Post responses to the following question: Do you believe in the Freudian view of
ID: 3492939 • Letter: P
Question
Post responses to the following question: Do you believe in the Freudian view of manifest and latent content or the activation-synthesis view of dreams? Use information from the chapter of your textbook or other sources to back up your answer. Students should post their first discussion post by the first post deadline (see Calendar). The first post should be a minimum of 100 words. Read your fellow classmate's introductions and post responses. When you would like to respond to a post, click the "Reply" button above the message area to write a response to that message. To receive full credit students should post at least two responses to other posts by the final deadline. Students should respond to at least one post that they agree with and at least one that they disagree with. Responses should be a minimum of 50 words. Feel free to reply to as many posts as you would like. Feel free to reply to as many introductions as you would like. Click on the Calendar to see the deadlines. Fact versus Opinion Posts should include facts versus unsupported opinion, a statement not supported by evidence. There is a difference between presenting arguments and presenting unsupported opinions. With an unsupported opinion the reader is left wondering what evidence there is to indicate that the statement is true. Posts should state points of view and provide evidence in support of what you are arguing. You should support your opinion with facts from the textbook or other sources. Cite this information by following it with (author, year) of the source. For example, if you use information from the textbook, you would cite it by following it with (Grison, 2017). For direct quotations, include the page number as well, for example: (Grison, 2017 p. 14).
Explanation / Answer
One of the most well known theories of dreams comes from Sigmund Freud. Freud claims that while dreaming we can express desires such as, fears, sexual, and aggressive desires without censorship. According to Freud, if we had conscious censorship of these embarrassing desires it would cause anxiety. Therefore we dream in symbols that reflect our unconscious desires. Freud breaks down dreams into two parts; manifest content and latent content. Manifest content is what you can remember once you are awake. Latent content is the symbolic meaning of the dream. Unlike Freud's theory, activation synthesis theory is a biological based theory. Also activation synthesis theory differs from Freud's theory in that it suggests that dreaming is merely consequential. Activation synthesis theory says that dreaming is a reaction of the highly aroused brain during REM sleep. Also the theory offers that our brain attempts to create meaning out of the neural impulses based on familiar images in our past. The main difference between the two theories is that activation synthesis theory suggests that there is no hidden theory, while Freud's theory says that Laten content is the hidden aspect. Let's look at our gentleman in the middle. He is lying down and he is dreaming. That raises the question, do our dreams have a meaning? So if he's thinking about money, relationships, even weird and wonderful things like monsters chasing him down the road, what does that mean? Where are all these dreams coming from? Now, along came Sigmund Freud, a prominent neurologist and psychoanalyst, and what Freud said in his theory of dreams is that dreams really represent our unconscious wishes, urges and feelings. That dreams are a way of understanding things that are typically hidden. Now how do we understand that? Well, let's take this iceberg, and let's say that the bit of the iceberg above the water represents conscious wishes, urges, feelings and these are the things we actually know about and that we experience and that we consciously are aware of. But what you can see here underneath the water, there's plenty more iceberg. And that actually represents, the unconscious. Our unconscious wishes, urges and feelings. And it's these unconscious elements that come out in our dreams. Now Freud actually went a little bit further and said we can break down dreams into two key components. The first one being, what is actually happening in our dreams. And this is actually referred to as the Manifest Content. So, if you dream of monsters chasing you, the manifest content is very much, monsters chasing you. The second part of Freud breaking down dreams is what is the hidden meaning behind a dream? And this is something that he termed, Latent Content. So the monsters chasing you, does that refer to you, being potentially chased out of your job or feeling insecure in your job because other people are getting a promotion? What is the hidden meaning? That's how he broke down dreams. Into the manifest and latent content. So, according to Freud, dreams very much have a meaning on our lives. Dreams and the interpretation of dreams, trying to understand what the dreams mean, can really help us to identify and resolve conflict. Now, on the flip side of this, I've got this picture of this brain here. And one the things that was also hypothesized to happen, is that in the brain, we get a lot of electrical impulses, neurons firing in this area called the brain stem. And these electrical impulses are sometimes interpreted by the "thinking" part of the brain, the frontal part of the brain. That may try to understand or make sense of all these kind of random impulses that keep firing and keep occurring during this period of REM sleep And REM stands for Rapid Eye Movement sleep. It's the time or part of sleep that our eyes are rapidly moving and we experience dreaming. So during REM sleep, we get these brain circuits, this brain activity in the brain stem. And then the cerebral cortex and frontal part of the brain, has to interpret that and make sense of that. So we can turn the brain stem activity as being activation, and the cerebral cortex trying to understand what's happening as being, as trying to synthesize meaning, and this is very much a hypothesis, and if we put all of those together, we get the activation, synthesis hypothesis. Which is what this is really called. And what I mentioned is that dreams are simply our brain is trying to find meaning in these random signals from the brain stem. So really, the dreams may not have any prominent meaning. So this is very much a way that we can split up these two key theories. On one side, Freud feels that dreams indeed have a meaning and important to helping us to resolve hidden conflicts and understand unconcious feelings, desires, impulses, and that's his theory of dreams. On the other hand, we have this activation synthesis hypothesis. that suggest that dreams are simply a part of our brain, the frontal part of the cerebral cortex, that more generalized thinking part of our brain, trying to make sense of these electrical impulses in the brain stem. So two, really contrasting ideas about the importance of dreams. There are some other theories, these are just two of them, but two of the more important ones that you should be aware of.