This week I am having trouble getting to grips with Freud’s take on things. WHY does everything have to revert back to sex, or childhood, or parents? I found it almost funny reading about the woman who had a dream about the beetles and being shocked when she was told it was OBVIOUSLY because she is concerned about relations with her husband. I think the fact that she had seen a drowning moth just before she had been to sleep was a more plausible explanation of animal suffering in her dream. Or maybe she had recently read Kafka, and the image of the beetle had stayed with her. I think there could be hundreds of possible interpretations and Freud should have commented on these instead of referring her dream instantly to sex.
I found interesting his thoughts on displacement, and think this part of his theory plausible. The fact that important things in the latent dream-thoughts are represented by things which appear to be unattached to them in the manifest content of the dream, and vice versa makes sense. Also the fact that one’s dream can to be about one thing whereas the dream-thoughts show it is really about something else also makes sense to me.
The emotion associated with one idea or experience is detached from it and attached to another one seems again another plausible suggestion. Last night I actually had a rather odd dream, and I wonder what Freud would have to say about this – I was on a farm with my mum, and we stole a pig. We thought about NOT stealing the pig but the thought of having a pig as a pet was really appealing, so we decided to still steal the pig. It wasn’t a dirty pig, or a thin pig, or an overly fat pig, just a rather nice pig we thought would make a good pet – we weren’t going to eat it, just keep it. I was actually intrigued to see what this might have meant, and on searching ‘pig dreams’ numerous things came up in my Google search; some interpretations hinted at my ‘gluttonous nature’ (I did have an extra After Eight last night), others suggested that my luck was about to change (better buy a lottery ticket, or perhaps take more care when crossing the road). Yet when interpreting dreams in a Freudian manner I know I must not look at the pig itself but what it might suggest – what kind of ‘displacement’ could have occurred in the dream. Freud suggests that through associations we can infer the real meaning of the dream, which is all well and good but where is the intrigue when we know everything will hark back to sex? I agree with his theory of displacement and condensation yet the handling of it in psychoanalysis seems rather shallow, if I may say that. I guess for now I will have to content myself in the knowledge that my dream about owning a pig does not in fact mean that I desire this, that it is associated to something else more profound (I hope). Though I have always quite liked the idea of being a farmer.
Ahhhhhh!!!!! Mais Madame, of course, this was a sexual dream. Pigs being OBVIOUSLY how we see men, it seems rather clear that you were looking for taming the dirty side of sexuality with the help/blessing of your mum… NO???
…. now might be the time to tell you that the reading of Freud and Lacan might have shaken me a little bit as I dreamt a couple of days ago that I was finding in my sister’s commode (which was actually mine before, inherited from my grand-father’s house and I think used by my dad) …so I was finding again old brand new underwear that I had forgotten about…what does that mean???
…I don’t know but it surely made my rhyzomatics…euh sorry, zygomatics work!!!