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This week we have been looking at Freud and coming from a psychology background what I have been taught and have come to believe is that Freud was wrong; a man obsessed with sex and who did a lot of crack. He developed many hypothesis most of which were unfalsifiable thus could never be proven right or wrong. When I read the interpretation of dreams, this only confirmed my previous ideas. There are a lot of reference to sexual desire, he talks about crack (of course in a scientific sense) and his hypothesis are very ambiguous. Especially with quotes like these:
“The ideas which are most important among the dream-thoughts will almost certainly be those which occur most often in them, since the different dream-thoughts will, as it were, radiate out from them. Nevertheless a dream can reject elements which are thus both highly stressed in themselves and reinforced from many directions, and can select for its content other elements which possess only the second of these attributes.” In other words important ideas could either be present of not be present in the dream, again how can we prove or disprove this!
But after when I read “Uncanny” there were some interesting ideas that we see in obsessive compulsive disorder. Which leads me to believe that even though Freud did not develop a coherent and reliable hypothesis he did describe many things from which many theories in psychology today have been developed. For example when he talks about repetition being uncanny he says : “Taking another class of things, it is easy to see that here, too, it is only this factor of involuntary repetition which surrounds with an uncanny atmosphere what would otherwise be innocent enough, and forces upon us the idea of something fateful and unescapable where otherwise we should have spoken of “chance” only. For instance, of course attach no importance to the event when we give up a coat and get a cloakroom ticket with the number, say, 62; or when we find that our cabin on board ship is numbered 62. But the impression is altered if two such events, each in itself indifferent, happen close together, if we come across the number 62 several times in a single day, or if we begin to notice that everything which has a number – addresses, hotel-rooms, compartments in railway-trains – always has the same one, or one which at least contains the same figures.”
This idea that what makes something noticeable (uncanny) is due to the attention we give it. I would of course remember the time when I thought of a friend and two second later I get a text message but I would not remember all the time I though of a friend and did not get a text message tight away or when I did get a msg but was not thinking of the friend. So in conclusion I think there are still many things we can derive from Freud his work is not as reliable but there must be a reason why we are so intrigued by his work,
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Some questions about Freud
When I started reading Freud, this first thing that came to my mind was Woody Allen’s earlier films, in which the main character (played by Woody Allen himself) is often plagued by some insecurity and seeks help in therapy. Then by googling Freund and Woody Allen, I found in a blog a few screenshots from […]
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Is it sex…? Is it a dream…? No it’s Freud !
While I was reading the texts of Freud and Lacan, I was thinking that Psychoanalysis and narrative are related in the process that both are created. In order to discover why a patient is experimenting some symptoms, the analyst has to begin taking elements of the conscious the get to the unconscious and recreate what is going on in it. In other words, the psychoanalyst tries to build up the story, which is behind the illness, it is, the elements that are working in the unconscious, and provoke anxiety, psychosis, hysteria, etc. in the conscious level.
The process of writing is similar: the author takes elements from the reality (a conscious world, we can say) to create his or her work. Once these elements are selected, he proceeds to make his tale or novel. Of course, the main difference between a writer and an analyst, is that the first one builds a work of fiction, and the last one –it is suppose- discovers a hidden reality. But, at the end, both create a story that is presented to someone else (the audience in the case of the writer and the patient in the case of the analyst).
In the fragment of the Interpretations of Dreams that we read, for example, Freud describes an own dream and some from his patients. What he does in his analysis is create relations between the elements of the dream that are condensed, searching for the dream-thoughts. In his analysis what he does is create a story based on a specific reality. The same happens when in a process of psychoanalytical analysis, the analyst recreates the childhood experiences of the patient. He has to explore in the past, rebuild the traumatic experiences that stayed in the unconscious and then come to the conscious in form of mental or physical illness.
It is interesting that some of the fiercest critics that are made to Psychoanalysis are that in some cases the analyst builds up a false story based on the information given by the patient. For example, trying to understand which trauma that remains in the unconscious is causing a mental illness, the therapist could determine, by mistake, that the patient suffered of some kind of abuse in his childhood that is blocked in his unconscious. Then, the patient blames to whom he or she considers that committed the abuse and a terrible conflict –now in the reality, but, paradoxically, false- arises and the patient ends suffering more.