Freud believed that the essence of dreams is a psychological activity, and dreaming is to satisfy the repressed desires in the subconscious. Dreams are divided into two levels. The first level is the concrete content of dreams, which is called the expression of dreams for short. The second layer is the real appeal hidden behind the explicit dream, referred to as the hidden dream. Interpretation of dreams is to find out the hidden meaning of dreams through the analysis from the outside to the inside.
There are two mechanisms for the operation of dreams: cohesion and transfer. The subconscious will extract and condense the key events in daily life into a dream, or transfer the view of one person and one thing to other people and things. The author puts forward that "subconscious" controls the formation of dreams! The proposition of "subconsciousness" has epoch-making significance in the history of psychology, and also laid the cornerstone of psychoanalytic therapy.
The spiritual world is divided into conscious and unconscious systems. Desires that meet social needs will be placed in the most conspicuous position in the memory bank, and those that do not meet the censorship requirements will be taken into the subconscious. The subconscious side is responsible for collecting and preserving repressed desires, which accumulate to a certain stage to form dreams.
Interpretation of Dreams deepens the concept of consciousness and puts forward three kinds of personality: id, ego and superego, which will become one of the theoretical foundations of psychoanalysis in the future.
The above-mentioned personalities can only develop healthily if they live in harmony and maintain balance. If there is fierce conflict for a long time, it will cause mental illness.
It must be admitted that Freud's view of dreams is limited, and his over-emphasis on the influence of human spiritual world makes psychoanalytic theory inevitably questioned.