Both dreams and neurotic dream-states have as their function the avoidance of displeasure, but the dream-states also serve to provide a positive pleasure gain.
Interpretation
Dreams can be a way to escape discomfort and also provide enjoyment.
This quote suggests that both dreams and neurotic dream-states are mechanisms individuals use to evade unpleasant feelings. While dreams help in avoiding pain, they can also offer a sense of joy or fulfillment, highlighting the dual function of dreams in the realm of human psychology.
In practice
In a psychology class discussing the functions of dreams, this quote can illustrate how dreams relate to our emotional states.
Fortunately I experienced Max Wertheimer's teaching in Berlin and collaborated for over a decade with Wolfgang Köhler. I need not emphasize my debts to these outstanding personalities. The fundamental ideas of Gestalt theory are the foundation of all our investigations in the field of the will, of affection, and of the personality.
People don't just get upset. They contribute to their upsetness.
It may be true in the case of autism that if you start off with a deficit in terms of empathy or mind reading, you've just got more time to devote to understanding the world by systemizing.
People's behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives.
The ideal of behaviorism is to eliminate coercion: to apply controls by changing the environment in such a way as to reinforce the kind of behavior that benefits everyone.
The abused child goes on living within those who have survived such torture, a torture that ended with total repression. They live with the darkness of fear, oppression, and threats. When all its attempts to move the adult to heed its story have failed, it resorts to the language of symptoms to make itself heard. Enter addiction, psychosis, criminality.
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