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.
Addiction, obesity, starvation (anorexia nervosa) are political problems, not psychiatric: each condense and expresses a contest between the individual and some other person or persons in his environment over the control of the individual's body.
If we think about emotion this way - as outside-in, not inside out - it is possible to understand how some people can have an enormous amount of influence over others. Some of us, after all, are very good at expressiing emotions and feelings, which means that we are far more emotionally contagious than the rest of us.
Wherever an inferiority complex exists, there is a good reason for it.
People don't just get upset. They contribute to their upsetness.
Everybody, to some extent, manipulates. Even children learn to cry when they want something. There are all kinds of subtle things we do to get others to follow our lead, not bother us, and so on.
I think the relationship between social-dominance orientation in people and the extent to which they're made uncomfortable by ambiguity and novelty is really important. Better a stable world that's familiar, in which I'm doing pretty poorly, than dealing with all the ambiguity of a changing world.
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