"It is from these dream-thoughts and not from a dream's manifest content that we disentangle its meaning.  We are thus presented with a new task...of investigating the relations between the manifest content of dreams and the latent dream thoughts, and of tracing out the processes by which the latter have been changed into the former.  The dream-thoughts and the dream-content  are presented to us like two versions of the same subject-matter in two different languages....the dream content seems like a transcript of the dream-thoughts into another mode of expression, whose characters and syntactic laws it is our business to discover by comparing the original and the translation....The dream content...is expressed as it were in a pictographic script, the characters of which have to be transposed individually into the language of the dream-thoughts...If we attempted to read these.according to their pictorial value instead of according to their symbolic relation, we should clearly be led into error."  (ch. VI, pp.311-312, Freud, 1900/1965)[1]

   Figure 1.  Sketch of Freud's dream scheme.  The "regions" are not locations but processes.

Jung vs Freud

There seem to be few significant differences on these issues.  Jung emphasized that all contents of the unconscious were not repressed contents.  Some just got there by normal memory processes ("depotentiation"?). 

 

Jung criticized this dream theory

"I am doubtful whether we can assume a dream is something else than it appears to be. I am rather inclined to quote another Jewish authority, the Talmud, which says: "The dream is its own interpretation.'

"The dream is a natural event and there is no reason under the sun why we should assume that it is a crafty device to lead us astray."

 

 

Jung also emphasized that some contents were inherited archetypes --the "collective unconscious.". Jung may have gone beyond Freud in this respect.  Both utilized empirical means to explore the unconscious and both believed that consciousness was only a small window on the mind.  Both had rather fabulous schemes for understanding the operations of the unconscious mind.


[1]Freud goes to treat dreams as "a picture-puzzle, a rebus" and not a "pictorial composition."  "In fact the interpretation of dreams is completely analogous to the decipherment of ancient pictographic script such as Egyptian hieroglphs...The ambiguity of various elements of dreams finds a parallel in these ancient systems of writing." (cited in Irwin, 213, as 13:177)

 

Freud, like many in Europe and the USA were enthralled with the mystical appeal of ancient Egypt. It seems likely his model of the dream interpretation was stimulated by the story of the Rosetta Stone. Unfortunately for Freud's theory of dreams, no one seems to have found the Rosetta for dreams!