The publication of Sigmund Freud's Interpretation of Dreams in 1900 raised seminal questions in psychology and psychoanalysis, but the institutional dominance of behaviorism and its standards of research marginalized dream research. Behaviorists criticized Freud's methodology as subjectivist and unscientific, leading psychologists to systematically banish dream discourses from higher learning. Although the 19th century saw early dream studies focused on phenomenology, the 20th-century movements of behaviorism, classical psychoanalysis, and gestalt psychology each undermined systematic research with larger sample sizes. This paper presents the views of Freud, Watson, Jung, Adler, and Perls to show how classical schools slowed the flow of methodical dream studies.
Dreams hold personal and psychological significance, reflecting unconscious thoughts about inner concerns, worries, fears, wishes, expectations, and fantasies. They can guide attention to important aspects of life or aspects of self that cause worry. Dream research benefits from combining quantitative and qualitative methods, notably synthesizing phenomenological and psychoanalytic psychology as an alternative qualitative approach for exploring beliefs and conceptions in both children and adults. Psychoanalytic phenomenological investigations aim to describe, explicate, and understand dream experiences by capturing individuals' experiences through reflective analysis. This hybrid methodology is well suited to studying unconscious representational processes and internal representations of self and others.