Sigmund Freud Analysis

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PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS ON FREUD’S THEORY OF DREAMS

Sigmund Freud was the father of psychoanalysis. He was born in the year 1856 in Czech Republic. He joined the University of Vienna at the age of 17. Contrary to his plans of studying law, he studied Philosophy, Physiology and Zoology. Sigmund Freud developed many theories and published a number of books in his lifetime. The aspect of Freud’s work in which I am interested is the Interpretation of Dreams. In this paper, I share my philosophical views on Freud’s theory about dreams.

Freud classified the mind into Id, Ego and Superego. The Id is that part of the mind which represents our raw desires and basic instincts. It is our unconscious mind. The Ego is the rational part of the mind. It represents the reasonable part of our mind, which balances the Id and the Superego. It is referred to as the preconscious. The Superego is the moral part of the mind. It is the conscious mind.

According to Freud, dreams are a ‘royal road to the unconscious’. He says that if we are able to interpret and understand our dreams, it will throw some light on the thoughts of our unconscious mind. Freud thus analyzed dreams and according to his psychoanalytic theory, dreams can be studied on two distinct levels- the manifest and the latent.

The manifest content is that part of the dream that a person remember when he wakes up. The illustrations, objects, images and thoughts about which the person is aware of in his or her waking state, is the manifest content. The latent content, on the other hand, is the hidden meaning of the dream. This is something that a person does not remember upon waking. The latent content can be deciphered by deciphering the manifest content of the dream. This in turn leads ...

... middle of paper ...

...In my opinion, the Unconscious is innate to us but the knowledge stored in the Unconscious is experiential. Here we can see traces of Kant’s Critical approach- bringing the Empiricist and Rationalist together. Well, let’s just say Freud is Freudian.

Through time, many philosophers like Aristotle, Socrates, Kant, Hegel and others have tried to discover the Self or the Subject. Freud says, "The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied." According to him, dreams are a royal road to the unconscious. Therefore, I think that if one starts to analyze his or her dreams then you can know yourself better and better. Freud, through his work, has given us one way of knowing the Self or the Subject better. Thus, we can always begin the search for the Self through our dreams.

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