Revealing the Unconscious through Dreams in Sigmund Freud’s Psychoanalysis

Abstract

In this text we aim to present the way Sigmund Freud discovered the universe of the unconscious and the significance of dream interpretation. For „the Father of psychoanalysis”, the unconscious is not just a depository of some mental contents that belong to a sub-conscious, but a genuine reservoir of autonomous energies that have their own determinism, different from that of conscious. The Viennese psychoanalyst is the supporter of a determinism at the unconscious level, which is revealed by the mechanisms of the dream. For Freud, dreams are the royal path through which the unconscious emerges. Only in the dream conscious can look strictly passively at the way in which unconscious contents emerge in symbolic forms through all sorts of condensations and transfers of repressed drives. In the dream, the Ego becomes free and ready for the real meeting with the Self, that only he can recognize and understand in its most intimate sense. However, dreams, though ephemeral, represent extremely effective successes for everyday psychic life. In the end, I concluded that the dream contents can be properly comprehended only by the dreamer, and the psychoanalyst can help the dreamer only to recognize these subtle understandings of his own unconscious.