Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, Nightmares & Irrational Fears

Sigmund Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, including

nightmares and irrational fears.

 Despite the widely-recognized failure of Freudian psychotherapy to heal disturbed people effectively and the

rejection of many of his major theories Freud remains one of the most influential figures of the 20th century.

Freud's basic insight that our minds preserve memories and emotions which are not always consciously

available to us has transformed the way humanity views itself ever since. Freud said that there had been

three great humiliations in human history: Galileo's discovery that we were not the center of the universe,

Darwin's discovery that we were not the crown of creation, and his own discovery that we are not in control of

our own minds. The tendency of modern people to trace their problems to childhood traumas or other

repressed emotions begins with Freud. One of Freud's more important discoveries is that emotions buried in

the unconscious surface in disguised form during dreaming, and that the remembered fragments of dreams

can help uncover the buried feelings. Whether the mechanism is exactly as Freud describes it, many people

have derived insights into themselves from studying their dreams, and most modern people consider dreams

emotionally significant, unlike our ancestors who often saw them either as divine portents or as the bizarre

side-effects of indigestion. Freud argues that dreams are wish-fulfillments, and will ultimately argue that

those wishes are the result of repressed or frustrated sexual desires. The anxiety surrounding these desires

turns some dreams into nightmares.

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