Wish fulfillment

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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Related concepts (4)

The Interpretation of Dreams

The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung) is an 1899 book by Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, in which the author introduces his theory of the unconscious with respect to dream interpretation, and discusses what would later become the theory of the Oedipus complex. Freud revised the book at least eight times and, in the third edition, added an extensive section which treated dream symbolism very literally, following the influence of Wilhelm Stekel.

Dream interpretation

Dream interpretation is the process of assigning meaning to dreams. In many ancient societies, such as those of Egypt and Greece, dreaming was considered a supernatural communication or a means of divine intervention, whose message could be interpreted by people with these associated spiritual powers. In modern times, various schools of psychology and neurobiology have offered theories about the meaning and purpose of dreams.

Free association (psychology)

Free association is the expression (as by speaking or writing) of the content of consciousness without censorship as an aid in gaining access to unconscious processes. The technique is used in psychoanalysis (and also in psychodynamic theory) which was originally devised by Sigmund Freud out of the hypnotic method of his mentor and colleague, Josef Breuer. Freud described it as such: "The importance of free association is that the patients spoke for themselves, rather than repeating the ideas of the analyst; they work through their own material, rather than parroting another's suggestions".