#327

p.349:

https://books.google.com/books?id=w-jfXz9T_2cC&pg=PA336&lpg=PA336&dq=Penniless,+ill,+abroad,+Henry+lay+skew+to+Henry's+American+fate,+which+was+to+be+well&source=bl&ots=eJA1mJjHUt&sig=pXY-EkReFzq0TeZaLih0xWC0pG4&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CB0Q6AEwAGoVChMImZnOz7SGyQIVTvpjCh1XAwGp#v=onepage&q=Penniless%2C%20ill%2C%20abroad%2C%20Henry%20lay%20skew%20to%20Henry's%20American%20fate%2C%20which%20was%20to%20be%20well&f=false

Picking a little bit of a squabble with Freud. My understanding of Freud is piecemeal, but I’ve gathered a few things: His obsession with childhood sexuality is understood now to be as much a reflection of his own issues as a descriptor of human psychology. Penis envy and castration complex? That just strikes me as such a misogynistic conception, shading well toward the ridiculous. There’s more of that kind of thing in Freud’s theory. Oedipus? I suppose. Id, ego, and superego? I don’t know what the conventional critique of that is—I’m aware that Freud is challenged all across his theoretical foundations—but I do know that in my own thinking about psychology, this patterns my understanding at a root level. And I do see his defense mechanisms in action all the time, in myself and in my head-shaking observation of other people. Jeez, if they could only see themselves!

B. was tormented by nightmares, so it’s understandable that he would turn to psychology and to one of its foundational figures in an attempt to understand them. And, he underent psychoanalysis himself. His critique of Freud stresses that Freud saw dreams in two ways, one as a psychosexual pageant of the dreamer’s early sexual development. The other take on dreams is that they’re the brain’s disposal of day to day rubbish. I think anyone who dreams understands at some level that this latter is often or at least occasionally what is happening. This two-pronged take on dreams is where B. is coming from when he writes, “he thought dreams were a transcript / of childhood & the day before.” So with Freud, it seems B. sees Freud as having left a massive gap between distant childhood and yesterday in his treatment of dreams. Some of the critique leveled at Freud now is that in focusing on childhood sexuality he was driven by his own sexual insecurities and projecting them on the whole human race. B.’s claim is that dreams are more than these two extremes, that in fact they’re a manifestation of the entire range of human psychological activity, ranging from and including the infant’s infatuation with his mother as well as the junk being cast off from yesterday’s trivial conflicts, but also images and symbols arising from a whole lot more. When I pay attention to my dreams, it’s this middle ground between Freud’s extremes that matters most to me. I recognize and discard the junk. I almost never recognize deep Oedipal aberrations. But I do recognize repeating images and settings, and I realize that they’re symbols of or representations of issues, people, conflicts, concepts, or places in my life that have taken on importance. Sometimes I can figure them out pretty quickly, and sometimes it takes me awhile, and some I never quite get to the bottom of. For example, there is a beautiful 50s-era house with a particular set of rooms that I recognize as being associated with my wife, and there is a barn that has gone through extensive dream-modification over the years as being representative of my boyhood. There is a particular landscape with hills and horses and lots of fences that I know is representative of a particular good friend. When I finally defended my dissertation, I had a recurring dream that only lasted awhile of sneaking into an airport, climbing into the cockpit of a big airplane, firing up the big propellers and taxiing out and flying the big thing around, just for a spin, all on the sly, not really knowing what I was doing, and landing it and parking it and getting away before I got caught. As I slowly came to accept that I actually do deserve the title and whatever accolades come from a doctorate (not so much, to be honest), this dream faded away. There are dozens of others, and they all reside in the psychological middle ground between yesterday’s detritus on one hand and the reverberations still ringing from the challenges of an infant forced to grow up on the other. I do occasionally recognize some deeper archetypes: If there is water in a recurring dream, for example, then I’ve almost always been able to figure out the woman involved or how the concept of the female is involved.

Freud is one of the great iconic philosophers of the 19^th century, up there really only with Marx and Darwin as far as the sweeping influence his thinking has come to have. If we quibble with him now, it’s mainly in the details. His ideas are so firmly established in worldwide consciousness that they’re fundamental: We are driven by unconscious desires. Sex is big with us. Dreams are one route into this psychological nether world. If Freud misled us, as B. is claiming, it’s only because he was the one who led us into the massive, unexplored, ink-dark cavern of the unconscious and was the first person in there, ever, poking around with a flickering candle. He described what little he found as best he could. The real accomplishment was breaking into the place in the first place.