Oedipus East and West: An Exploration Via Manifest Dream Content

Abstract

The frequency of opposite-sex figures in the dreams of 45 female and 51 male Indian university students is found to vary in relation to cultural and subcultural factors. When compared with a large sample of American dreams, the gender-counts of Indian dream-characters is found to differ significantly in a direction explainable by the greater sexual segregation in India. Moreover, when the sex ratio of dream characters for all subjects are correlated with their scores on a specially devised "Transitionalism Index" a significant positive relationship is found between dream contact and indications of daily interaction. It is also found that predictions of preference for the male or female parent which are based on dependency motivations coincide more closely with dream data than do those assuming a sexual motivation. The findings are interpreted as supporting a phenomenological-cultural theory of dreams rather than a classical psychoanalytic one. They are seen as a challenge to previous claims that the sex-ratio of dream characters is cross-culturally ubiquitous and consistent in psychological meaning.