The Comfort Of Maize Essay, Research Paper
What does Freud s theory of dreams tell us about the nature of the human mind? Freud insists that dreams are a product of the individual s mind and are not something impressed on the mind by outside sources. If the are mental events that need to be analyzed to be understood, what can be inferred about the mind that created them?
The Comfort of Maize
The functioning of the human mind remains in great measure a catalyst for wonder, amazement, and discovery for all mankind. Some of mankind s greatest intellectuals have attempted to quantify and define the vast amount of brain functions. Through years of experiment and observation, man has excelled in the understanding of many of the brain s functions. However, the function of dreaming continues to elude empirical verification, and many have theorized about its purpose. Sigmund Freud was a pioneer in developing theories on the usage of dreams. He described many of these theories in his essay, The Interpretation of Dreams. From some of the premises found in his essay, we can see how dreams are capable of opening a window into the nature of human kind.
Freud theory states that dreams serve as a function of wish fulfillment. They are the unconscious manifestations of ambitions and hopes that were created in our conscious life. He points to many examples of this idea throughout his essay.
If I eat anchovies or olives or any other highly salted food in the evening, I develop thirst during the night which wakes me up. But my waking is preceded by a dream; and this always has the same content, namely, that I am drinking. I dream I am swallowing down water in great gulps, and it has the delicious taste that nothing can equal but a cool drink when one is parched with thirst.
In this excerpt from The Interpretation of Dreams, the theory of dreams functioning as wish fulfillment is very clear. While sleeping, Freud developed a thirst provoked by the salty food he consumed before going to sleep. To fulfill his wishes, he then created a dream scenario to meet his physical needs; whereby affirming of the idea that we attempt to compensate for the lack of met needs in the conscious mind by fulfilling unmet wishes in the unconscious dream state.
Freud also included the effects of the emotional response into the function of wish fulfillment. In his essay, Freud used his children as examples of how emotional need could promote the dream-wish fulfillment function. He described how his daughter had hoped that a particular boat ride would have been a long journey. When the ride ended without achieving the child s expectations, she began to cry. The next day, the child described with joy how she had dreamt of a long boat journey during the night. Here, we see another example of how the dream-wish fulfillment function has served its purpose. It created a convenient joyful response for the child in order to promote the most amount of satisfaction.
This striving for satisfaction by the human mind says a lot about human nature. A love of comfort and convenience is not really compatible with the consideration for other people. In this line, Freud implicates the egotistical nature of the wish fulfillment function; and by doing so, implicates the root egotistical nature stemming from our own biology. It is an inherent function for all living creatures to attempt survival, at least for some period of their life span. In many basic respects, this survivalist instinct is based on the idea of self-preservation. This idea may include other members of one s community, but only by way that the neighbor s survival is instrumental to one s own existence. However, humans have seemed not only to attempt to survive, but to do so by the most satisfying methods available. The wish fulfillment theory suggests that the subconscious compensates for the negative aspects of the conscious life by creating a temporary vacation or resolution to unmet emotional, spiritual, and physical needs. The dream-wish fulfillment function helps to create a more pleasant environment in which to survive; and by doing so, it shows that the brain goes through some intelligible process in order to instigate this process.
Freud says that the dream-wish fulfillment function is, constructed by a highly complicated activity of the mind. He equates this function with intelligible acts, and does so perhaps because this function could be viewed as a problem-solving scenario: the problem being a deficiency in the perceived needs of the conscious individual, and the solution is provided in the dream-wish fulfillment. The Swiss physician Carl Jung might have added that this problem-solving function could be accomplished by a continuously active piece of psychic material that lies below the threshold of the conscious mind.
It also possible that the dream-wish fulfillment function is contained within the Multiple Intelligence Howard Gardner described. It appears that one s Intrapersonal Intelligence would take the burden of responsibility for the dream-wish fulfillment function. Gardner states that the Intrapersonal Intelligence deals with, knowledge of the internal aspects of a person Perhaps there is a correlation between the level of Intrapersonal Intelligence and that of the vividness or gratification of the dream-wish fulfillment function. Nevertheless, it is clear that intelligence of some kind is responsible for this brain function.
Our minds are infinitely complex. There are still many areas of function that await discovery, and the dream-wish fulfillment function is one of those mysterious regions. Freud creates a solid case for the motivation of this function; yet, no one has yet been able to provide scientific evidence for describing the actual processes. Also, this function still cannot be defined by the classes of intelligence. Yet, that does not eliminate the overwhelming evidence provided by Jung, Gardner, and mainly Freud to show that the dream-wish function is developed through some sort of complex intellectual activity that serves us to promote the greatest amount of satisfaction during our survival.