Slightly Disturbed.
by dianaquan
I don’t know if it was just me, but I felt a little disturbed quite frequently while reading this book. Especially when I read this:
“I could not help smiling; for I was able to show her exactly a fortnight earlier she had read a piece of news that concerned be in the newspaper.” (112)
When I first started reading, I thought that maybe this would be a 124 page book filled with medical terminology that would be a good thing to help me fall asleep during those nights that I lie in my bed at 3am knowing that I have to wake up in 4 hours.
Then I was introduced to Dora. It was probably Dora’s story that kept my attention to the end of this book. Everything in her retelling of events seemed to make sense and I took it all in at surface level. And then somehow Freud managed to take every little aspect of her dreams and interpreted them in several ways along with the sprinkle of medical terminology which left me with an expression that looked a little like this: O_O”
I wanted to insert a meme in pace of the type out face but then there was the whole thing about copyrights. (But here it is. http://weknowmemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/chloe-meme-original.jpg)
I guess you could say, I didn’t like this book. I didn’t passionately hate it, but I would probably never open it again.
One part that I did find interesting was the example of the bricklayer. For those of you who didn’t read/ haven’t finished, here is what I’m referring to:
“Let us imagine a workman, a bricklayer, let us say, who has fallen off a house and been crippled, and now earns his livelihood by begging at a street-corner. Let us then supposed that a miracle-worker comes along and promises him to make his crooked leg straight and capable of walking. It would be unwise, I think, to look forward to seeing an expression of peculiar bliss upon the man’s features. No doubt at the time of the accident he felt he was extremely unlucky, when he realized that he would never be able to do any more work and would have to starve or live upon charity. But since then the very thing in which the first instance threw him out of employment has become his source of income: he lives by his disablement. If that is taken from him he may become totally helpless. He has in the meantime forgotten his trade and lost his habits of industry; he has grown accustomed to idleness and perhaps to drink as well.” (37)
More often than not, I am very optimistic. When I read this passage in the book, I found that Freud had a knack of taking something that would sound like a good thing and find a way to twist it into something else. In this case, he took the opportunity of a miracle and made it look like a death wish.
Ha! Well, later on in his career Freud would have a lot to say about the “death wish.” And he was never particularly optimistic. (It might be worth asking why not.)
Meanwhile, I agree that the book is disturbing in various ways. And Freud would concur. I just wonder whether we are disturbed by it in the same ways that Freud expects us to be.
I was going to say something about this bricklayer analogy and then I read people’s blog posts and noticed you’d already mentioned it!! I thought it was awfully strange that he took a pessimistic view of this (especially implying that someone begging on a street corner is prone to idleness and alcoholism) … I have a feeling that if Freud were alive today, I wouldn’t like him very much!!