Why We Dream: Freud, Jung and Matthew Walker
Freud believed that all dreams — even the ones that did not appear so — were ‘wish fulfillments’. In his Interpretation of Dreams, he writes that the dream-cause is ‘invariably a wish craving’, and that if it is unrecognisable as a wish (due to its ‘peculiarities’) this is the effect of ‘psychic censorship to which it has been subjected during its formation’.
The question is, why would our wishes need to be censored? Oedipus aside, there are plenty of impulsive desires that we would not want to claim ownership over. Thus, the ‘disagreeable content’ in dreams ‘serves only to disguise the thing wished for’:
we feel justified in connecting the unpleasant character of all these dreams with the fact of dream-distortion, and in concluding that these dreams are distorted, and that their wish-fulfilment is disguised beyond recognition, precisely because there is a strong revulsion against — a will to repress — the subject-matter of the dream, or the wish created by it. Dream-distortion, then, proves in reality to be an act of the censorship. We shall have included everything which the analysis of disagreeable dreams has brought to light if we reword our formula thus: The dream is the (disguised) fulfilment of a (suppressed, repressed) wish
Jung, however, disagreed. For Jung, wish-fulfillments were only a small portion of…
