Sleep and Dreams buy essay help Economics homework help

The same study also found there is a connection between a person’s psychological health and the types of dreams people have. People that have a lower psychological well-being tend to have more dreams in which the interactions are more aggressive while also experiencing more negative feelings during these dreams. Persons with an insecure attachment level seem to remember their dreams more often, have dreams with an increased emotional intensity, and have more reports of tooth grinding and sleepwalking than persons with a secure attachment level (McNamara, Andresen, Clark, Zborowsky & Duffy, 2001).

A person’s psychological well-being directly affects the content and emotional intensity of their dreams. How did Freud use dreams to help people understand their behaviors? Dream interpretation was intended to simplify and accelerate the psychological analysis of the psychoses (Freud, 1913, p. ix). According to psychoanalytic theory, dreams have two main functions: * To defend an individual’s sleep against disturbing thoughts by disguising those thoughts as symbols in dreams, also known as manifest content (Zimbardo et al, 2009, p. 351).

The defending dream relieves psychic tensions created during the day. * To serve as a form of wish fulfillment by allowing the dreamer to work harmlessly through unconscious desires (Zimbardo, et al, 2009, p. 351). Freud uses free association to start the process of becoming familiar with the individual’s associations to the world around them (Zimbardo et al, 2009, p. 351). This exercise will help him to understand the patient’s word associations and will eventually lead to the decoding of the symbolism (manifest content) present in the patient’s dreams.

Once a dream is decoded, Freud uses the word associations from the free association exercise, to perform an interpretation of the dream. This interpretation should give Freud clues that will uncover the latent content (actual meaning) as it relates to conflicts, unfulfilled wishes, or repressed memories that are thought to have been censored by consciousness, and may lurk in the unconscious. Freud believed that abnormal behavior was caused by unresolved issues from early childhood or traumatic events that have been repressed (Zimbardo et al, 2009, p. 70). The unresolved or repressed issue is then brought to the surface of the conscious mind so that the patient can come to terms with what happened to them by talking things out in therapy. Freud came to focus as much on analyzing his patient’s dreams as he did on their symptoms because he was able to gain a better insight into the patient’s underlying personal dynamic than he could with their symptoms. What evidence did he use to support the contention that dream analysis is a valid way of treating mental illnesses?

Freud cited numerous observations and opinions of published peers whose views supported the claims that Freud put forth to be accepted. One such claim was proving the existence of treatment and cause relations between dreams and the psychoses (Freud, 1913, p. 74). Freud actually cited and quoted quite a few items that were in disagreement with his claims, but I believe that was so he didn’t get criticized for having a confirmation bias, which I believe that our textbook said that they suspected that he was biased anyway.

Freud’s scientific method is certainly lacking in clinical research that he needed to perform as part of the case study he was doing. Anyone can cite sources and anyone can find articles and journals to agree with your views. Did the evidence he provide support his claims? In this excerpt from Freud’s the introductory note from his dream interpretation book, he informs the reader he was forced to submit his own dreams for analysis to provide more research material in the clinical study to use as examples to prove his claims (Freud, 1913, pp. v-vi).

Due to the personal nature of some of the content, he made omissions and substitutions where he deemed it necessary to protect his privacy. He then asks that the reader overlook this fact. Warning us before we start into the body of the study, does not make it acceptable. The peculiar nature of the material employed to exemplify the interpretation of dreams has made the writing even of this treatise a difficult task. Consideration of the methods of dream-interpretation will show why the dreams recorded in the literature on the subject, or those collected by persons unknown to me, were useless for my purpose.

I had only the choice between my own dreams and those of the patients whom I was treating by psychoanalytic methods. But this later material was inadmissible, since the dream-processes were undesirably complicated by the intervention of neurotic characters. And if I relate my own dreams I must inevitably reveal to the gaze of strangers more of the intimacies of my psychic life than is agreeable to me, and more than seems fitting in a writer who is not a poet but a scientific investigator. To do so is painful, but unavoidable; I have submitted to the necessity, for otherwise I could not have emonstrated my psychological conclusions. Sometimes, of course, I could not resist the temptation to mitigate my indiscretions by omissions and substitutions; but wherever I have done so the value of the example cited has been very definitely diminished. I can only express the hope that my readers will understand my difficult position, and will be indulgent; and further, that all those persons who are in any way concerned in the dreams recorded will not seek to forbid our dream-life at all events to exercise freedom of thought!

This is creating source of bias in his conclusions and his data collection methods. Could the data that Freud censored from his published work be used to challenge his claim? Could that be the real reason he didn’t want this in the book? Did he manipulate the data to make it seem to his readers that his theory had been proven? Without knowing exactly which examples he is referring to, the reader cannot make the decision as to whether or not to accept the claims as true.

Freud used the clinical method to develop his theory on dream interpretation because he was performing an in-depth case study on a small group of people with unusual qualities, of which Freud himself was a participant (Zimbardo et al, 2009, P. 18)! The conclusions drawn using this type of method sometimes receive criticism because the research is done on such a small sample group, the variables are harder to control, and the conclusion may not apply to other individuals, other than the subject(s) of the study (Zimbardo et al, 2009, p. 8). Freud had already been practicing his dream interpretation on his patients, so he had already harvested data regarding dream interpretation during the course of his psychoanalytical therapy sessions with his patients. The data was gathered prior to the establishment of a systematic data collection method for the study, and may have inconsistencies as to how it was collected, where it was collected, what the background/medical history of the participants was, what the participant’s mental state was, what criteria was observed, etc.

This data may be a source of bias in the research performed and drawing conclusions from inconsistent data is damaging to your theory’s credibility. Dreams are extremely difficult to study using scientific methodology because dreams are such private experiences and cannot be viewed or experienced by anyone other than the dreamer (Zimbardo et al, 2009, p. 336). There is no way to measure the successful result of psychoanalytic treatment, other than observing the lack of symptoms in the patient and having the patient’s behavior change back to normal again.

The unfulfilled wishes, repressed memories, and unconscious conflicts are not visible or measurable, so how do you tell is someone is cured of their disorder? The evidence that Freud used to support his study consisted of various stories of observations of patients’ dreams and how the recount of that dream helped him to make a point valid in his book. Another source of evidence was Freud’s own personal dreams analysis and interpretations of his self-analysis and self-treatment of a few neuroses he discovered he had. This evidence is still far from what should be considered to prove a theory.

What are the current ideas regarding Freud’s dream analysis? What do you conclude about using the method of interpreting dreams to treat mental illness? I do not think that it is that efficient of a method for treating mental illness. This method was not effective on any sort of mental illness that is worse than anxiety or hysteria. This type of method takes too long to see any results because you have to have therapy quite a bit. You have to go often so that your therapist can get familiar with your associations so that he/she will know when you associate something out of the ordinary.