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sychology

Common Psychoanalytic Symbols and their Latent Meanings

Because psychoanalysis assumes that personality is largely unconsciously determined, there is a great emphasis on indirect means of assessment.  The therapist must look for clues in overt behavior to determine the state of the unconscious.  Slips of the tongue, humor, forgetting, loss of objects, and illnesses may provide indications of the unconscious.  However, Freud felt that dream interpretation provided the most useful way to examine intrapsychic events.  That is why dream interpretation is sometimes referred to as the "royal road to the unconscious."  Below are some events that may occur in dreams and the hypothesized latent meanings.  This list was taken from Liebert and Spiegler's "Personality: Strategies and Issues."