The Interpretation of Dreams

"I chose it because I like to think of Freud’s own trajectory, Freud biographically, personally. After all, the first analysis is his self-analysis. There would probably not be psychoanalysis or even our therapeutic times without that. Then, too, Freud is a great literary modernist. I stress ‘literary’, because Freud actually experiments with form; he infuses scientific and medical thinking with literary form. He trained in science. He trained as a neurologist before he became a doctor. He’s interested in physiology, in the anatomy of the brain, in aphasia. He’s interested in all these things, and early on does experiments on eels. He’s interested in facts and hypotheses. But when it comes to thinking about patients and understanding the people who come to see him in his early days of practice, let alone attempting to understand himself, he both turns to literature and writes ‘with literature,’ with his own wide reading. He invents the genre of the case history, a kind of composite between a medical case and a short story. With The Interpretation of Dreams , he invents a special kind of confessional, reflective, meandering narrative genre, through which you can both argue theoretically and also look inward and write about the self and the way the mind works. Through this book you see how the Freudian self takes on layers and layers of significance. He leads us not only into dreams and their occluded meanings, but into memory: for Freud, the most important dreams take you back into childhood. These memories of childhood are woven into fresh understandings of childhood experience and more generally into ideas of how dreams hide meanings and how interpretation can take place. I always think of Proust in relation to Freud because of this focus on memory, but Proust never read Freud. Joyce did. “Freud is like the weather. He’s everywhere” We could ask where Freud’s thinking about the Oedipus complex came from. It came from observation of his own family life to begin with. But why Oedipus? Freud had a proper gymnasium education and was steeped in the classics . He’d read Sophocles and Oedipus very closely as an adolescent. So he uses the great literature, the great literary characters that are familiar to him. This usage is akin to what other modernists do. Joyce, in Ulysses , gives us an odyssey through dear, dirty Dublin, where God is a shout in the street. Freud too looks through the ordinary, the detritus of everyday Viennese life—dustbins, hidden, discarded matter, the refuse of the day metamorphosed into dream. This is where meaning or clues lie. Dreams, missteps, mis-directions, mis-sayings, mis-rememberings, mistakes: all are matter to be interpreted. The individual’s symptoms, blocks, repetitions, obsessions, fixations, are nudged into new directions by uncovering such matter through language, through freely associated language. Freud’s dream book is thus one iteration of autobiography—memoir as discovery through the interpretation of those insignificant things shared by all, dreams. And within that personal investigation, Freud interpolates a universalized scientific treatise. The Interpretation is science, plus literature, plus an analysis of the self. Freud’s convoluted dream narratives are such fun. You get this extraordinary portrait of Viennese life through them, of his own childhood history, too. One of his own dreams starts with the sleeping Freud in the train station watching a former Austrian prime minister getting into a far better carriage than Freud has got, one undoubtedly reserved for free—while Freud has had to pay for his… The prime minister’s carriage also has a new loo in it and needless to say, Freud’s doesn’t. Freud describes all this in a graphic way. The dream feels like reality. In the middle of this dream night, Freud has to go and pee, something we all do, though it hasn’t perhaps been a regular subject for literature. (Remember ground-breaking Ulysses begins with a piss). These bodily matters are key Freudian subjects, hidden within our social lives. Excreta, the things we pay little attention to or find dirty, take on a significance. The Count Thun dream (as it is called after the prime minister) ends up taking us back into Freud’s childhood in Moravia in what is now Czechoslovakia. As a small boy, around four years old, he wanders into his parents’ bedroom at night, and finding that he needs to urinate does so in his parents’ chamber pot. At which point his father says, ‘this child will amount to nothing.’ Freud names this as a wish fulfilment dream, one of his core ideas about the function of dreams, because Freud desperately wants to prove to his father—who is at the core of his writing of The Interpretation, begun after his father’s death—that he hasn’t amounted to ‘nothing,’ he has a relation with Count Thun…. So there’s a kind of joke at play here, a wish, various layers of being and meaning. All within a narrative that mixes up the kinds of languages in which writing, argument, thinking, and story take place. I think there’s a kind of contagion effect to a lot of Freud’s writing: we all have dreams and when we read about them it stimulates memory of our own… just as when we read about the family romance or daydreams or the id/ego/superego we’re drawn to think about our own. Freud is very interesting in the way in which he sets up his narrative structure in The Interpretation of Dreams . There’s a way in which he constantly argues with the very ideas he puts forward, says, ‘no, no, that’s wrong,’ then takes you somewhere else. And because he’s arguing with himself, you find yourself defending some of his arguments or attacking alongside him. Over the expanse of his work, you realise that he changes his mind and feels free to do so. Ideas are never carved in stone: they’re hypotheses. Up until the age of 50, he constantly rethinks himself and the ideas that make up psychoanalysis. He draws us into refuting him and resisting him. And then, in a sense, he gives way and says, ‘your refutation is my refutation, as well. Here’s a different version.’"