Freud's method of dream interpretation allowed him to reflect on his own dreams to discover their latent and manifest meanings. Examining the dream of one of his patients, he showed how the manifest content served as a symbol for the underlying meaning and psychological import of the dream. For example, a comb was a symbol of "mixing the breed," or racially mixing (p. 61-63). The young woman had recently argued with her parents over marrying a man of a different ethnic and religious heritage. The manifest content of the dream, a comb, symbolized her deep-rooted anxieties about racially mixed marriages.

             Freud had already begun to apply the theory of manifest and latent dream content to his own dreams years earlier. For example, Freud dreamt he was on a train accompanied by an elderly gentleman who was blind in one eye. Freud acted as his nurse and held out a bottle for the man to urinate in, and the man then takes out his penis. All this is the manifest content of the dream.

             Investigating the manifest content of this dream allowed Freud to probe into his childhood and discover the latent meaning of the dream. For example, the elderly gentleman in the dream symbolized his father. The symbol of uncontrolled urination referred to Freud's bed-wetting, and more importantly the emotional and psychological associations to bed-wetting: guilt and ambition (p. 49). Freud thus determined that the manifest content of the dream (old man, urination) referred to his latent desires to overcome the pressures placed on him by his father and to prove to his father that he had "amounted to something" (p. 49). The latent dream content therefore had to do with shame, guilt, and lingering feelings of resentment toward Freud's father.

             2. The forerunner of Freud's interpretation of the Oedipus "complex" is an ancient Greek myth, popularized by the classical Greek playwright Sophocles. King Laius and Queen Jocasta of Thebes are expecting a child.