Background and aim

1. Link to the theory: Freud (1918) supports the Freudian theory of dreaming, in which a dream disguises repressed material from the unconscious mind.
2. Aim: to show that dream analysis would help treat psychological problems by releasing repressed memories.
3. The patient: a man in his twenties from a wealthy Russian family, given the name 'The Wolfman' to protect his identity.
4. He came to Freud living with depression, after his sister and his father had both died by suicide.
5. Another of the problems he brought was that he could not empty his bowels without an enema.
6. The dream: as a small child he dreamed that his bedroom window swung open by itself.
7. Outside, six or seven white wolves were sitting in the walnut tree in front of the window, watching him, and he woke terrified that they would eat him.

Method

1. Design: a longitudinal case study of one patient, producing qualitative data.
2. Sample: one participant, the man Freud called 'The Wolfman'.
3. Materials: the patient's own account of his dream, his childhood and his symptoms, gathered in conversation.
4. Procedure: interviews carried out over four years, with treatment centred on the wolf dream.
5. Freud treated each element of the dream as a symbol to be decoded.
6. Seeing the same patient over four years let him return to the dream again and again as more of the childhood material came out.

Results

1. Freud read the wolves watching the boy as a memory of a real event, seeing his parents having sex when he was very young.
2. The wolf symbolised the father.
3. The whiteness of the wolves represented his parents' bedclothes and sheets.
4. The tree represented a Christmas tree, because the dream occurred at Christmas, so the wolves had replaced presents.
5. Freud concluded the patient had an unconscious desire to be seduced by his father, connected to the pleasure of receiving Christmas gifts.
6. He also feared his father, as he feared the wolves, because he was scared of being castrated by him.
7. So the patient had repressed his fear of his father, the latent content, and displaced it onto the wolves, the manifest content.

Conclusions

1. Dreams can represent repressed thoughts that are hidden in the unconscious mind.
2. Dream analysis can bring those thoughts to light, so Freud believed it could help treat psychological problems.

Criticisms

1. Rich data is a strength, because four years of interviews produced unusually detailed qualitative data about one mind.
2. Ethics is a further strength, because the pseudonym kept his identity confidential, so deeply private material was never attached to his name.
3. Application is a strength too, because the case went on to shape psychoanalytic therapy.
4. Subjectivity is the main weakness, because the unconscious mind cannot be observed or objectively tested, so nothing outside Freud's own judgement can confirm the reading.
5. A different analyst could read the same white wolves an entirely different way, and no evidence would settle which reading was correct.
6. Generalising from one person is a further weakness, because other people's dreams may be far more literal, so one case cannot show how dreams work in general.
7. The patient is also unrepresentative because he was experiencing mental health problems, so his dreams may have been unlike other people's.
8. Reliance on dream recall weakens it too, because the analysis depended on him accurately recalling a dream from early childhood, and most dreams fade within minutes of waking.
9. The interview method adds a further problem, because he may have lied, lacked insight, or been unable to put what he experienced into words.

Turning this into marks

1. When two weaknesses are asked for, make them genuinely separate, so subjectivity and generalising from one person count as two while two versions of subjectivity count as one.
2. Name the symbols Freud gave, the father, the bedclothes and the Christmas tree, because writing that the wolves stood for something frightening does not secure the knowledge mark.
3. The mark most often lost is describing the dream without saying which part is the manifest content and which is the latent content.