Freud & Lacan

Freud's work on dreams is hard to prove because there is no way to test dreams or get an actual data sample of a dream. He feels that dreams have two parts, one which he calls the symbolic representation and the other he calls the plastic representation. The symbolic representation being what the dream means or was interpreted to mean, and the plastic representation being what the dream simply appears to be, without any kind of interpretation. The study of dreams and it interpretations consists of condensation, displacement, and visualization. During condensation the dreamer has to "understand the fact that the manifest dream has a smaller content that the latent one, and is thus an abbreviated translation of it." Meaning you have to condense the manifest dream, to begin interpreting it. Displacement is when the dreamer replaces the part which seems to be the center and is most important, with something that is not- making the dream "strange." The last step of interpretation is where the dreamer would make their thoughts and ideas into a "visual image." All the processes of dream interpretation are not visible which makes it hard for you to test and prove. Although some of the theorys that Freud has proposed are true, it is very hard to test them. Psychoanalysis is one of my favorite parts of psychology, but unlike the rest of them, which can be tested with experiments and numbers, psychanalysts can not.