Psychology^intro

"Repression" is what Freud called the part of our brain that turned our unacceptable or shameable desired away from us. For fear of ridicule, mockery, distaste, these desires are repressed and made unavailable to our concious thought. The "unconcious" and the "ID" are the terms that Freud uses to refer to these inaccessable thoughts and wishes. According to our psychoanalysis, our repressed desires do not come out on purpose, but rather disguised in dreams, symptoms, "slips of the tongue", or other seemingly accidental actions.

Now, Freud understood dreams to be signs of concealed, conflicting desires -repressed thoughts. He considered powerful desires to be always in conflict, a battle between the good and evil, socially acceptable and not. His theories tried to account for how these conflicts give rise to unintentional expression. Dreams and other unconscious acts conceal even as they reveal wishes that we would rather not face more directly. Freud considered dreams to be the outlet for these thoughts to escape for our minds to be made more aware. He thought dreams to be incredibly important and significant, calling them "the royal road... to the unconcious." Freud came to these conclusions after his own father's death. He had a guilt-ridden dream about showing up late to his father's funeral. After revealing these admissions Freud thought as so shameful to colleague Wilhelm Fliess, he began working on his theories of dream repression and concious, unconcious, and ID.

According to Freud, dreams are spyholes into our unconscious. Fears, desires and emotions that we are usually unaware of make themselves known through dreams. To Freud dreams were fundamentally about wish-fulfillment. Even "negative" dreams (punishment dreams and other anxiety dreams) are a form of wish-fulfilment; the wish being that certain events do not occur. Very often such dreams are interpreted as a warning. Freud believed that although our dreams contain these important messages, they are encoded - disguised. The unconscious mind doesn't speak any verbal language therefore it must communicate with us via symbols. Some of these symbols are near-universal, others very personal to us and our individual life experiences. Freud thus distinguished between the "manifest content" of dreams (what we actually dream) and the "latent content" of dreams (the unfulfilled wish that the dream represents). Dream content is rarely presented by the mind in a simple and direct fashion. Instead a complex dream is constructed from the basic elements. The raw dream symbols are distorted via condensation (compression, conflation and omission of dream elements) and "displacement" (shifting emphasis). This is followed by a process of "secondary revision" that takes all these (by now distorted) elements and assembles them into some more or less coherent narrative structure. Freud went further and suggested that very often our conscious mind actively tries to reject the messages of our dreams; we "repress" this knowledge. Dreams are often an expression of a repressed wish that we would rather not admit to - they thus indicate psychic conflict that can in turn be at the core of mental disturbance. Because of this complexity dreams require analysis to discover their true meaning. This process takes considerable time as a body of recorded dreams needs to be built up and analysed. Freud's main technique for analysing the dream was free association. Here the dreamer is encouraged to look not at the direct content of the dream but at the thoughts and emotions it generates.These will then lead to other thoughts and emotions and so on. At its simplest free association is simply saying whatever comes into your head.

Freud was fond of creating metaphors for the psychological mechanism of repression. An archaeological excavation or a children's toy called the "wunderblock," were for him excellent tangible representations of this mechanism. On a wunderblock, the writing can be erased from the covering paper, but its traces remain, if barely visible, in the soft tablet underneath. Erasure, like repression, is only partially successful, Freud said.

According to Freud, sexual desires conflict with one another, with social conventions, and most critically, with reality. He saw them as fundamental yet never fully satisfied. We desire what we do not have or what we feel we have lost, and these unsatisfied desires find expression in surprising, sometimes disturbing ways. After World War I, Freud paid increasing attention to the phenomenon of aggression. He speculated that a death drive was as important as the sexual drive in our psychic constitutions. He saw the basic conflict in our lives as that between Eros and Thanatos, Love and Death -- a conflict never to be resolved and with fateful consequences in daily life and in world events.

Fantasy, Memory and Truth

Through the 1890s, Freud confided his doubts, anxieties, ideas and ambitions in letters to Wilhelm Fliess, a Berlin physician. These letters form a record of Freud's self analysis, as well as some of his attempts to diagram neurological components of sexuality. In this letter, Freud announces that he no longer believes that neurosis is caused by sexual attacks on children, and that he is now concentrating on the interrelationship of fantasy and memory.