Manifest Content And Latent Content

The manifest content of a dream is the actual literal content and storyline of the dream. This is normally contrasted with what is referred to as the latent content or subconscious meaning of the dream.

For case, imagine that y'all accept a very brilliant dream that you fly out your bedroom window and soar around your city. The sights, sounds, and storyline of the dream are the manifest content. A dream interpreter might suggest that your dream reveals a hidden desire to seek freedom from your day-to-24-hour interval life. This symbolic pregnant behind the literal content of the dream is known as the latent content.

Two Types of Dream Content

According to the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, the manifest content of a dream includes the actual images, thoughts, and content contained inside the dream. The manifest content is the elements of the dream that y'all think upon awakening.

In his book The Estimation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud suggested that the content of dreams is related to wish fulfillment. Freud believed that the manifest content of a dream, or the actual imagery and events of the dream, served to disguise the latent content or the unconscious wishes of the dreamer.

For example, if you dreamed that you were being chased by an ominous creature through the dark streets of a strange city, that would exist the manifest content of the dream. What that dream might actually mean, or the interpretation of its symbolic meaning, would be considered the latent content. In this case, a dream analyst might suggest that the manifest content of your dream suggests that you are running from something in your life or worried virtually an upcoming change in your life.

Unconscious Thoughts

Then why does the latent content of a dream end upward being hidden by the manifest content? Freud believed that the unconscious mind contained desires, urges, and thoughts that are unacceptable to the conscious mind. These might involve traumatic memories, hush-hush desires, or socially objectionable urges that might cause distress if they were brought into awareness.

As you recollect, Freud believed that dreams served as a class of wish fulfillment. Since we cannot act on our unconscious desires in our waking life, we tin explore these feelings in dreams. However, we tend to do this in hidden, symbolic forms. According to Freud, the heed uses a number of different strategies to censor the latent content of a dream.

For example, imagine a new person merely started working at your office. Everyone else seems to like this person, but you nonetheless feel a strange sense of ambivalence. I night, you dream that the new co-worker hates you lot and is going out of their style to sabotage your efforts and work with the goal of getting you fired.

In the dream, they spread untrue gossip nearly you throughout the role and even starts taking credit for your work. While the dream is obviously stressful, it does non really reflect the actions of this co-worker. The events of the dream stand for the manifest content, but at that place is clearly something else behind this strange and rather frightening dream.

By censoring the unconscious wishes and disguising them in the manifest content, we can explore our subconscious thoughts and memories in a way that protects the ego from anxiety.

Freud might suggest that you are using a psychological strategy known as a projection to disguise your true feelings about the new co-worker. This defense mechanism involves projecting your feelings onto someone else. The reality is that you securely dislike the new co-worker, only you lot realize that these feelings are non shared by your officemates and would exist deemed socially unacceptable.

And then you instead project these feelings onto the co-worker, dreaming that she hates you when it is actually the other way around. By doing this, you can explore your unconscious feelings in a fashion that seems more acceptable. Another common ways that the listen censors latent content include displacement, symbolization, rationalization, and condensation.

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Additional Reading

Freud, South. (1900). The Estimation of Dreams.

By Kendra Cherry
Kendra Red, MS, is an author and educational consultant focused on helping students learn about psychology.

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