well um
i have always been really interested in dream analysis, particularly because i tend to lucid dream really often. most of my dreams are really vivid and im able to control most of them to some extent! it goes from being aware that it is a dream to being able to control some aspects of the dream to being able to control the dream in its entirety, so freud’s dream analysis is interesting to me. i always heard about how freud tends to link everything happening in dreams to masturbation or penis envy or wanting to have sex with their mother, but i figured it was just an entire generalization or an inside joke. i never really fully understood to what extent it would actually be true. i was not prepared.
either way, i found that i could read freud’s writing really easily, which surprised me because i could understand most of what he was saying but not what words he was saying. i had a lot of questions about the certain terms but they were answered pretty well from the lecture!
im still kind of confused exactly who dora was attracted to, though. was she attracted to herr k and just repressed it, was she attracted to her father and repressed it? what about frau k? freud just mentioned about dora being attracted to so many different people but they didn’t necessarily contradict each other and they werent exactly super related to each other or mentioned again either.
how puzzling. im looking forward to the seminars this week, though!
-nicole
Good questions. Mainly I think Freud is saying that Dora was attracted to Herr K., and when he says she also is in love with her father this is, he claims, a re-activation of her childhood love for her father as a sort of screen to hide from herself her love for Herr K. This is what he says when she has the dream of her father coming to wake her up because the house is on fire: her father has replaced Herr K., who had also come into a room and woken her up, and she turns to her father to try to “save” her from Herr K. But ultimately this is just a coverup for her desire for Herr K.
As for Frau K., Freud says this is the deepest of her unconscious loves, the most buried (if I remember correctly–don’t have the book with me at the moment). If that’s right, I think what he means is not necessarily that this is the strongest of her loves, but rather the one that she really can’t face. And why should she have a love for Frau K? For Freud, all people have some degree of “bisexuality,” in the sense that as children we aren’t necessarily destined to become attracted to men or women exclusively, but that various environmental factors can affect this. We also are not really necessarily clearly “male” or “female” psychologically as children, but this develops over time based on our experiences (that’s why he’s puzzled about how femininity develops, because it isn’t something women just naturally fall into automatically). At any rate, that Dora may be attracted to Frau K. is not considered by him unusual, but could be a sort of holdover from earlier childhood when her love object was female (her mother).