HANDOUT ON FREUD AND PSYCHOANAYLSIS

What's here?

• Reading assignments for this session
  
• Key dates for Freud
  
• Background info--key ideas from earlier sections of The Interpretation of Dreams
  
• Study questions on these readings
  
• Two final thoughts from Freud
• What next?--suggestions about where to go from here

Sigmund Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, chapter VI ("The Dream- Work"), sections A-C.

NOTE: Look for these selections in Volume IV of the Standard Edition of the Complete Works, pages 279-335.

NOTE 2: During the course of our readings, Freud twice refers to one of his own dreams. For a look at this dream, which is known to Freudians as the "specimen dream" or the "dream of Irma's injection," check out the second section of Interpretation of Dreams, "The Method of Interpreting Dreams: An Analysis of a Specimen Dream."

Key dates for Freud

1856 Freud is born in Freiburg, Austria.
1881 Freud completes his medical studies.
1885 Freud becomes a psychiatrist.
1886 Freud marries Martha Bernays. He also undertakes research on hysteria.
1892 After experimenting with hypnosis, Freud begins to develop his "talking cure," a method founded in free association, which becomes the basis of psychoanalysis.
1899 Freud publishes the first edition of Interpretation of Dreams. Over the next two decades, he will spend considerable time expanding and revising the book.
1905 Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, "Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria" (Dora)
1908 First International Psychoanalytic Conference
1908 Freud, "Creative Writers and Day-dreaming"
1918 Freud, "From the History of an Infantile Neurosis" (Wolf Man)
1919 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
1923 Freud, The Ego and the Id. Freud is diagnosed with cancer of the mouth.
1930 Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
1938 Freud and his family leave Vienna for London.
1939 Freud dies.

Key ideas from earlier sections of Interpretation of Dreams

We'll be reading excerpts from fairly late in The Interpretation of Dreams, focusing on passages that tell how the "latent content" of a dream is converted into its "manifest content." This conversion happens by way of two distinct psychological processes: "condensation" and "displacement." To understand all of this, you'll need to know about a few of the ideas presented in earlier sections of the book:

1. Dreams are not trivial, but crucial. By studying and interpreting dreams, we can gain insight into the nature and working of the unconscious.

2. Dreams are based in wishes (usually infantile wishes) and are themselves efforts to fulfill or satisfy wishes.

3. Since forces of repression and denial are at work even during sleep, shameful wishes or thoughts are not allowed to appear in dreams. These thoughts must be "translated" into more acceptable (and often entirely unrecognizable) forms. The process of "translation" is called the "dream-work."

Possible discussion questions

1. I'm guessing that although you've heard about Freud, you may never have read much of his stuff. What did you expect from him? Did he ever do or say anything that surprised you? Did these readings confirm or change your earlier opinions of Freud?

2. Are you flummoxed by Freud's vocabulary? What's the difference between "dream-content," "dream-thoughts," and the "dream-work"? What about "condensation" and "displacement"? How are those processes different?

3. At the very beginning of our reading, Freud introduces the crucial distinction between the "manifest" and "latent" content of a dream. To what extent might this distinction be compared or likened to Marx's distinction between base and superstructure? Do you see any other possible connections between Marx and Freud?

4. In choosing a selection for the syllabus, I was careful to pick an excerpt in which you'd actually see Freud engaged in the act of interpreting dreams. Are his interpretations persuasive or intriguing? Where are they especially ingenious--and where do they strike you as contrived?

5. In what ways might the interpretation of dreams (as conceived by Freud) serve as the basis for the interpretation of literary or artistic works? Are the processes or strategies of a dreamer anything like those of the artist?

Two final thoughts from Freud

1. "There can be no doubt that the connections between our typical dreams and fairy tales and the material of other kinds of creative writing are neither few nor accidental." (Interpretation of Dreams, chapter V)

2. "Just as all neurotic symptoms, and, for that matter, dreams, are capable of being 'over-interpreted' and indeed need to be, if they are to be fully understood, so all generally creative writings are the product of more than a single motive and more than a single impulse in the poet's mind, and are open to more than a single interpretation." (Interpretation of Dreams, chapter V)

What next?

• Homepage for English 60A
  
• Syllabus for weeks one and two (Precursors: Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Saussure)
  
• Students' comments on Freud
  
• Links to internet resources on Freud and psychoanalysis