On Dreams

Sigmund Freud – 1901

 

People have built entire careers out of discrediting Freud, but his name and influence live on, and I don’t believe that could be if there was nothing of value there in the first place, something solid and true that resists the weathering of time and attack.  To willfully ignore or dismiss Freud is – to me – no different than trying to erase Picasso from the history of art because his private life is at odds with today’s mores.  I think we do young people a disservice by encouraging them to not bother with anything that doesn’t blend nicely and without controversy with popular taste.  I’ve found that once I got past the cliché image of Freud as the bespectacled, bearded, repressed Austrian Jew who plastered his own issues onto the patients he claimed to be helping, and actually started reading his own words instead of critical synopses, I saw Freud equally as a scientist immersed in pure research and a philosopher with interests far beyond the field of psychology.  In fact, his work in psychoanalysis was ultimately merged into a comprehensive study of human history; including art, anthropology, politics and religion.  On Dreams is an abridged version of Freud’s mammoth and groundbreaking book The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) that he grudgingly agreed to produce at his publisher’s request in order to make his work more accessible to a lay audience.  As such, it’s as good a place as any to start reading Freud if you want to.  The portrait of the writer that I immediately get is not someone with a closed mind demanding that the world accept his view of things, but of someone humbly laying out his findings as a first glimpse at a whole new continent that future generations will explore and map.  The book uses many dream recollections from Freud’s interviews with subjects, and a few of his own as well, to illustrate that, from childhood on, a major, but not sole, function of dreams is wish-fulfilment, which in youth are obvious enough but in adulthood become elaborate fantasies that seem to compensate for the profound absence of satisfaction in the lives of people in industrialized societies.  I see humility in Freud’s writing, not arrogance, and the fact that he refused to propose a rosy state of mental health that should be attainable with the right combination of techniques is all the more reason to accept him as a great author, intellect, scientist and philosopher.