Dream Theories You May Have Missed
While the names most people associate with dream theory and the
interpretation of dreams are those of Sigmund Freud and Carl
Jung, there are a number of lesser known but nevertheless
important figures in the world of dream research and dream
interpretation. Two of the most important of these are Alfred
Adler and Frederick Perls, and they are the focus of this
article. Alfred Adler (1870-1937) What made Alfred Adler so
special to the world of dream interpretation was his belief that
dreams should be used to understand and solve the problems
experienced in the waking world. Adler believed that by bringing
dreams into the waking world, the dreamer could solve the
problems experienced in the daytime world. He believed that
people could use resources from their dreams and use them to
solve waking problems.
While Sigmund Freud believed that repressed sexual impulses
where behind all types of behavior, Adler believed that
motivation and drive were the responsible parties. In addition,
Adler did not believe that conscious actions and behavior were
ruled and dictated by the unconscious. Unlike Freud, Alfred
Adler believed that people were motivated to do the things they
do by their striving for perfection. For this reason, Adler
believed that feelings of inferiority or inadequacy were strong
actors on behavior.
When it came to dreams, Alfred Adler thought that they were a
path toward the true thoughts, actions and emotions of the
dreamer. For instance, to Adler, dreams were a way for dreamers
to clearly see their aggressive desires and impulses. To Adler,
dreams were a way to overcompensate for perceived shortcomings
in the waking world.
One example of this overcompensation is the dream about a boss.
The dreamer who is scared to stand up to an overbearing boss in
real life may dream that he or she lashes out and tells of his
or her boss in a dream. This dream can be seen as a socially
acceptable, yet still satisfying, way of getting revenge on an
overbearing authority figure.
Frederick Perls (1893-1970) Frederick Perls is best known as the
inventor of Gestalt therapy. The focus of Gestalt therapy is to
allow patients to fill their emotional void so that they are
able to become whole. To Perls, dreams contained the rejected
and disowned parts of the self. Therefore, in Perls dream
interpretation theory, every person and every item in the dream
represented an aspect of the dreamer's self.
Perls rejected the theory of dreams popularized by Carl Jung.
Carl Jung believed that the images in dreams were part of a
universal symbolic language. Perls rejected this archetypal
explanation of dream imagery in favor of his own theory that the
objects in dreams were representations of the self. To Perls,
each dream is unique only to the person who dreamed it, and
there were no universal archetypal images to draw on.
Perls also felt that it was important to retell the dream in the
present tense in order to understand and discover the part of
the dreamer that is being disowned or disavowed. In addition,
Perls felt it important to verbalize the feelings engendered by
each part of the dream, even those feelings stirred by inanimate
objects. Perls felt that by looking at things from a different
perspective the dreamer could understand feelings that he or she
had overlooked.