“The interpretation of dreams” (1900), which describes a method for the interpretation of dreams.
Freud differentiated between the hidden meaning and its actual content. He did this by trying to reconstruct the motivation of the dream from the dreamer’s waking associations. According to Freud, thoughts that are characteristics of our early childhood strongly influence our dreams. In his view, the mysterious and absurd qualities of dreams are directly due to the need for disguising the wishes, which our conscious mind will not acknowledge. Freud stated that dreams have two principal functions: first, to attempt to fulfill our restrained, subconscious wishes that are mainly sexual and aggressive in nature and secondly, to guard our sleep. Freud believed that the content of dreams consists of our memories, but that the stimulus for a dream is always a subconscious wish that has its origin in childhood.
Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1962) started his research similarly to Freud, and later developed his own theories. He analyzed the dreams of his patients to explore the inaccessible regions of the subconscious mind. He too believed that dreams are largely symbolic. While Freud’s wish-fulfillment theory was intended to explain the biological function of dreaming, Jung’s theory suggested also a psychological function of dreams. His view was that the function of dreams is to compensate for aspects of the dreamer’s personality neglected in his conscious life. This viewpoint does not differ substantially from Freud’s wish-fulfillment theory. For Jung, dreams attempt to reveal rather than to conceal what is in the subconscious mind. He used mythology, comparative religion, and history in interpreting the symbols appearing in