ot always) these dreams can trace back to sexual or aggressive motives. For example, the specimen dream of Irmas Injection is not only interpreted in terms of its associations to which it gives rise, but is analyzed as a wish fulfilment; the dream satisfies a desire on the part of Freuds to be highly regarded by his colleagues, as well as one to absolve himself of responsibility of misdiagnosis while assigning blame on his physician-friend. Throughout the course of the text, the idea of wishing becomes gradually transformed; it is not simply that more dangerous wishes come to emerge in the interpreted meaning, but that these wishes, with respect to their associations, refer to events (again, often sexual or aggressive) of earlier, especially childhood, events in the life of the dreamer. Events that are normally forgotten and inaccessible to the waking mind.Freuds method of interpretation through spontaneous association, and analysis of the mechanism of content representation through a desire for wish fulfilment, is formulated in distinction to what he took to be the commonly-held historical tradition of symbolic understanding. Freud rejects a universal key for symbols in dream interpretation. His own method of interpretation, founded on contextualization of each dream element, cannot support an array of fixed symbolic meanings. However, by the end of the text, Freud finds symbolism to be important because it permits him to translate psychoanalysis into a general cultural science, a manoeuvre he requires in order to have his new science of the mind accepted on a broad level. He maintains that symbols are subject to elements peculiar to the dreamer. They [dream symbols] frequently have more than one or even several meanings, and, as with Chinese script, the correct interpretation can only be arrived at one each occasion from the context (S. Freud, 1968, Vol.5, p.353). Nevertheless, he ultimately creates a variety of common examples of f...
