THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

These past several days have been emotionally wrenching. First the news [overblown] that Obama was trying to kill the public option. Then Harry Reid's bold move [my new hero]. Then Joe Lieberman's apparent announcement that he would vote to support a filibuster. [You have to be Jewish, as I am, to enjoy the privilege of saying openly just how thoroughly despicable he is. The knee-jerk apologists for Israel have a contemptuous epithet for people like me who dare to attack the Liebermans of this world. They call us "self hating Jews." The phrase always amuses a narcissist like me.] Just this morning, Reid and Durbin indicated that reconciliation is not off the table. [I hope my readers are sufficiently versed in the inside baseball of Washington politics to follow all of this].

Rather than try to blog by the minute, I shall let events unfold and instead talk for a bit about Freud's extraordinary book, THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS, which I have finally finished reading. Freud considered it his hauptwerk and he was not wrong. There is obviously much to say about the book, but I want to write about the courage Freud showed in writing it. Freud was, of course, thoroughly a man of his milieu, which is to say a bourgeois professional Jewish doctor in late nineteenth century Vienna. He was ferociously intelligent, classically educated [you need to be up on Greek mythology just to follow his associations to elements in his own dreams], fiercely ambitious, and prudish and proper in just the way one would expect. He routinely refers to masturbation as "pollution" and at one point, about to introduce a dream that features images of urination and defecation, he writes "I have the following short dream to relate, which every reader will read with disgust." [near the end of Chapter Six, "The Dream Work."] My copy is an old 1913 edition of the authorized translation, by A. A. Brill, of the Third Edition, and pasted into the front fly leaf is a slip of paper that reads: "Publisher's Note: The sale of this book is limited to Members of the Medical, Scholastic, Legal, and Clerical professions."

Despite the almost universal rejection he faced when he announced his clinical findings, Freud persevered, acknowledging openly in the accounts of his own dreams the intensity of his desire for professional success and recognition. The fact seems to be that had Freud pursued a more conventional neurological career, he might have actually been appointed to the professorship he so desired [though the fact that he was Jewish worked against him]. Instead, he followed where his research led him, violating enormously the powerful social taboos of his milieu.

The example I find most enchanting concerns the issue of infant sexuality. It was an unquestionable premise of all psychiatric discussion in his earlier days that babies and little children are asexual, only exhibiting sexual feelings and wishes upon entering puberty. But patient after patient, under the hypnosis that was then Freud's principal therapeutic technique [learned from the great French neurologist, Charcot], reported having been sexually molested by her father as a young child. Freud's reports of these findings scandalised his audience. He was, after all, talking about upstanding Viennese bourgeois. Eventually Freud concluded that the reports were actually accounts of infantile wishes, not experiences, an extremely important realization. But this, of course, made things even worse! So, the fathers were not abusers; the little girls were sex mad creatures lusting after their fathers!

We are now so accustomed to these ideas -- thanks, of course, to Freud -- that it is extremely difficult for us to think ourselves into the world that Freud inhabited, and to understand the strength of the inhibitions he had to overcome in order to do his revolutionary work.

Well, enough already. If you haven't read it, I strongly suggest spending several weeks with THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS.

READING RECOMMENDATION

Some time ago, as I was preparing my lectures on Marx for the OSHER program, I conceived the idea of following those lectures with a series of "Thought of ..." courses devoted to some of the great social thinkers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries whose insights have been lost to us, or have been distorted by the passage of time. My first thought was to offer a course on The Thought of Sigmund Freud, and I tentatively decided to follow that with courses on The Thought of Max Weber and The Thought of Karl Mannheim.

The Freud course has now actually been announced, and will be given this Spring. I had intended to build the course around the brilliant book on Freud by Richard Wollheim, which I had read many decades earlier. But re-reading the Wollheim in Paris in September, I concluded that it was much too technically difficult to serve as the basic reading for such a series of lectures. Accordingly, I ordered from Amaazon.com a fat paperback FREUD READER edited by the distinguished historian Peter Gay. [Full disclosure: at Columbia in '68, Gay and I crossed swords in a debate before more than a thousand students, he defending the university administration and I defending the students. Gay, who had been hugely popular as a lecturer, was so personally affronted by the negative reaction of the students that he accepted an offer from Yale, and finished his career there -- a great loss for Columbia, needless to say.] My current plan is to read the 800 page collection in the next month, and choose from it appropriate selections for the course.

I should perhaps explain that I have absolutely no academic credentials to underwrite my offering of this course. Still, it is true that I have over the course of my long life spent twenty years in one form of therapy or another -- teenage analysis, a full scale Freudian psychoanalysis, couples therapy, and once-a-week counseling, all by medically trained psychoanalysts. I have the sort of insight into psychoanalysis that a lump of clay has into pottery.

Gay's reader opens with "An Autobiographical Study"written by Freud, near the end of his life, for inclusion in a collection of autobiographical statements by eminent physicians. I am now halfway through this forty page essay, and I can report that it is a powerful, fascinating, deeply moving piece of work. I strongly commend it to anyone reading this blog. The essay is quite reserved and contains very little of Freud's personal life. What makes it so powerful is the enormous intellectual courage and honesty he displayed at each stage in the development of what we now know as Freudian theory. To arive at an understanding of the psychoneuroses presented by his patients, Freud was forced to engage simulataneously the philosophical preconceptions concerning consciousness and mental life that had dominated western thought for more than two millennia, the prudish and close-minded prejudices both of his colleagues and of the Viennese bourgeoisie, his own internal conflicts and resistances, and the puzzling presentations and manifestations of mental illness exhibited by his patients. The clarity and determination with which he carried out this complex task is such as to command our admiration and respect. I confess that reading a portion of the essay this morning, I found tears coming to my eyes at the sheer beauty of the ideas that Freud formulated to make sense of his data.

This is an essay that is well worth your time.