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Chapter Eleven - Theories of Dreaming

from Part II - Dreams

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 April 2023

Patrick McNamara
Affiliation:
Boston University School of Medicine
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Summary

At the dawn of the twentieth century, Freud presented his theory of dreams in his landmark work The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud’s basic claim was that the dream was a hallucinated wish fulfillment. Recent memories and imagistic fragments called day residues provide raw material for dream images that then activate motivated content and affects or wishes, and these wishes conflict with the waking ego and so must be disguised by the dream censorship mechanisms. The dreamwork mechanisms (condensation, representation, displacement, etc.) take the basic content carrying the desire or motivational wish and construct elaborate disguises around it (via secondary revision) while still attempting a hallucinated fulfillment of the wish. Up until the discovery of REM sleep in 1953, most scholars and scientists studying dreams operated within this Freudian framework. Carl Jung broke with the framework and presented his own theory of dreams as simulations that compensate for some aspect of the personality or psychic structure of the individual. Jung also postulated the appearance of mythic archetype in dreams, consistent with Freud’s claims concerning reenactments of the Oedipal tragedy and transgression in dreams.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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References

Further Reading

Maquet, P. et al. (2005). Human cognition during REM sleep and the activity profile within frontal and parietal cortices: A reappraisal of functional neuroimaging data. Progress in Brain Research,150, 219227.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Nir, Y, & Tononi, G (2010). Dreaming and the brain: From phenomenology to neurophysiology. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14(2), 88100. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2009.12.001.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Schredl, M., & Hofmann, F. (2003). Continuity between waking activities and dream activities. Consciousness and Cognition, 12(2), 298308. doi: 10.1016/S1053–8100(02)00072-7.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Solms, M. (1997). The Neuropsychology of Dreams. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar

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  • Theories of Dreaming
  • Patrick McNamara, Boston University School of Medicine
  • Book: The Neuroscience of Sleep and Dreams
  • Online publication: 06 April 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009208840.014
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  • Theories of Dreaming
  • Patrick McNamara, Boston University School of Medicine
  • Book: The Neuroscience of Sleep and Dreams
  • Online publication: 06 April 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009208840.014
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Theories of Dreaming
  • Patrick McNamara, Boston University School of Medicine
  • Book: The Neuroscience of Sleep and Dreams
  • Online publication: 06 April 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009208840.014
Available formats
×