Freud: the dream is a wish fulfillment

Interpretation of dreams – Chapter 3 – Freud

Chapter 3 – The dream is a fulfillment of a wish

Brief summary

In chapter 3 of the book Interpretation of Dreams, Freud develops the point of view, according to which dreams are fulfillments of a wish. “They are not therefore meaningless, they are not absurd. On the contrary, they are psychic phenomena of complete validity, wish fulfillments”.

In the second chapter, on the model dream, he had already developed this “discovery”: “when the interpretation work is concluded, we realize that the dream is the fulfillment of a wish”.

Freud questions himself about the origin of the enigmatic form of the dream, the alterations of the dream thoughts in the manifest dream, the source of the peculiarities of the dream, and then verifies whether dreams, all of them, can be considered as wish fulfillment.

In other words, the manifest dream is the dream as it is first reported. It may happen that the manifest dream does not immediately indicate the desire that corresponds to it in the so-called latent dream.

After showing the peculiarities of dreams and the difference between the manifest dream and the latent dream, Freud goes on to demonstrate examples, such as the realization of the desire to drink water, the desire to continue sleeping, dreams that predict pregnancy and the desire of these women to get pregnant or to spend more time free from motherhood. Children’s dreams also appear in the text.

The latter are “pure fulfillment of wishes. They raise no problems to be solved, but they are of inestimable importance in proving that, in their essential nature, dreams represent wish-fulfilments.” Freud then describes some dreams of his own children.

He considers that children sometimes have more complex dreams and adults, under adverse conditions, have “childish” dreams. And he concludes the chapter by showing some German, Jewish and Hungarian proverbs that corroborate his thesis: dreams are wish fulfillments.

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