To what extent do neurobiological sleep-waking processes support psychoanalysis?
Sigmund Freud's thesis was that there is a censorship during waking that prevents memory of events, drives, wishes, and feelings from entering the consciousness because they would induce anxiety due to their emotional or ethical unacceptability. During dreaming, because the efficiency of censorship is decreased, latent thought contents can, after dream-work involving condensation and displacement, enter the dreamer's consciousness under the figurative form of manifest content. The quasi-closed dogma of psychoanalytic theory as related to unconscious processes is beginning to find neurobiological confirmation during waking. Indeed, there are active processes that suppress (repress) unwanted memories from entering consciousness. In contrast, it is more difficult to find neurobiological evidence supporting an organized dream-work that would induce meaningful symbolic content, since dream mentation most often only shows psychotic-like activities.
Gottesmann
Claude
C
Département de Biologie, Faculté des Sciences, Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis, Nice, France.
D004325:Dreams / Q000502:physiology* / Q000523:psychology; D006801:Humans; D011572:Psychoanalysis / Q000379:methods*; D011603:Psychophysiology / Q000379:methods*; D012890:Sleep / Q000502:physiology*; D014851:Wakefulness / Q000502:physiology*