Instincts

When Freud talks about infantile wishes he is not talking about thoughts that we have consciously. Infantile wishes include all urges we have instinctively such as those to survive. These include competition for food and shelter. instinctively we are social and rely on others to survive but if someone is not helpful, is not the person who feeds us and puts us to bed, we see no need for them instinctively. While our childhood brain cannot comprehend it we feel the urge to be rid of this other person who is in competition with us according to Freud's theory. He goes even further to say that sons want to kill their fathers and daughters want to kill their mothers. Freud says this desire is linked to a sexual attraction that sons find towards their mothers and daughters find towards their fathers. I agree that there might be some primal instinct to be rid of someone who is not healthy however and these wishes are repressed by society and come out in the form of dreams.

As I mentioned in my last post however, there is no one reason for dreams. We talked in class that you can dream about your day, something that frightens you or something that makes you happy. These kind of dreams I think are just the brains way of processing events and emotions. The weird dreams however where there are upside-down clowns in space can come from some sort of repressed thought or feeling coming to the surface and then being distorted to keep you asleep.  Freud's theory has some good points but also some bad as with every theory.