This course is no longer offered

10547 Visual Imagery and Dream 1

Credits: 6 advanced credits in Psychology

Prerequisites: 36 credits, including Introduction to Statistics for Students of Social Sciences I, Introduction to Statistics for Students of Social Sciences II, Research Methods in Social Sciences, Cognitive Psychology, Participation in Research Studies in Psychology. Students must also fulfill all English requirements and take bibliographic instruction in the Library.

Recommended: Research Experience, Regression Analysis and Analysis of Variance

The course is based on a reader edited by Ofer Fein and Dekel Shalev, and on a translation of General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, by Sigmund Freud.

The course deals with two phenomena: visual imagery and dreams. The two phenomena differ but both are phenomenologically visual and spatial. The first part of the course focuses on the question of whether visual imagery is actually thinking in images, as is commonly believed, or whether it is thinking in concepts and propositions like all other kinds of thinking. Additional questions raised are: how can imagery be studied, and what conclusions can be drawn from the findings of the various studies performed on imagery.

The second part of the course centers on theoretical and empirical aspects of the dream. The three main paradigms in the study of dreams are presented in order of historical development: the psychoanalytic paradigm, and specifically, the classical theories on the interpretation of dreams by Freud and Jung; the psycho-physiological paradigm examining the question of whether dreams can be considered physiological events (such as REM sleep); the cognitive paradigm, and results of content analysis of dreams.


1Students may write a seminar paper in this course, although it is not required.

There is some overlap in the content of this and other courses. For details, see Overlapping Courses.