Dreams are thoughts the ego represses

The argument

Dreams are manifestations of deeply held thoughts and wishes, displayed in an inoffensive and suggestive way. The disguise is not incidental to the process but the reason a dream takes the form it does: a wish that could not be entertained while awake is admitted into consciousness only once it has been made unrecognisable. One of Freud's patients deeply disliked his sister-in-law. He frequently referred to the woman as a “dog”. In one of his dreams, he dreamt he was strangling a small, white dog. The substitution follows the patient's own language, which is what makes the dream interpretable at all: the figure in the dream is not arbitrary but taken from the term he already used for her, so the disguise is assembled out of his own associations rather than imposed from outside. The man's dream echoed his deeply held dislike and quite probably, his wish to strangle his sister-in-law. However, the manifestation was not of strangling his sister-in-law, which would have been quite traumatising and likely incurred feelings of guilt, but in the form of a small animal which will have been more palatable. The wish is expressed and the guilt avoided in the same movement, which is precisely what the transformation accomplishes. As in the above example, dream interpretations can offer an accurate look at the subconscious mind, its desires and its repressed thoughts and beliefs. What the method reads is the dreamer, and every material it works from, the associations, the substitutions, the aversions, comes from the dreamer as well. It cannot offer any accurate insight into the real-world or, as some argue, the future, because nothing outside the dreamer's own mind is among the things a dream is made from.

Context

In 1895, Sigmund Freud had been worrying about a patient of his named Irma. In a dream, he was at a party with the patient when a chemical compound flashed before his eyes. The chemical was for a drug that another doctor had given Irma previously. When he awoke, he was convinced that in administering the drug, the doctor had used a dirty syringe. Because of this, Irma was not responding to his own treatments. In 1900, the father of modern psychology, Sigmund Freud, devised his theory of dream interpretation.

Premises

Counter-arguments

If dreams are a glimpse into an individual’s thoughts and desires, why do many of us have similar dreams? Many people have dreams in which their teeth fall out or giving a presentation in front of a room full of people without any clothes on or studying for exams despite completing school many years previously. If our dreams were a glimpse into our subconscious thoughts, why are so many of us dreaming of the same thing? The universal and shared element of dreams seems to undermine the conclusion that they can unlock a deeper understanding of the individual.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Dreams are too universal to be an indication of an individual's thoughts.