Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud was born on May 6, 1856. He was an Austrian neurologist and founder of the psychological school called psychoanalysis. The two of his more notable works discussed in this essay are The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) and The Uncanny (1919).

The Interpretation of Dreams-

Psychoanalysis is known to have disrupted the notion of a unified and complete whole conscious mind. Sigmund Freud introduced the idea of an unconscious part of the mind, predominantly beyond our conscious control. In this essay Freud discusses his belief that dreams can be used as a window into our unconscious mind through the procedures of psychoanalysis. According to Freud, dreams hold clues to traumatic sensory occurrences that the mind is unable to process and therefore, buries at the back of the mind which create a state called neuroses. This action is called repression. Freud assigns our drives (hatched from our impulses) to three centers across the gradient of our conscious and unconscious minds: the id, ego and superego. The extremes of these centers are, on one end, our instinct; and on the other, our moral conscience, operating mostly unconsciously, on how oneself should act.

Our dreams can be scrutinized in psychoanalysis for firstly, it's manifest content and secondly, most important for interpretation, it's latent content. Manifest context is what the therapist must dissect within the dreamer, or perhaps, decipher within the plot of dream to extract it's latent content, the product of repression. The brain writes this within the dream through terms called condensation and displacement. Condensation referring to the brain's compression of information into a dream and displacement referring to the seeming insignificant details that often times, however random , are the vital clues in recovering repressed, troubling memories, the aim of psychoanalysis.

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