Abstract
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Sigmund Freud advanced a major change in the thinking about dreams when he posited that they are a meaningful creation of the dreamer’s unconscious mind. After Freud, numerous others, especially Carl Jung and also Alfred Adler, then Thomas French and Erika Fromm accepted his basic notion but offered modifications of its working details. Later, Medard Boss rejected the notion of the unconscious; thus, his theory puts forth a very different view. A different approach was taken by Calvin Hall who approached dreams and their analysis as a scientific psychologist rather than as a therapist and thus offered new and important insights. Later in the twentieth century, theories of dreaming took an even more scientific point of view because of the discovery of REMS. Prominent among these theories is the activation-synthesis theory of Alan Hobson and Robert McCarley. Other theories of this type include those of Mark Solms, David Foulkes, Harry Hunt, Ernest Hartmann, and William Domhoff. Different contemporary approaches to how to interpret dreams are also reviewed.
Portions of this chapter have been adapted from Moorcroft (1993) with permission of the publisher. Specific references to statements in this chapter that can be found there and in multiple, widely available sources are not included in the text. A selection of these sources is listed below and can also be consulted for verification or more detail. (Cartwright 2010; Kryger et al. 2011; Ameen et al. 2002).
Related ideas about dreams and dreaming can be found in Chap. 11.
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Notes
- 1.
This summary of Freud’s theories on dreaming is from his groundbreaking book The Interpretation of Dreams published in 1900. It is interesting and relatively easy to read.
- 2.
The censor, for the same reason, also causes poor retention of dreams.
- 3.
Over his 49-year professional career, Freud used secondary revision in different ways including: (1) putting finishing touches on the dream to make it more story-like and (2) revising the manifest content of the dream when retelling it to make it smoother and more logical. To illustrate this second type of secondary revision, recall your own experiences of waking up and reviewing your own dreams. Perhaps, you dreamed of a casual acquaintance being in your class. But you believe the person was your friend, and your mind changes the memory of the dream to be consistent with your belief. Now when you recall the dream, it was your friend who was in class.
- 4.
Psychoanalysts, including Freud, have denied the popular conception of an overemphasis on sex in psychoanalytic theory and practice. To some extent they are correct in that there is more to the theory and practice than just sexual motives, yet sex is a heavy emphasis.
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- 9.
In 1953, Hall wrote a short and easy-to-read book about his dream theory called The Meaning of Dreams. It was republished in 1966.
- 10.
A boy’s desire to sexually possess his mother and kill his father.
- 11.
The process of synthesis during dreaming is no different from what occurs when you are awake. All of us constantly synthesize the currently available sensory and motor information with our present emotional state and then draw upon our memory banks of similar experiences and meanings in order to try to make it coherent. Also see Box 8.2.
- 12.
- 13.
- 14.
From Hartmann’s 1998 book, Dreams and Nightmares: The New Theory on the Origin and Meaning of Dreams.
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Moorcroft, W.H. (2013). Modern Theories of Dreams and Dreaming . In: Understanding Sleep and Dreaming. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6467-9_9
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