Freud's dream book deals with the intersection of fantasy and reality. In his view, the purpose of dreams was to allow the individual to experience those instinctual urges which society deems unacceptable. As Freud was a product of the Victorian age, much of his dreamwork focused on the symbolism of dreams as projections of feelings of sexual frustration and guilt, and he was often dubbed "the Vienesse Sexologist." Freud felt that the dreaming mind transforms and censors dream content so as to disguise its true meaning and therefore the fantasies created in dream will not evoke the strong emotional response in the dreamer that would typically cause the individual to wake. As such, Freudian dreamwork is about uncovering and discerning the meaning behind the dream, to penetrate the disguise and interpret the true dream behind the fantasy.
The important work Sigmund Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams is still argued by modern day researchers as a viable tool for studying the dream process. In it, he describes five distinct processes which are brought into play during dreamwork:
Displacement: This is where the dreamer represses an urge, and then redirects that urge to another person or object. If the individual were to engage in the literal dream of killing their mother-in-law (a repressed urge), the strong emotions evoked in the dream would awaken the dreamer. Instead of killing the mother-in-law, in displacement the dreamer might instead have the fantasy within the dream of the mother-in-law being crushed in a car accident.
Condensation: This is the process whereby the dreamer disguises a particular urge, emotion or thought by condensing, or contracting, it into a brief dream image. This brief event symbolizes the deeper meaning behind it, which in most cases is not readily evident.
Symbolization: This is where the repressed urge is played out in a symbolic act. For instance, in Freud's methodology the act of inserting a key into a keyhole would have sexual meaning.
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