One of the things I’ve heard about Freud’s theories on dreams is that he believed that every character in a dream represented an aspect of the dreamer. In other words, if I dream about my mother killing me, the mother in my dream does not represent my real-life mother or my feelings for my real-life mother, but is some aspect of myself that I’m symbolizing as my mother (and that, in this case, I fear). (Edit: I’m also not talking about Jung’s mother archetype – I’m talking about, say, if I dream about my friend Bob, dream-Bob represents some aspect of me, not real-life-Bob.)
My question is, where did he write this? I’m assuming in The Interpretation of Dreams, but where exactly? I’m flipping through my copy and can’t find this, and I’ve tried Google for quotes but can’t come up with his exact words or a citation pointing me in the right direction.
Can someone help? I promise I don’t need this for homework.
I subscribe to Jeffrey Masson’s theory that Freud was a fraud. He quickly realized that the trauma he was treating was due to childhood molestation; then realized that Viennese high society did not want to hear that they included child molestors in their midst, so he deliberately made up crap to explain with bizarre theories, what was best explained by simple abuse.
You’re not finding it in your Freud book, because that’s not Freud. That *is *Jung, not the bit about the collective unconscious/archetypes, but the subjective approach names each party in the dream a representative of the dreamer. (The objective, Jung’s *other *approach to dream analysis, took a literal view: that the mother is the mother, the sister the sister, etc.)
Nice! I don’t have a copy to be sure it’s from there, but it’s the most often cited in articles which describe his subjective dream interpretation, so it’s a good bet to start with.
