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Concept
Wish fulfillment
Summary
Wish fulfillment is the satisfaction of a desire through an involuntary thought process. It can occur in dreams or in daydreams, in the symptoms of neurosis, or in the hallucinations of psychosis. This satisfaction is often indirect and requires interpretation to recognize.
Sigmund Freud coined the term (Wunscherfüllung) in 1900 in an early text titled The Interpretation of Dreams. It corresponds to a core principle of Freud’s Dream Theory. According to Freud, wish fulfillment occurs when unconscious desires are repressed by the ego and superego. This repression often stems from guilt and taboos imposed by society. Dreams are attempts by the unconscious to resolve some repressed conflict.
Sigmund Freud's fundamental work The Interpretation of Dreams marks an important date in the history of psychoanalysis. For the first time, a scientific approach to dreams was attempted. On the one hand, it was a moment of systematisation of the analytical theory that would become metapsychology, and on the other hand, it was a book that made psychoanalysis known, but not without raising a lot of criticism.
In The Interpretation of Dreams, challenging the dominant scientific theories of his time for which the dream is not a mental act, but a somatic process revealed only by certain psychic signs, he argues that dreams are "psychic acts" and that they are “nothing more than a special form of our thinking, which is made possible by the conditions of the sleeping state”. Since his analysis of neurotics had taught him that the most complicated thought activities can take place without the intervention of consciousness, he asserted that dreams are proof of the existence of unconscious psychic acts, demonstrated that they have a meaning and can be interpreted by a "scientific method", that of psychoanalysis.
The first of the dreams, a dream of Freud's reported and analysed in The Interpretation of Dreams, the dream known as "Irma's injection", is a dream that can be said to be inaugural and founding.
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