Concept
Wish-fulfilment
The imaginary fulfilment of a wish, which Freud made the meaning of dreams in Die Traumdeutung (1900): every dream represents a wish as fulfilled, and where its content seems painful the wish is disguised by the dream-work because it is unacceptable to the dreamer. He traced the model to the infant's hallucination of a past satisfaction, and found the same kind of fulfilment in symptoms, fantasies and daydreams. Traumatic dreams that repeat a painful event later led him, in 1920, to admit an exception.
- Introduced by
- Sigmund Freud
- Key works
- 1
introduced by
- Sigmund Freud 1900 The thesis that a dream is the (disguised) fulfilment of a (suppressed or repressed) wish is the central claim of Die Traumdeutung, stated after the analysis of the Irma dream and defended against apparent counter-examples such as anxiety dreams.