Final answer:
Freud believed dreams are a vital gateway to accessing the unconscious mind, uncovering repressed feelings and desires. Freud and his followers, like Jung, theorized that dreams reveal both personal and collective subconscious elements through symbolic language.
Step-by-step explanation:
When Sigmund Freud said that dreams are the "royal road to the unconscious mind," he was referring to their crucial role in providing insights into the otherwise inaccessible unconscious part of our psyche. Freud's psychoanalytical theory suggests that by analyzing dreams, which often have complex layers of meanings, we can discover the latent content that represents underlying thoughts, desires, and feelings stored in our unconscious. These hidden elements, such as repressed memories or unfulfilled wishes, can manifest themselves in the symbolic language of dreams, hence why Freud considered dreams so essential to understanding our unconscious mind.
Freud's contemporaries, like Carl Jung, expanded on his ideas by suggesting that dreams could also connect us to a collective unconscious shared among all humans, filled with universal archetypes and symbols. Freud's emphasis on the unconscious as the larger part of our psyche, likened to an iceberg with a smaller visible conscious part and a larger hidden unconscious portion, underlined the significance of dreams as a window into the depths of the human mind.
Freud's methods, including dream analysis, free association, and the concept of Freudian slips, became foundational in the field of psychoanalysis and influenced numerous areas of art, literature, and psychotherapy.