Wish fulfilment

1. Freud argued that the purpose of every dream is wish fulfilment.
2. A dream lets an unconscious desire that waking life blocks be acted out safely inside your head.
3. Those wishes sit in the unconscious mind, held down there by repression, so you never know you have them.

Where the wish comes from

1. The id is the part of your personality that wants satisfaction now and will not wait, like a small child demanding a treat.
2. In sleep the ego is weakened, so the id's wish pushes up towards consciousness.
3. The dream then shows the wish being met, though almost always behind a disguise.
4. If you have begged for a puppy for months and been refused, you may dream of a dog bounding round the garden with you, so the id gets its turn while you sleep.

Manifest and latent content

1. Manifest content is the surface story of the dream, the part you could describe to a friend the next morning.
2. Latent content is the hidden, symbolic meaning behind that story, which is the repressed wish the dream really expresses.

Dream work

1. An undisguised wish would shock you awake, so the ego disguises it first through a process Freud called dream work.
2. Dream work turns the hidden wish into symbols and a storyline you can watch without alarm.
3. Reaching the latent content means reading those symbols backwards, which is what dream analysis does.

Freud's case study of the Wolfman

1. Freud's fullest worked example is Freud (1918), his dream analysis of a patient he called the Wolfman, a Russian man in his twenties.
2. He came to Freud with depression after his sister and his father had both taken their own lives.
3. Treatment centred on a childhood dream in which his bedroom window swung open by itself and six or seven white wolves sat watching him from the tree outside.
4. Freud read the wolves, the manifest content, as a disguise for the latent content, a repressed fear of his father.
5. Their whiteness stood for his parents' bedclothes, and the tree for a Christmas tree, because the dream had happened at Christmas.
6. The wolves had also taken the place of the presents he had been promised, so the dream turned an expected treat into something frightening.
7. Four years of interviews produced rich, detailed data about one mind.
8. Freudian dream analysis is still used in some talking therapies, for instance treating a bereaved person's recurring dreams as a route to buried grief.

The problem of subjectivity

1. The main criticism of Freud's theory is how much rests on the interpreter's own judgement, which is the problem of subjectivity.
2. There is nothing to measure, so two therapists can give the same dream two different meanings and nothing decides which of them is right.
3. Freud may have read dreams in whichever way suited his own theory, which opens every interpretation to bias.
4. Freud never set out in advance what a dream would have to contain for his account to be wrong, so no dream a patient reported could ever count against it.
5. The Wolfman was also one man in therapy for mental health problems, so his dreams may not be typical of other people's.
6. The account leaned on him recalling a childhood dream accurately years afterwards, and most dreams fade within minutes of waking.

Turning this into marks

1. When manifest and latent content are both asked for, make them genuinely separate rather than describing the storyline twice.
2. Name subjectivity as the problem, because writing that the theory is hard to prove does not secure the knowledge mark.
3. The mark most often lost is retelling the Wolfman's dream without saying what Freud took the wolves to stand for.