There is a dark side to each one of us where our forbidden fear, lust and anger lurk. These unconscious desires do not rest quietly in the human psyche. They are, in a sense, our enemy within.
One man believed he could exorcise our demons through the study of dreams. Sigmund Freud took pride in disturbing the sleep of humanity. At the turn of the century in Vienna, Austria, Dr. Sigmund Freud claimed he had discovered a new doorway to the unconscious. So tell me anything that comes into your mind.
Perhaps we could begin with your dream last night. As a child, I had a recurring nightmare of falling down what seemed to be an endless well. Drive for miles and miles down this tunnel.
When suddenly we're attacked by a sea creature. Turns out to be a giant octopus. And I may have been invisible at the time.
time. There's a man in front of her with a snake. I can see the teeth of the snake.
Out from the tunnel, out onto the deck of a sailboat. Chases me through the ship and eventually I come to a door behind which I know the octopus is waiting for me. I woke up before I reached the bottom. I shall bring forward proof that there is a psychological technique which makes it possible to interpret dreams.
Freud's self-proclaimed masterpiece, The Interpretation of Dreams, offered readers a window into almost secret selves. In his revolutionary work, Freud suggested that often the purpose of dreams is to satisfy through fantasy the instinctive urges that society judges unacceptable. The laws of logic that rule our waking world do not apply to the kingdom of sleep, but we are free to experience fantastic adventures. For Freud, this liberation of fantasy was a path that led to the heart of the unconscious. He promised us a profoundly deeper understanding of the human condition.
This was a dream I had just a couple of weeks ago which took place on a canal boat and the guy who was piloting the boat I knew was a nutcase yet I got on the boat with him anyway and at some point during the journey he attacked me and I had to defend myself and I ended up killing him but the sensation the dream left me with when I woke up was a very clear sense of what it was like to actually stick a knife into somebody and to end their life. Ever since Freud first declared his groundbreaking views about the mind and its operation, opinion about him has been bitterly divided. He has become the psychiatrist everybody loves to hate. Freud was really a bold and daring thinker who loved wild hypotheses and then more or less on the guinea pig model tried to induce the evidence to confirm his theories in the prisons of his various patients on the couch.
So we have here a picture of Freud as a grand theorist, a very reckless thinker really. Oh, if he weren't a revolutionary creative thinker and if he weren't... Right in so many areas, he wouldn't be criticized for where he's been wrong. There are, you know, dozens of psychologists who were very largely wrong, about whom we say nothing because they really have not shaped our society. Whatever your opinion, Freud is inescapable.
His terminology and his ideas pervade contemporary life. He taught us to pay attention to feelings and actions that we once thought meaningless. Provoking a confrontation with our more primitive selves. After Freud, it was not so easy to avoid responsibility for unconscious behavior.
What Freud did was to build a whole system of interpretation aimed at exposing the real meaning for an act that seemed to have no meaning at all. Something that seemed to come just from our bodies, just out of habit, something that we didn't pay attention to. Freud found in that the key to what we might really be desiring. And whether we reject psychoanalysis or embrace it, that's a move the 20th century culture is built upon.
Freud famously described dreams as the royal road to the unconscious and firmly believed that he had begun to unravel their full mystery. Nearly every creative thinker has been touched by the magic of dreams. Chagall and Magritte painted dreamlike visions. Salvador Dali cited Freud's interpretation of dreams specifically as inspiration for his surrealistic paintings. Dally also designed the famous dream sequence in Alfred Hitchcock's movie about psychoanalysis, Spellbound.
I can't make out just what sort of a place it was. It seemed to be a gambling house, but there weren't any walls, just a lot of curtains with eyes painted on them. A man was walking around with a large pair of scissors cutting all the drapes in half.
Then a girl came in with hardly anything on and started walking around the gambling room kissing everybody. She came to my table first. Did you recognize this kissing bug? I'm afraid she looked a little like Constance. This is plain, ordinary, wishful dreaming.
Freud himself was anything but ordinary. After working in Paris with the famous neurologist and hypnotist Charcot, Freud returned to Vienna to lecture the medical society on his newfound knowledge. He dramatically proclaimed that neuroses were psychological rather than physical.
The audience was skeptical, but Freud was nothing if not sure of himself. Successful people are very convinced of their own correctness. They're monothematic and megalomaniac.
Genius is not balanced. Genius has to be committed to the goal. So they don't necessarily come off as the boy next door.
The arrogant and contentious Freud dismissed criticism, giving it the psychoanalytic term resistance, which he claimed proved he was right. Freud had this funny personality where he took disappointment as a sign of his own great ideas. That is, there's no success like failure, you know. I mean, if people don't understand me, it must be because I'm on the right track, since people are so wrongheaded, since their methods are so bad, since they're so prejudiced, the fact that they don't like me. means that I must be on the right track. Freud's work on dreams began in 1887 when he was seeing a number of young women who suffered from what was then called hysteria, a puzzling complex of symptoms that ranged from aches and twitches to complete paralysis.
He grew to believe his patients'symptoms were elaborate defenses against the pain of long-forgotten psychic shocks. Freud treated them, unsuccessfully, with hypnosis. But when patients spontaneously began describing their dreams, he was intrigued.
Eventually, Freud became convinced of the role that dreams could play in revealing hidden trauma. He brought me a box. What was in the box?
I was very much afraid to open it. When Freud and a patient were working together to interpret a dream, he asked the patient what the patient could remember, which is called the manifest content of the dream. He then asked the patient to sort of associate to each of the elements of the dream, and that simply meant...
to say everything that came to mind in connection with both the dream as a whole and to each particular detail of the dream. Freud's ongoing work with free association reinforced his belief that the source of neuroses sprang from emotional damage caused in early childhood. This was a subversive idea, and Freud was left nearly isolated in his profession for 15 years.
Finally, The ambitious doctor's persistence paid off, appropriately enough, in a dream. The Irma dream is the classical dream. It's the so-called dream specimen of psychoanalysis.
It's the dream that Freud had on, I believe it's the night of July 23rd, 1895, that he used as the basis to illustrate his interpretive method in the interpretation of dreams. In his dream, Freud attends a family party where he sees Irma, one of his patients. Irma has been on Freud's mind since her therapy had stalled and she had left for her country estate. The day before, Freud's family doctor, Otto, had told him Irma was not completely cured. The oversensitive Freud resented the criticism.
At the party, Irma complains of terrible pains in her throat and stomach. Freud scolds her for quitting therapy and proceeds to examine her throat. He discovers a peculiar growth on the walls of her mouth and calls upon a colleague for a second opinion.
In the dream, Freud realizes that the cause of Irma's suffering is a careless injection given by Otto. They had neglected to use a clean needle. Freud's dream struck him as terribly revealing. The dream was an act of revenge. Against Otto for maligning Freud's ability.
Against Irma for resisting his analysis. He proposed a general law. The dream is a wish fulfillment. It was this revelation that inspired Freud to write The Interpretation of Dreams. The book was published in 1899, but Freud requested that the publication date be given as 1900, to create the impression that his views were pioneering thoughts for the new century.
Freud's epic was ignored by disapproving colleagues and seemed only eccentric food for a handful of readers. The book sold merely 350 copies in its first six years. Freud was characteristically defensive.
I had dared against the objections of severe science to take the part of the ancients and of superstition. In the book, Freud notes that amid the kaleidoscope of unique dreams are a handful that occur to almost all dreamers. Dreams of falling, being chased, soaring through the air and failing exams are common to the human experience. I come from Austria and we have some nice ideas about life. The biggest thing that you can do for a girlfriend is to pick up a needlewise by yourself.
And so last night I dreamed I climb up to the mountain over the rocks and I found... I'm tail-wise. When I found it, and I tried to get it, broke the stone under my feet.
So I fall, I fall, I fall, down, down, down. And at the very end, alarm. I worked up. I look at my hand.
The finger was still together, but no L was. It was a dream. Freud's interpretation of the meaning of dreams was based on his larger view of human nature.
He saw us as basically selfish animals driven by aggressive urges and the desire for pleasure. We learn how to repress our animal impulses as we grow up in order to get along in society. But we never totally conquer our primitive selves.
This animal self, which contains the core of the psyche, Freud called the id. The ego and the superego are later developments that arise from the need to survive and adapt to the surrounding social environment. The ego is our rational self. The superego represents societal pressures and tells us what is right and wrong. The superego is frequently in conflict with the id.
Freud saw the psyche as a battleground, with the various personality components engaged in ongoing struggle. Feelings are being repressed if the ego or superego become too dominant over the id. To Freud, emotion unexpressed often led to problems.
What Freud says in the Interpretation of Dreams, in saying that every dream is a fulfillment of a disguised wish, is that our meanings are disguised, that we don't... know for sure what things are significant. But we need to find ways of discovering how they may be related to our desires, how what we do unconsciously, without thinking, may be related to our fundamental desires. maybe even expressing those fundamental desires without our being aware of it.
Once one opens that question, it's not up to then some scientist or philosopher to come on and say, they don't really mean anything. No, the issue is then how are we going to make sense of things, events, words, activities, that we used to not bother about. And now we decide, yes, I'm going to bother about that. I'm going to try to see what that means about my life or about my friend's life or about our relationship.
Thank you. And psychoanalysis in Freud's hands opened up that question. In the interpretation of dreams, Freud laid out a formula which could make sense of even the most confusing dream. His theory relies on a part of the mind he called the sensor, which edits our dreams.
If we dreamed about the literal fulfillment of desire, he said, the powerful emotions this would create would wake us. The sensor transforms the dream content to disguise its true meaning. Freud called this transformation of desire dream work. It is composed of a number of processes.
Displacement shifts emotion from one idea to another. Condensation fuses together multiple thoughts into a single symbol. Along with symbolization and projection, DreamWork components join together to change and redirect dream thoughts and images into acceptable forms.
After the sensor has completed its dream work, the ego reorganizes the otherwise bizarre components of the dream so that it has an apparent meaning called the manifest dream. The process of dream interpretation involves decoding the manifest dream content to discover the real hidden meaning of the dream. called the latent dream. Freud insisted that dream life is as important as real life. Stripped to bare essentials, a dream unanalyzed was to Freud an unopened letter.
In every dream, there is always another story. There is more than meets the eye. In 1977, director Robert Altman found artistic inspiration and a solution to a problem. In his dreams, the film he had been preparing to direct was cancelled. His wife was ill, and he needed a new project.
I dreamed a title, Three Women. I dreamed that Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek were in it, and I knew it was kind of what the genre of it was. And so I woke up, and I took the pad next to my bed, and I wrote down my notes about that, and I went back to sleep. And then I dreamed...
more about the thing, and I saw this place in the desert, kind of a bar and a shack, and I woke up and I wrote down some notes, and I went back to sleep, and then I called my production manager, and I said, go out in the desert and look for this kind of place, et cetera, et cetera, and I made some notes, and I went back to sleep, and I woke up. Notes or notepad next to Robert Altman's bed. It had all been a dream, but it was one that came true. Three women was contracted to be made 11 days later. What's that?
Oh, that's just Willie. She paints those weird things all over the place. Three women, it has a dream-like quality to it. This problem that I had, I solved within the confines of my own mind, but when I was asleep.
So I've just learned through the years, practiced trusting. Not necessarily what I dream, but that I will dream. And perhaps an answer to whatever the problem is will come out of that.
I can talk about a dream that I had 47 years ago, which is as vivid in my mind as it was when it happened, and changed my entire life. I dreamed I was lying in a field, a beautiful field of flowers. with my baby and suddenly there appeared a black monster or horse, a bête noire, which is a black beast in French, and this beast was trying to trample us and to kill us and to ruin us. And I realized, noire is also schwarz in German.
And I was married to a man, the father of my child, by the name of Schwartz. And I knew then I had to get out of this marriage. I just couldn't possibly stay in it. I never thought of it before, until I had the dream, and then I knew, out. The Freud family moved to Vienna when Sigmund was four years old.
He was born in Moravia in 1856, the eldest of seven children of Jacob, a Jewish wool merchant, and his wife Amelia. The Freuds were poor during most of Freud's youth, but always sacrificed to give him the best possible education. Young Sigmund was an exceptionally gifted student.
His parents think that Freud's work is the most, little Freud, little Sigmund's work is the most important thing that goes on in the apartment. Everybody else be quiet, no piano, no noise, little Sigmund is working. The brilliant young Freud went to the University of Vienna and trained as a neurologist. After school he began a career in research, but lack of money forced him to start a small medical practice.
At the age of 30 he married Martha Bernays. the daughter of a distinguished German-Jewish family. In the Victorian Austria of Freud's youth, psychology was still in its infancy. Mental illness was thought to be caused by a malfunction in a body fluid.
Psychoanalysis did not exist. Dreams had only just begun to lose their mythic quality as messages from the gods or warnings of impending disaster. Times have changed, yet reports of premonitory dreams are still common.
I had this dream not long ago that revealed to me the death of my mother. I was just dreaming that I was in the church with my mother, and we were singing and glorifying the Lord. And suddenly, there was a man covered with blood.
He burst into the church, and everybody was running. I, too, I was running. To my greatest surprise, my mother was standing.
waiting to know what was going on with this man. And I was so frightened, so scared from the dream, that I opened my eyes and I walked home. And five days later, I received a phone call that my mother had an accident, and she died. By the end of the 19th century, consciousness began to be seen as a rational process. It was also believed that behind all psychological functioning, there had to be a physical origin.
a biological cause for every mental effect. Freud, too, viewed the human brain in mechanical terms, somewhat like a steam engine. He saw the brain as a complex neural network in which neurons build up electrical charge and, as a result, require discharging.
Freud envisioned that dreams occurred during discharge. Freud comes at a period in the history of Europe where there has been this tremendous successful liberalism, this great industrial revolution, the apparent triumph of science and ideas, and at the same time this increasingly powerful feeling that something is amiss, that things aren't working right, that aggression, violence and hatred are still major issues. The late 19th century brought an uneasy mixture of hard science and speculation to attempts to understand the mind.
I was so helpless. A young Austrian woman named Anna O. had been seeing Dr. Joseph Breuer for severe hysteria. She suffered from speech disorders, found food repulsive, and experienced frightening visions.
Breuer tried hypnosis and discovered that when in trance... Anna recalled traumatic memories and her symptoms disappeared. The talking cure had been invented.
Breuer recounted the case to his friend and protege, Dr. Sigmund Freud, who was fascinated. After 14 years of collaboration, the two men published Studies on Hysteria. From this work emerged the field of psychoanalysis.
After publication, Freud increasingly focused on the sexual nature of the psyche. Breuer and Freud parted ways one year after their book came out, the first of many Freud friendships to end bitterly. When Breuer showed himself to have reservations about various ideas promulgated by Freud, particularly those impinging on the realms of sexuality and so on, Freud took umbrage and I would... Read it as Freud having engineered, in effect, a falling out between them. Freud's theorizing about the sexual origins of mental illness was scandalous to polite society.
I think Freud was very brave in his emphasis on sex. He pointed out something that needed to be pointed out, which is that Victorian culture was, at least in its formal sense, very prudish sexually and distorted human relations through, you know, the way that sex was ignored or suppressed or limited, and that lots of odd things went on around the edges in terms of human behavior to avoid those prescriptions and... Lots of behavior as a result of shame and family conflict and so on that revolved around sex.
Okay, I'm in my kitchen making a meal, and I'm dressed in this little T-shirt and jeans, and this older man comes in my apartment, and he tells me I'm dressed inappropriately. I feel very embarrassed. He then gets on the floor, and he tries to make love to me.
I get very scared and very upset, and I run out the apartment, down the stairs as he's after me. I'm now on the street, and I'm trying to call my boyfriend, but he's not there, so I... I'm still very scared and I run downtown to my girlfriend's house, but she's not there. She just got married and gone on her honeymoon.
I feel unsafe and I feel I have nowhere to go. And then I woke up. Freud could find a sexual reading for almost any image that occurs in dreams. It is this emphasis on sexuality for which he has been most criticized. Freud simply thought that this criticism...
was wrong and contributions from other fields including anthropology and art history and literary criticism have in fact shown the ubiquity of sexual themes in all of human thought. Freud tended to look for sexual symbols and he tended to find them although for him the most important element at least as he describes in the interpretation of dreams is not the appearance of an object point the object means phallic A round object with a hole means a woman's genitals. That's not his best style of interpretation. His Freudian style of interpretation is to ask the question, what is this doing in the dream? What does it mean for the dreamer?
The dreamer gives significance to the symbols. Before the rift between Breuer and Freud, Breuer introduced Freud to Dr. Wilhelm Fliess, who was to become his confidant. Freud and Fliess were both insiders and outsiders. highly trained Jewish doctors working beyond the frontiers of accepted medicine. They were obviously very, very close.
The fact that they lived in different cities, Vienna and Berlin, allowed them to correspond and at the same time, almost paradoxically, prevented them getting too close, or one might better say, seeing too much of the truth about one another. For years, the two men corresponded regularly, exchanging ideas, thoughts. and findings, but their relationship also turned sour. In 1903, the two men met for the last time.
Fleece by then had every good reason to suspect Freud's ingenuousness, to fear that Freud was intent on plagiarizing him, or more bluntly, stealing from Fleece a theory of bisexuality, which by then Fleece had been working on for nearly four years. And... Fleece declined the invitation to go on this hiking exhibition, convinced that Freud had a plan to lure him to his death.
Freud confessed... An intimate friend and hated enemy have always been necessary requirements of my emotional life. Loss and loneliness seemed to play a large part in the life of Sigmund Freud.
He was mourning his father, who died in 1896. while he was writing the interpretation of dreams. This book has a subjective significance for me personally, a significance which I only grasped after I had completed it. It was, I found, a portion of my own self-analysis, my reaction to my father's death, that is to say, to the most important event, the most poignant loss of a man's life.
Many of the dreams and the interpretation of dreams that he discusses and many of the themes that he discusses are dreams and themes about how do you live with loss? How do you make sense of the past when elements of the past are going to disappear from your life and how do you retain them in some form that's meaningful? Mothers and fathers play a huge role in Freudian analysis. Although he changed his mind a number of times about specifics, Freud was certain that boys'and girls'relationships to their parents were crucial to development, sexually and psychically. He believed the full emancipation of women would mean the end of an ideal.
After all, he concluded, nature has destined women, through beauty, charm, and sweetness, for something else. There's a lot of emphasis been put on Freud's diminishing women by talking about penis envy. Freud was wrong about women in a number of ways, and one aspect of his being wrong was that he saw mothers as entirely benign.
Otto Ranke said that, you know, essentially that Freud knew no mother other than the good mother. He was afraid to say anything critical because of his own anxieties around his own mother and that whenever he approached that subject, he veered off. Modern psychoanalysts believe that little girls develop a sense of femininity very early in childhood.
If a woman feels persistent inferiority to men, development has gone profoundly wrong. Freud himself was dissatisfied with his theory of female sexuality, and analysts ever since his time have critiqued it and revised it. In part, Freud has been misinterpreted. For example, when he talked about penis envy and feelings of inferiority in women, he wasn't saying that women should feel that way. He was saying that they often did.
Before Freud, most people believed in... unconscious will alone, Freud forced us to recognize the unknown power of our unconscious. Like most revolutionaries, he has been both damned and praised.
Freud's self-image was one of the conquistador, that here is this warrior against repressive forces who would set us all free and would allow us to fulfill the human potential, even though he had some doubts whether we could really do that. He's never in any doubt that one day he's going to arrive. This is the Sigmund Freud who, in 1896, with his seduction theory, proclaimed to his medical colleagues that he had discovered no less than the source of the Nile of neuropathology.
That's a quote. This is the same Sigmund Freud who, a decade later, or thereabouts, would claim to have deciphered the, quote, riddle of the Sphinx. In terms of his theory of infantile sexuality, this is quite a conceit. By 1897, Freud considered his seduction theory, the assumption that all neuroses are caused by childhood sexual abuse, invalid. He concluded that many patients who cited abuse had no more than active imaginations, or that Freud himself had encouraged false confessions.
Recently, there have been a wave of accusations of sexual abuse from people who suddenly remember what they allegedly repressed years ago. Although Freud withdrew his seduction theory and would have regarded most of these charges with skepticism, his theory of repression and the unconscious is being used, most Freudians would say misused, to assert their authenticity. Among certain feminist circles. It's hell that he changed his mind about what was called the seduction theory, i.e. that many of his patients actually had been sexually abused, because of concerns about his career and his reputation, that it was a piece of intellectual dishonesty on his part. This reading simply isn't true.
Freud's discovery of infantile sexual fantasies was one of his most important discoveries. And he was very clear about this, and at the same time, he was convinced that a certain small number of children had been sexually abused, and he never gave up the idea that certain neuroses were caused by that. The study of Freud is sometimes considered more of a religion. science, and yet when measured against scientific findings, at least some of Freud's theories hold true.
Everybody dreams, probably. Although many of us forget them, during a normal night's sleep we dream for about one-fifth of the time. Our most vivid dreams come to us during REM, rapid eye movement sleep. They can be as intense and emotional as real-life experiences. At the Bethesda Sleep Disorder Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, experiments on dreams and sleep are conducted almost daily.
He's had a scene change, you know, like he's gone from one room to another, or the whole theme and place of the dream has changed. Patients are attached to electrodes which measure various impulses, including REM. EEG readings, which record the electrical activity of the brain, show that these periods of rapid eye movement correspond with particular brain rhythms.
The notion that REM sleep, the physiology, has somehow destroyed, altered, or made Freud untenable, I think we too quickly, my colleagues, even my psychoanalytic colleagues, jump much too quickly to the notion that Freudian theory is somehow put aside by the laboratory work. Freud theorized that dream function helps keep us asleep. REM theory supports this idea. The more REM we have, the more we dream.
Since the most REM happens in the second half of the night when we're more likely to wake up, that is also when most dreams occur, which with their censoring, keep us asleep. I dreamt I was high up in an apartment building watching a volcano erupt when suddenly I heard a terrible noise and I looked out and saw a huge tidal wave coming and at that moment I suddenly thought my children and I turned around and saw each of my three children being swept out. of the building. The next moment I was in the water swimming after them and I was trying to find them and I was crying and crying in the water. Then I was on dry land looking for them and I saw all these dead people lying around.
And first I found my eldest daughter and she was wet but she was alive. Then my middle daughter and I knew for sure my youngest daughter was dead. And sure enough I saw her lying out among all these other people and she was dead. And I was crying and crying and I woke up. The next giant of dream interpretation was Carl Jung.
At first, an ardent disciple of Freud. Although Jung and Freud did not formally part ways in... In 1913, they had conflicting opinions from the start. Jung agreed with Freud that the unconscious plays an important role in neurosis.
He also believed dreams dramatically influenced the psyche. But Jung's notion of the collective unconscious, the theory that we are shaped by a common memory of myths and images, was a strong departure from Freud's theories. Jung also rejected Freud's insistence that life energy is primarily sexual. Jung converted many to his new form of therapy, but his approach to psychology owed much to the father of psychoanalysis.
The history of modern psychotherapy begins with Freud, and a historical overview has to include him. But I think there was a sense that when I trained, that Freud was almost everything, and to the extent that he wasn't everything, there was a sort of hub and spoke. arrangement where Freud was at the center and everything else was some variant of Freud or comment on Freud whereas I'd say now even within psychotherapy Freud has become one among many of course psychoanalysis is still the best most complexly elaborated theory of the human mind Freud wrote prolifically after the interpretation of dreams was published.
His later volumes included a study of the individual's relationship to society, a psychoanalytic account of Moses and the Jews, and more detailed work on the ego and the id. By 1926, Freud was an internationally known psychiatrist. Anna Freud followed her father's footsteps into psychoanalysis. Providing Freud with a collaborator and companion until the end of his life.
From 1923, Freud suffered from cancer of the jaw and palate, which required repeated surgery and radiation treatment. For the next 15 years until his death, Freud was never without complaint, at times enduring terrible pain. In 1933, the rise of the Third Reich infiltrated Freud's life. Because Freud was a Jew with rebellious ideas, psychoanalysis was blacklisted.
Book burnings staged by the Nazis consigned Freud's works to the flames. Exit visas from Austria were difficult to obtain, and Dr. Freud, even in old age, retained a fighting spirit. But in March 1938, the Gestapo appeared at Freud's home and left, taking Anna with them.
Concern for his daughter was the event that broke Freud's will. When Anna came back the same day, Freud agreed to emigrate. Influential friends in France and England bribed the Nazis for Freud's safe passage out of Austria.
On June 4, 1938... Freud, Martha, and Anna were able to leave Vienna. Freud's own words best express his most poignant escape. The feeling of triumph on being liberated is too strongly mixed with sorrow, for in spite of everything, I still greatly love the prison from which I have been released.
Freud died in London in 1939, 15 months after leaving Vienna. This is one of these dreams where I don't know how it began, how it ended. All I remember is that I was sitting on top of a roof with several other people and I was holding the hand of this little girl, maybe five or six year old girl. And we are all listening to this piano music which was coming from nowhere. We were listening, and as soon as a certain melody in the music appeared, the girl turned into a bird, and she starts to float away.
So I have to hold her tight so that she won't leave me. That's my dream. Much recent criticism of Freud's ideas has centered upon his rigidly ordered view of the mind.
Constant struggles among the id, ego and superego. Research now suggests that rather than continually competing with each other, the different personality components actually coexist as partners. Dreams are much less important even in psychoanalysis than they used to be. In fact, I think a lot of the impetus for dream interpretation today comes from patients who expect that that ought to be part of the therapy and who, unasked, bring in dreams. And I don't...
know whether that is a matter of fashion or a matter of technique. I mean, psychotherapy today is so focused on concrete circumstance and external circumstance, and it's so much pressing for quick change that it may be that the dream is not the royal road or the best avenue toward the kind of information that therapists want to deal with. The future of psychotherapy has become uncertain due to the increasing success of drugs in the treatment of disorders from depression to schizophrenia.
There is unquestionably a place for psychopharmacological treatment of emotional disturbances. And Freud, from the very beginning, speculated that there might be in the future... chemical treatments for some of the conditions which he had to treat with psychoanalysis.
This man who spent his life imploring patients to tell him their troubles was less anxious to confess his own story. We will probably never know why Freud destroyed many letters and documents. Perhaps he thought some things were better left unread. I was lying there, and there were thousands of snakes and of spiders. Freud was a very vigorous speculator.
A lot of his speculation, from our perspective, is just wrong. His view of women is maybe in some ways progressive for its day, but not generous by our standards, not reasonable. by our standards, just wrong.
Certainly the case can be made that many sorts of people have been injured by the application of Freudian theory. Biographers today are making the case that Freud did not act in good faith in certain circumstances. circumstances. Of course, he did so many things that even if he very largely acted in good faith, there would be important areas where he might not have been.
He was an ambitious, driven man. He was a contentious, sort of cantankerous person, generous in certain ways as well. And I think it is a tribute to how large and influential he is that every aspect of his personality has come under scrutiny. Despite his detractors, our culture has found Freud and his unsettling vision of the mind compelling enough to argue about for close to a century. His ghost is not an easy one to live with.
Many of us find ourselves in situations throughout our lives where we don't know who we are and what we need to do. And Freud's response to that is, make sense of your past. Find a way of making meaning out of who you have been and where you have come from.
That is a way of giving yourselves more possibilities in the future. So that our choices in the present are richer, more complex, more nuanced, and in a word, more free, because we now have an interpretation. of the past. The interpretation of dreams was Freud's way of making sense of the past through signs or symptoms that people thought were meaningless.
Whether or not one takes the dream as the royal route to the unconscious, it seems to me the lesson of this great book is that we make sense of our past because we need to be more free in the present when we have intense, sometimes painful conflict. Perhaps not so much has changed since Dr. Freud invited us to lie down on the couch. We still understand only the smallest fragments of the human mind and its dreams. At the very least, Sigmund Freud encouraged us to examine ourselves. The analysis session is not over.