Quote:
Freud's claims about the nature of dreams rest for the most part on his method of free association, in which the dreamer produces uncritical, unreflective trains of thought to each aspect of the dream. Freud assumed that these free associations reveal the "latent" wishes on which dreams are based. The discovery of latent content through free association then leads to the inference that the cognitive processes called the dream-work transform these latent wishes into the "manifest" dream content.
Because other methods have not been able to show support for Freud's theory, any remaining credibility it may have depends upon the validity of this method. However, there is no evidence that the method has any specific scientific usefulness even though it seems to be helpful in bringing people to talk about themselves, their emotional memories, and their current concerns. As Fisher and Greenberg (1977, pg. 66) note in their first assessment of Freud's work on dreams, "there is not a shred of empirical or reliable evidence that they provide a unique 'true' solution concerning what is contained in the dream." In addition, a large-scale attempt by Foulkes (1978) to make use of free associations to understand dreams collected in the laboratory setting ended with the conclusion that the method is "inherently arbitrary" (Foulkes, 1996)
