Hi everyone I know this is late but here my reading on Freud!
When I first saw that we had to read Freud I thought that it was Ironic that after 4 years of psychology I never really read something written by Freud. As I started to read I had a hard removing myself from the negative view of Freud that comes from psychology. I thought it was funny that is psyc. You always joke that Freud was high on cocaine when he came up with so many theories, and in the text he talks about his contribution to the study of cocaine and its pain numbing properties. In general what stood out to me the most from his dream interpretation is the idea of condensation. He believes that there is a big difference from the “manifest content” of a dream and the “dream thought” and this difference is due to condensation. I believe this idea is interesting in literature because there is a big difference in what we read and what the author is trying to say. For example in the story we read in class MAUPASSANT, you might just see it as simple story but as you look into the context and the background of the writer you do move into deeper and more profound interpretation. I do think though that Freud takes it to far, the problem with this is that you will start to make connections that are not really there. When Freud talks about the woman who dreams with beetles and concludes that it all has to do with her sexual desires towards her husband he leaves out the part of the daughter who use to kill beetles when she was little. So he really only looks at what supports his own theses and ignores all the rest. This can also happen to us when reading we might just look for an interpretation we like but not necessarily what the author is trying to interpret.
In conclusion I think that we should not have such a negative view of Fred because he was a thinker and his ideas have helped many fields come up with legitimate theories especially in psychology.