Sigmund Freud's "The Interpretation of Dreams"

Discuss Freud’s notion of the dream-work (including condensation and displacement). How does this notion of the dream-work parallel the process of the writing of literature?

Freud is one of the famous people who become interested on dreams and study them. To Freud, dreams are composed of two parts: (1) the manifest and (2) the latent content. On the one hand, the manifest refers to whatever a person would and could remember as soon as he wakes up—what he would consciously describe to someone else when recalling his dream. Freud suggests that the manifest content possesses no meaning at all because it is just a disguised representation of the true thought of the real dream. On the other hand, the latent content, the actual dream, holds the true meaning of the dream –the forbidden thoughts and the unconscious desires and fears of a person. The latent content appears in the manifest content but will be rather disguised and unrecognizable.
The process by which the latent content is transformed into or related to the manifest content by the person who dreams is known as the “dream work.” The dream work can disguise and distort the latent thoughts in at least two ways: (1) condensation and (2) displacement. On the one hand, condensation is a single unconscious idea or object. This single idea or object can express the content of several chains of association. From the term itself, it condenses numerous objects from the latent content into few or single idea in the manifest content. This concept of Freud explains the apparently laconic nature of dreams. Displacement, on the other hand, refers to “the process whereby the emphasis or intensity of an unconscious idea is detached from that idea and transferred to a second and less intense idea to which it is linked by chains of association.” From the term itself, it displaces the association from the real object or idea or person in the latent content to a rather related and significant one in the manifest content.
Furthermore, Freud believes that the unconscious is manifested not only through dreams but also arts and literature. Because the superego keeps on suppressing and limiting the unconscious, it would find different ways to be expressed—this time though something acceptable to the society. Some of these ways are the arts and literature. Thus, literature is one of the expressions of the unconscious—the hidden desires and fears of a person. Literature is, as Freud implies, the actual and clear manifestation of the author’s unconscious mind. This idea asserts that in the process of writing literature, although he is not completely aware of it, the author brings along with him his unconsciousness (his childhood experiences, desires, and fears). So literature can be approached using Psychoanalysis to unleash the hidden motivations and the repressed desires of the author and even the characters in the story, poem or play.