Classics and the Western Canon discussion

VI: The Dream-work

Freud endeavors to demonstrate the relationship between manifest dream-content (the images and actions of the dream itself) and the latent dream-thoughts that underlie the contents. The manifest content is seen as a picture-puzzle where each piece holds some kind of meaning, often quite removed but associated with its representation.

a. The Work of Condensation

He has already given examples of dream contents that are composites -- the face of his friend R. and his uncle Josef, for example. The composite nature of these images makes them ambiguous, but it also reveals an association between the elements that are mashed together, or condensed, and finding what they have in common can reveal the meaning of the image. Freud claims that "the elements with the most and best support are best qualified for admission to the dream-content, rather like election..."

This strikes me as an excellent observation, but I'm still unsure about the "election" process. He considers word associations and word play extensively, and I suppose there is a parallel between language usage and composite dream images. One word can have multiple meanings, and one meaning can be described in different ways with multiple words. This paves the way for immense creativity and any number of wild associations, many of which *suggest* meaning but are ultimately meaningless. If I read him correctly, he is arguing that the elements with the greatest "popularity" are the ones that get picked, but then they get distorted, displaced, condensed, etc., and the interpreter has to find coherence in them.

He gives three dream examples, and the process of consdensation in each is pretty clear. I went through the second one, "A Pleasant Dream" with some care and the thing that struck me most is that Freud concludes that the dream is sexual in nature and has a lot to do with the patient's ex. The troubling thing is that much of his interpretation relies on an association that Freud makes himself when he connects the dream to a play that the patient hasn't seen, and the dream itself has no women in it. How are the associations that Freud makes justified?

b. The Work of Displacement

Freud claims that valuable dream elements may be replaced by insignificant ones, and he "assumes that dream-displacement comes about through the influence of censorship, "the censorship of endopsychic defence." So there may be no women in the "Pleasant Dream" example because the patient has repressed or censored the sexual content that is his real concern. This of course means that the dream is about exactly what is being censored.

c. The Means of Representation in Dreams

Most of this section is Freud's attempt to explain how dreams express causal and logical relations, i.e. the mechanics of association. Images may be successive, or one image may be transformed into another (even if they are contradictory -- contradictions are disregarded) and in this way identified with each other. The tendency is for images to be unified in some way, often with one image covering up or hiding the other in the process. (Which sends Freud running for his pry bar to see what's underneath.) Dream images often appear to be the opposite of what they mean. What is least vivid is often the most important.

d. Regard for Representability

How does the psyche express an abstract idea? Language, of course. "The entire field of verbal punning is available for the dream-work to use." (Which makes me wonder if Joyce had read this book before he wrote Finnegans Wake.) But how much of this verbalizing is done in the mind of the unconscious dreamer, and how much of it is attributable to the conscious interpreter?

Thomas wrote: ""The entire field of verbal punning is available for the dream-work to use." (Which makes me wonder if Joyce had read this book before he wrote Finnegans Wake.) "

I had exactly the same thought. Joyce's artistic process is founded on condensation and displacement (and of course verbal puns). Whether Joyce read the book or not, Freud's ideas were clearly an influence.

Not a spoiler, just Joyce stuff.

(view spoiler)[According to Richard Ellmann, Joyce was familiar with Freud but downplayed his importance. It was suggested that he owed Freud a debt for his "stream of consciousness" technique, but Joyce said that his technique owed more to Edouard Dujardin than Freud. He also thought that Vico's ideas preceded Freud's.

He seems to have thought more of Jung, but not much more. Jung had read and appreciated Ulysses, and he told Joyce that Molly's sililoquy at the end displayed an impressive understanding of female psychology. (Which prompted Nora, Joyce's wife, to say "He knows nothing at all about women.") But Jung was ambivalent about Ulysses as a whole and wrote an introduction to Stuart Gilbert's commentary that Joyce felt was "rude". He said that Jung seemed to have read Ulysses cover to cover without cracking a smile. One of his friends suggested the reason might be his name. Translated into German, Joy(ce) is "Freud". (hide spoiler)]

Thomas wrote: "... He said that Jung seemed to have read Ulysses cover to cover without cracking a smile. One of his friends suggested the reason might be his name. Translated into German, Joy(ce) is "Freud".

I loved that story about Jung, Joyce and the joke about his name.

Susanna wrote: "Perhaps Freud's Interpretation of Dreams has been more influential from a literary standpoint, rather than a scientific perspective".
Freud IoD has been seminally and continuously influential in the plastic arts, Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism. And today it continues in the arts while only of historic interest in psychiatry.

Monica wrote:"I loved that story about Jung, Joyce and the joke about his name."

Would that be the sentence "She was Jung and easily Freudend?"

Susanna wrote: "From my current fiction reading:

"There was a rumor that Project 9 engineers had figured out a way to replace the random jumble of our nighttime dreaming with organized thinking and real-life prob..."

This raises the very interesting question of where scientific creativity comes from. How does a "stroke of genius" arise? How much of this is conscious calculation, and how much comes out of the blue as unconscious epiphany? One famous example is the chemist August Kekule, who claimed to have discovered the form of the benzene molecule in a dream.

The novelist Cormac McCarthy was fascinated by this. His short essay is definitely worth a look for anyone interested in the question of how the unconscious communicates with the conscious mind.

I call it the Kekulé Problem because among the myriad instances of scientific problems solved in the sleep of the inquirer Kekulé’s is probably the best known. He was trying to arrive at the configuration of the benzene molecule and not making much progress when he fell asleep in front of the fire and had his famous dream of a snake coiled in a hoop with its tail in its mouth—the ouroboros of mythology—and woke exclaiming to himself: “It’s a ring. The molecule is in the form of a ring.” Well. The problem of course—not Kekulé’s but ours—is that since the unconscious understands language perfectly well or it would not understand the problem in the first place, why doesnt it simply answer Kekulé’s question with something like: “Kekulé, it’s a bloody ring.” To which our scientist might respond: “Okay. Got it. Thanks.”

Why the snake? That is, why is the unconscious so loathe to speak to us? Why the images, metaphors, pictures? Why the dreams, for that matter.

https://nautil.us/the-kekul-problem-2...

Henri Poincare discusses this very point in the chapter 'Mathematical Creation' in his book Science and Method, to which I refer the interested reader. It is a protracted discussion, but the sum of it is that sudden illumination is the result of long prior work by the unconscious.

Sam wrote: "Monica wrote:"I loved that story about Jung, Joyce and the joke about his name."

Would that be the sentence "She was Jung and easily Freudend?""

Emoji of laughing face!

While we are on famous dream results, it is said that Rob't Louis Stevenson dreamt his story of "Dr. Jekyl & Mr. Hyde."
Regarding the question of why the unconscious does not speak to us more directly: 1) it would not then be The Unconscious. 2) it serves a protective function, allowing us, for example, to drive a car without demonic distractions. 3) Kekule's dream. The image of the Ouroboros may be signifying more than the benzene ring. If I have my scientific history right, that benzene ring was the founding event of synthetic chemistry.
(eh, does anyone notice that everything is becoming Freudian?)

The work of Phillip K. Dick also explores the merging of the conscious and the unconscious.