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The original psychoanalytic conception of dreaming was concerned with processes or agencies within the individual that were in conflict with one another and the mechanisms (censor, defenses) by which conflict was resolved . The process of dream formation was largely mechanistic. Unconscious drives (wishes) that were derivations of infantile (usually sexual) impulses joined together with day residues in an attempt to achieve conscious representation. The dream work (e.g., condensation, displacement, symbolization) protected the conscious ego from these presumably disturbing thoughts or ideas by distorting the libidinal wishes and making them unrecognizable to secondary process, external reality-oriented thinking. Free association to dream elements facilitated the discovery of the underlying (latent) dream thoughts.
Early psychoanalytic dream theory did not focus on questions of whether the dream might directly reveal characteristics of the dreamer's sense of himself or herself, possibilities for future adaptation in the dreamer's life situation, or the potential for psychological development or change that might be foreshadowed in dreams (Gabel, 1991).
Jung, an early follower of Freud, later became prominently associated with criticisms of orthodox psychoanalytic thinking (Jung, 1960). He raised objections to Freud's notion of the dream and its formation, often pointing out that the manifest dream seemed to have a striking ability to describe in metaphoric terms the psychological state of the dreamer and the developmental possibilities available to the dreamer. The Jungian view of the dream, with its emphasis on the dream's metaphoric statement describing the individual,