Psychoanalysis and dreams

The professor and the author holds very different viewpoints about psychoanalysis and the interpretation of dreams. In the passage, the writer thinks that our dreams is a symbolization of our desires and we acquire the meanings of the symbols through dreamwork. The reason why we symbolize the content of the dream is that our desires may not serve the needs of society’s ethics. So a dream may seem like a pointless images all over, and we call it as the manifest content since it’s superficial at first but when we analyze the hidden meanings, we come across the meaning of the parts of the images and we name it as the latent content, since it’s hidden and needs to be analyzed. The professor on the other hand, gives an example of 2 researchers that holds very different viewpoints towards dreams. researchers concluded on a study that they ran with cats that, for example, when we are walking in our dream, although we don’t really walking, they observe the same brain activity and the same chemical response. They say they worked with cats because their sleep pattern is very identical to those of humans. And also they concluded that dreams are caused by brain stem. Although the writer thinks that the dreams have hidden meanings and therefore need to be analyzed, the professor indicates that the content of the dream is caused by the brain activity and doesn’t have any hidden meaning.