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What do geese dream of?” asks Freud (1900/1950a) in The Interpretation of Dreams. He answers “of maize.” “Pigs dream of acorns,” adds Ferenczi (1910) in a footnote. Contained within these succinct quotes, said to have originated in an Hungarian proverb, is the basic theory that dreams are wish fulfillments.
What does Sophie dream of? Surprisingly or not, in Sophie's dreams we can find many Freudian elements: aggression, war, sex, and, of course, food. She dreams of a dining hall, of a kitchen where people prepare her food, and, later on, where she can cook her own food. Her dreams refer to the War in Israel in 1973, to military commanders, missions in foreign countries, and include images of bags (vaginas?) and motorcycles (penises?). In her dreams, she loses stuff, is kidnapped, and she is hungry—very hungry.
As we know, there are as many psychoanalytic schools of thought as there are approaches to dreams. These approaches are strongly tied with the way one thinks about the analytic process itself. We can clearly see the link between analytic method and technique of dream analysis from Freud on. In the Freudian tradition, as Aron (1989) points out, dreams were used to prove the topographic model of the mind, the primary process functioning of the unconscious, the importance of infantile sexuality, and the usefulness of the free association method. Freud, who believed that the manifest dream is only a way to conceal and disguise the real contents and not to reveal the inner psychological life of the dreamer, minimized the organized quality of dreams, and considered that dreams were brought about exclusively through the primary process. Any aspect of dreams that reflected more organized thought was dismissed.