mind, the mind operating well outside the attention of the conscious mind a ...

thoughts, drives, and desires. The unconscious mind actively suppresses what can be revealed from the latent content in order to protect the individual from primitive feelings that are particularly difficult to cope with. Freud believed that by uncovering the meaning of one's hidden

motivation Motivation is the reason for which humans and other animals initiate, continue, or terminate a behavior at a given time. Motivational states are commonly understood as forces acting within the agent that create a disposition to engage in goal-dire ...

s and deeper ideas, an individual could successfully understand his or her internal struggles through eventually resolving issues that create tension in their lives. In contrast to the information easily recognizable, latent content makes up everything underneath the surface, revealing the deeper underlying thoughts within an individual's unconscious.

Interpreting dreams

The technique of free association, actively utilized by Freud in dream interpretation, often begins with a psychoanalyst's analysis of a specific dream symbol followed by the proceeding thought that automatically comes to a client's mind. To further this investigative practice, Freud classified five separate processes that facilitate dream analysis. #

Displacement Displacement may refer to: Physical sciences Mathematics and Physics *Displacement (geometry), is the difference between the final and initial position of a point trajectory (for instance, the center of mass of a moving object). The actual path ...

occurs when the desire for one thing or person is symbolized by something or someone else. #

Projection Projection, projections or projective may refer to: Physics * Projection (physics), the action/process of light, heat, or sound reflecting from a surface to another in a different direction * The display of images by a projector Optics, graphic ...

happens when the dreamer places their own personal desires and wants onto another person. # Symbolization is illustrated through a dreamer's unconscious allowing of repressed urges and desires to be metaphorically acted out. #

Condensation Condensation is the change of the state of matter from the gas phase into the liquid phase, and is the reverse of vaporization. The word most often refers to the water cycle. It can also be defined as the change in the state of water vapor to ...

illustrates the process by which the dreamer hides their feelings and/or urges through either contraction or minimizing its representation into a brief dream image or event # Rationalization (also referred to as secondary revision) can be identified as the final stage of dreamwork in which the dreaming mind intently organizes an incoherent dream into something much more comprehensible and logical for the dreamer

Latent semantic analysis

Altszyler et al. have shown that

text mining Text mining, also referred to as ''text data mining'', similar to text analytics, is the process of deriving high-quality information from text. It involves "the discovery by computer of new, previously unknown information, by automatically extract ...

techniques, such as

latent semantic analysis Latent semantic analysis (LSA) is a technique in natural language processing, in particular distributional semantics, of analyzing relationships between a set of documents and the terms they contain by producing a set of concepts related to the do ...

, can be used to extract word associations from dreams reports. These tools allow us to measure word associations in dream reports and to identify the meaning of words in their context.

References

{{Reflist

External links

"The Preconscious, Conscious, and Unconscious Minds"
Verywell Mind. Freudian psychology