Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Freud believed that the mind is responsible for both conscious and unconscious decisions that it makes on the basis of psychological drives. The id, ego, and super-ego are three aspects of the mind Freud believed to comprise a person's personality. Freud believed people are "simply actors in the drama of [their] own minds, pushed by desire ...
In fact, Freud believed that dreams were, "the royal road to the unconscious"; he devoted an entire volume to the interpretation of dreams. Freud had his patients lay on a couch in a dimly lit room and would sit out of sight, usually directly behind them, as to not influence the patient's thoughts by his gestures or expressions.
Carl Gustav Jung agreed with Freud that the unconscious is a determinant of personality, but he proposed that the unconscious be divided into two layers: the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. The personal unconscious is a reservoir of material that was once conscious but has been forgotten or suppressed, much like Freud's notion.
Freud viewed the unconscious as a repository for socially unacceptable ideas, anxiety-producing wishes or desires, traumatic memories, and painful emotions put out of consciousness by the mechanism of repression. Such unconscious mental processes can only be recognized through analysis of their effects in consciousness.
The conclusion that every dream reveals itself as the fulfillment of a desire derives from Freud's extensive work when he was exploring the unconscious.The method used involves interpreting the content of a large number of dreams in order to uncover the underlying latent meaning and to identify the unconscious desires and conflicts that are causing psychological distress.
Freud believed that by uncovering the meaning of one's hidden motivations and deeper ideas, an individual could successfully understand his or her internal struggles, and thus in psychoanalysis the manifest content of the dream is analyzed in order to understand the nature of the latent content. [4]
Subsequently, in The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud cites as a precursor of free association a letter from Schiller, the letter maintaining that, "where there is a creative mind, Reason - so it seems to me - relaxes its watch upon the gates, and the ideas rush in pell-mell". [5] Freud would later also mention as a possible influence an essay ...
Lacan uses his concept of the letter to distance himself from the Jungian approach to symbols and the unconscious.Whereas Jung believes that there is a collective unconscious which works with symbolic archetypes, Lacan insists that we must read the productions of the unconscious à la lettre - in other words, literally to the letter (or, more specifically, the concept of the letter which Lacan ...