Philosophy of Dreaming: Freud

So I have been horrible at blogging while I attend class so I will have to play catch up on my classes as they ended last week. For the Philosophy of Dreaming, I thought posting a review of the constructive theories would be the easiest way to get to the meat of our discussions. 

First on the agenda is Freud. Let's start with a review of Freud's idea of the psychological personality. According to Freud, we have three aspects of our personality. 

• The base part, the "Id" is comprised of our innate drives (especially biological ones). He suggests some drives such as aggression, sexuality, the drive for food, etc. These drives are largely unconscious (abbreviated as UCS) meaning that we sometimes are not consciously aware of them, they exist without our knowing.
  
• Next is our "Ego" which is our self concept or your 'conscious 'I''. Basically it is how you perceive yourself.
  
• The "Superego" is above the Ego, it judges the Ego and makes it conform to consciously and UCS-ly learned social norms. It can also be described as our conscious (the Jimminy Cricket variety, not the conscious (abbreviated as CS) v. UCS type). 
  

The Ego is stuck between the sometimes opposing forces of the Id and the Superego. 

Freud says dreams are a result of the Superego's repression of Id desires. Dreams allow us to live out our unfulfilled wishes, which keeps our frustration low and keeps neurotic symptoms away. However, even in our dreams, the Superego censors the fulfillment of our Id driven desires. The Superego is still active in our UCS state, and uses disguise mechanisms to hide our the wish fulfillment in our dreams from the Ego. (Why this happens is still unclear to me). 

Freud's five disguise mechanisms are Representation, Condensations, Displacement, Symbol, and Secondary Revision. 

1. Representation is pretty straightforward. Our dreams are forms of pictorial representations and elements in our dreams represent other things. Event the sequence of images can be important representation. 
   
2. Condensation means that one symbol or element in our dreams can stand for multiple meanings. It also means that one meaning can be reinforced by multiple symbols. In one example, a man dreams of a woman wearing two bathing suits. The interpretation is that the woman represents two people, the man's wife and mother. 
   
3. Displacement confuses the Ego by transferring meanings onto neutral or trivial objects. i.e. clutching a teddy bear in a dream where the teddy bear might symbolize a loved one. One form of displacement is reversal which makes every thing its opposite. You might dream you are at a large party but the dream is actually disguising loneliness. Symbol is a set of universal symbols that represent the collective human experience. 
   
4. Symbols that Freud favored were pointy objects representing a penis and any vessel representing a vagina. Emerging from water might represent birth, round containers a womb, etc. Things that every human being experiences.
   
5. Secondary Revision takes place when you wake up. It is your editing of your dream experience, where your mind might try to make the dream images more narrative or logical. This can cloud out the meaning of dream images and place too much importance on dream narratives according to Freud.
   

Essentially, Freudian dream interpretation asks what the disguised wish might be in our dream.

Check back later for an exploration of Fiss :)