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Hardcore Literature
Ep 85 - The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud)
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Welcome back to Hardcore Literature. Your favourite book club deep dives into the greatest books ever written. Provocative poems, evocative epics and life changing literary analyses. We don't just read the great books, we live them together. We'll suck the marrow out of Shakespeare, Homer, Tolstoy and many more. We'll relish the most moving art ever committed to the page and stage from every age. Join us as and me, your host, Benjamin McAvoy on the Reading adventure of a lifetime with hardcore literature. Sigmund Freud's the Interpretation of Dreams is one of the most significant works ever penned and is a landmark not only in the field of psychology, but in the tradition of great literature too. And like many revolutionary and endlessly influential works, Die Tramdeutung was born out of great personal crisis. In 1896, Jakob Freud, the father to the father of psychoanalysis, died at the age of 81. His son, who had just entered his 40s, entered a period of intense and sustained mourning. Rather than let the grief overwhelm and crush him, however, Sigmund channelled his pain into his work and put his own feelings, his interiority, his mind, his self up to scientific examination in order to gather evidence for his psychological theories. Where would the world of art, human endeavor, scientific advance and self understanding be if not for sons needing to endure the death of their father? Shakespeare lost his father and of course his father lost a father, as is the common lot. But the Bard's response was to pen the Tragedy of Hamlet. Freud himself reminds us that it was hot on the heels of the loss of not only Shakespeare's father, but his son Hamnet, that one of the greatest plays of all time was born. And indeed that play makes it into Freud's top three works of literature of all time. The list is Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, Hamlet by William Shakespeare and the Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. And that weighty Russian tome was like Shakespeare's pinnacle work and like Freud's dream book, also born out of the tragedy of paternal death. And whilst these writers would have written regardless, I am confident in saying that we would not have these works, or at least in the way that they present, if not for the death of their fathers. And indeed, in the preface to the second edition of the Interpretation of Dreams, Freud would see his work as ultimately being his reaction to his father's death. That is, in other words, the most significant event and the most decisive loss of a man's life. Freud did something extraordinary in response to his trauma after his father's passing, for the next four years, he set about studying his dreams and the dreams of his patients to prove that dreams have inherent psychical meaning, which interpretation and analysis can uncover in a startlingly profound way, a way reminiscent of Michel de Montaigne, St. Augustine and Jean Jacques Rousseau. Freud put himself at the center of his work with some of the most rigorous self analysis the world has ever seen. And like Montaigne, he made himself the subject of his book. Die Traumdeutung is many things, but just a simple work of psychology it is not. This is a deeply gothic autobiography of one man's soul and resists evil classification. Indeed, Freud himself saw his dream book as a guided tour through a grand palatial structure, but also like a journey through a forest and then up a mountainside to a summit, a great height of human understanding. Now, it's odd to reflect on the work's initial lackluster reception, given how much of a seismic shift it caused in the Paris paradigms of world thought. The culture of the modern age is Freudian. We speak of repression, the unconscious, the ego neurosis. We speak of all these things so effortlessly that you would think we were born on the couch. And indeed, in our age, we can say that we essentially were. Freud anticipated shockwaves through the scientific community the moment his work was published, and he was feverishly looking forward to the upset and controversy he would kick up, the thunderstorm he would cause. It's not for nothing that he chose the following line from Virgil's Aeneid as his book's flectere sinequio superos acarunta. If I cannot bend the higher powers, I will move the infernal regions. Yes, Freud is nodding towards the fact that the plunges into the depths of the unconscious, the dark nighttime underworld of the psyche. But he is also making a social comment on his contemporaries in Vienna, the intellectual scientific elite, who he wished to rattle. At this point in his career, however, Freud had certainly not made big waves in the scientific community. He had written a paper in praise of cocaine, which he saw as something approaching a miracle drug. And it would be some years more before the devastating and addictive qualities of that substance were revealed. He had also written his important studies on hysteria in collaboration with the physician Josef Breuer, and he had written a few other papers too. But this was before his writing on the psychopathology of everyday life. This was before his theories of sexuality and gender, jealousy, love, narcissism. This was before his writings on the id, ego and Superego. This was before his great works, Totem and Taboo, beyond the pleasure principle and his civilization and its discontents. All of these are extraordinary works that await the intrepid explorer of Freud, who is just starting out on their adventure through his works. So, so sure of the stature of his work. And he would of course be correct in the long that Freud, who called himself a conquistador and he called himself the New Moses, so his self image was one of both explorer and discoverer and conqueror and prophet and spiritual leader. So sure of the stature of his work was he that Freud altered the publication date at the very last moment. His dream book was published towards the end of 1899, which makes it a fin de siecle work. It's the end of the century. But he would tack on the publication date of 1900 at the last minute. Why? Because Freud was saying, this isn't the summation of the century just gone, the end of the century to be left behind with the rest. No, this is a pinnacle work that will set the tone for the 20th century, the whole century, and will pave the way for progress in the modern age. Freud had been anticipating his future legacy for a while, for at least a decade prior to publication, but honestly, for most of his life. But 10 years prior to publication, Freud set about destroying all of his documents and notes, his letters and manuscripts and correspondence. And he did this to deliberately cause frustration, trouble for biographers in years to come. Let the biographers labor and toil, he said with a glee that feels to me almost Joyceian. We won't make it too easy for them now, sadly for Sigmund, or to give him the name that his father gave him, Sigismund Shlomo, his book was released to the sound of Viennese crickets. Unlike another one of the century's most important but controversial, provocative and deeply influential books, Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, which sold all 1250 copies of the first edition by the evening of the publication day. Freud's book, the Interpretation of dreams, sold only 351 copies over the course of six years. His ideas would gain serious traction in the 1910s and 20s, and most certainly after the first and Second World War, as people en masse began to feel a yearning to heal the trauma running through their psyches. Mankind would enter the age of anxiety. And Freud and psychoanalysis purported to have the solution to our mental woes through something known as the talking cure. Now, it can be difficult to engage with Freud today without feeling his influence in our culture. So much has been written on Freud, his ideas, and so much has been written denigrating as well as praising him, critiquing him and refuting his ideas. This is a privileged and somewhat oedipal position to be in, we might think, because whatever one thinks of Freud's zanier theories, of which there are many, taking issue with Freud can be akin to taking issue with one's own father, as he in effect helped birth the modern consciousness. And yet, despite the fact that we feel the Freudian influence all around us, let's try and put our reservations aside for a moment and let's see the man and his work, and particularly his dream book, afresh. And why should we do this? Why should we engage with a book that seeks to understand the dream life of man? Because, in the words of Freud, the interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind. If we learn to read our dreams, we can learn to read great poetry and vice versa. And both endeavors give us access to a greater understanding of ourselves and therefore a greater understanding of others. And we have discovered the healing properties of great literature together from reading the works of writers like Shakespeare and Dickens and Austin. And at the very least, engaging with Freud's interpretive framework and appreciating his analyses, both of works of literature and of dreams, will significantly improve our own sensitivity to great literature, the great books that we are reading together. And we can unlock the healing power within them. So what's the main thesis of the interpretation of dreams? The first thesis which we have mentioned is that dreams hold meaning. As Freud says at the beginning of his work, every dream turns out to be a meaningful psychical formation which can be given an identifiable place in what goes on within us in our waking life. And the second thesis of the work, which is of the utmost importance. So let's drill this into our minds, is dreams are wish fulfillments. A dream is a disguised fulfilment of a suppressed or repressed wish. And these wishes are always incredibly, childishly self centered. You do not wish in your dream on behalf of another or for another's good, but you wish fully and only out of your deepest and most selfish personal desires. Now, this idea of dreams holding meaning and being wish fulfillment runs in stark counter to the entire tradition of dream analysis prior to Freud. And he seeks to emphasize that right at the beginning of his dream book with a meaty literature review that goes back to the ancients. For much of human history, dreams have been seen as sent by the divine. And thus when you read old stories, you see when characters awake from a dream, they attempt to puzzle out what it portends, what it predicts, because surely these images that flash on the interiority of our minds when we are asleep must be visionary, they must predict the future. Freud stresses this is the accepted norm for the ancients, up until Aristotle, who believed that dreams were daimonic or demonic, but not divine. And yet he believed that there was still a possibility of seeing the future, because in one's dreams is where we're able to store up and think through the elements of waking life that we have missed whilst conscious. A lot of divination for the future, a lot of prediction for the future is heavily contingent on being really perceptive as to what's going on in the present. You can make predictions about the future that are kind of already true or becoming true. And if you're very sensitive to what's going on around you or what's going on inside you, then it can feel like you've predicted the future when really you've put your finger on the pulse of something that's already underway. And at the end of our talk today, we will return to this idea of divining the future through our dreams, and we'll see what Freud ultimately makes of that. But Freud runs through all the different theories of dreaming at the beginning of his book. Of course, of course, external sensory stimuli can influence what we see when we close our eyes. We've known that for a long time. Freud, in his work, nods to a famous dream of French physician Louis Ferdinand Alfred Maury, where he dreamt of the Reign of Terror and the time of the Revolution, and he took part in the dreadful scenes of murder and was brought before the court, before Robespierre, and was then himself condemned and then led to the place of execution. In his dream, he mounts the scaffold, the executioner fastens him to the plank and the guillotine blade falls, and he then wakes up in a torment of fear to discover that the headboard of the bed had collapsed and just like the blade of a guillotine struck the back of his neck. We've all had dreams that have clearly been influenced by external stimuli. Maybe a bug lands on you, a fly or something, and that's going to influence what's going on inside your mind. We can also point to internal stimuli. Just say, for instance, you eat a large portion of cheese before bed. I know in my personal experience, and it must be something to do with the slow digesting casein protein, I know that I am going to be afflicted with nightmares post Brie and Camembert binge. There are theories that propose the full psychical activity of waking life continues in dreams, whilst other theories assume a lowering of psychical activity in the dream. And for everyone who sees the dream as divine, there are just as many who see the dream as utterly irrelevant, nonsensical and totally without inherent meaning. And whilst science has made some significant advances since Freud when it comes to dreams, many questions are still left unanswered more than a hundred years on since his dream book. In the field of neuroscience, for example, the discovery of REM sleep rapid eye movement in the 1950s was of landmark significance. And from there we began to understand sleep phases and we began to map brain activity whilst dreaming. Today, dreams are often thought of in a cognitive sense as memory consolidation and emotional processing and a way of working through problems. And I think it is clearly a reparative and restorative process. But that is not saying anything new, shocking or revolutionary. And ultimately there is no one unifying universally accepted theory on the thing we all want to know. Why do we dream? And indeed, today, a large consensus still sees dreams as a biological function with no psychological meaning. Freud flies in the face of all of this when he says that dreams are wish fulfillment and require interpretation. He points to the common proverbial saying that dreams are froth, treima sind scheuer. But we also know surely that our unconscious wishes for things, because we also say this is another proverbial saying. We also say, I wouldn't have imagined this or that even in my wildest dreams. We cry this in delight when we find our expectations surpassed in reality. So we've long intuited that there might be some wishing going on in our dreams. Now, it is a groundbreaking claim on Freud's part, and he discovered that dreams were the royal road to the unconscious through his Viennese colleague Josef Breuer's work with his patients and a little technique that would go on to be known as association. He noted that when one patient in particular talked through her dreams, a woman referred to as Anna O, whose case study was foundational for the development of psychoanalysis. This patient had nervous disorders, or what was once, but is no longer known as hysteria. And we have Freud and indeed neurologists like Jean Martin Charcot, to thank for the advancement in understanding of mental health that we now benefit from today. As you probably know, the 19th century's attitude to mental health was dire and mental illness was rampant in society. But it was diminished and it was written off and it was Massively misunderstood. Charcot, for example, was responsible for establishing hysteria as a nervous disease distinct from psychiatric disorders with organic origins. And in so doing, he drastically threw out incredibly old medieval hypotheses on hysteria that Victorian era was still clinging onto. Hysteria could refer to many different things, from neurological disorders to somatic symptom disorders, feeling pain or fatigue without a clearly discernible physical reason, or anxiety disorders. People who suffered from panic attacks, what we now know as panic attacks in the 19th century were diagnosed as hysterical, as were those with dissociative disorders and borderline personality disorders. And Freud' study of hysteria that would be foundational to psychoanalysis. And the concept of neurosis would be instrumental in him seeing the hallucinations and delusions of neurotic patients as being akin to what we see when we sleep. Freud was able to understand the unconscious life of mankind generally, what we see when we sleep, the dreams that come to us through his work with neurotic and hysterical patients. Now, according to psychoanalysis, we're all neurotic, different degrees. Norman O. Brown, whose work on psychoanalysis, Life Against Death, which I highly recommend, it's fantastic. He would posit that neurosis was ultimately a revision of an age old idea, the idea of original sin. But for this patient, Anna O. She started to experience hallucinations after the death of her father, along with neuralgia, aphasia, paralysis, mood swings, amnesia and eating disorders. Now today, she would likely be diagnosed with split personality or dissociative identity disorder. And so she went to Josef Breuer for hypnosis. And together they embarked upon a process of remembering, remembering work to get to the root cause of her illness. What Breuer and Freud discovered with Anna oh. Was that her symptoms disappeared whenever she gave an account of when they first appeared and when she related the scattered fragments of her dreams via word association. When she would do this, a comprehensible thread would inevitably be revealed. Freud was really significantly influenced by Josef Breuer's cathartic method. This is what would go on to be known as free association. This is a kind of early psychotherapy that enabled patients to recall early traumatic events, those that would lead to their symptoms of hysteria. Breuer noted that the symptoms disappeared as the patient recalled the traumatic memories and essentially re experienced them again, walked through them, lived in them. They were able to get to grips with them and come to terms with them. The patient was implored to say everything that came into their head out loud in response to some of the symbols that they saw when they closed their eyes and went to sleep. This is free association. And this, according to Freud, was the pathway deep into the unconscious interiority and would get us back to the root cause of neurotic symptoms, where repressed memories had been stored up. With the cathartic effect of free association, Freud found that language served as a substitute for action. That's fascinating. Keep this in mind, by the way, when you think of the effect of reading or watching a play in the theatre. Aristotle saw the social function, the utility of tragic drama as providing a catharsis, a release, a purging of emotions. We've spoken about this in our journey through the works of William Shakespeare, because tragedy and comedy do two different things. Tragedy provides a catharsis. The catharsis, when we read a great book or watch a great play, is done with language. Now, there's action as well when we're in the theatre, but the action is observed on stage. We watch the action, we do not undertake it. But when we read a book, the catharsis comes about via language only. We create the action in the mind's eye. We translate the ink stains on the page to the stage in our mind. And if we truly live in the world and connect with the characters and really take on their concerns as our own, we can feel a purging and a catharsis even when we read really difficult, emotionally troubling and tragic works. Freud would talk of the patient needing to give the therapist or the hypnotist complete consent to do the work. Now, again, keeping literary parallels in mind, we do this. We form this pact with the writer when we read a novel or watch a play. Samuel Taylor Coleridge would talk of the willing suspension of disbelief. We place our trust in the storyteller that they are going to keep us safe, even when they present traumatic situations to us. And in psychoanalysis, we place our trust in the therapist to work through some seriously intimate inmost thoughts. This is the talking cure. Now, Freud, seeing the healing power of talk therapy with Anna O, turned the spotlight on himself and examined his dreams. There are more than 200 dreams analysed in this work, and around a quarter, 47 are Freud's own. And he found that by following the associations which arose from the separate elements of his dreams, divorced from their context, he arrived at a number of thoughts and recollections which he could not fail to recognize as important products of his mental life. Freud's most famous and analyzed personal dream would be known as the dream of Irma's injection. Essentially, he dreamt that he was at a party with one of his patients, a woman called Irma, who appeared to be unwell. And Freud himself in the dream, felt concerned that he could be responsible for her condition. He examined her and he found strange white patches in her throat. And then several of his medical colleagues turned up and they analysed her condition too. And one of them would point out that her condition was caused by an injection administered by a careless doctor, Freud's colleague Dr. Otto. He had administered an injection with a dirty syringe. The dream ends with Freud feeling a sense of relief that he is not the one to blame for her illness. Freud would say that in his waking life around this time, he had anxieties about his treatment of this specific pat, which were exacerbated by what seemed to be criticism of his technique from his colleague Dr. Otto. We might say, and this is one of the biggest criticisms around Freud's theory, we might say, well, where's the wish fulfillment in that? That sounds like an anxiety dream. Freud refuted the existence of anxiety dreams as we might understand them today. And he saw in them always a wish that needed to be fulfilled, even if it meant the unconscious dressed things up in symbolism, contrary to what we might expect. He would point to the universal dream of being naked and embarrassed in public, for example. Although dreams are unique to the dreamer, there is a storehouse of common dreams that almost all of us have experienced, from public nudity, to falling from a great height, to flying, to having one's teeth falling out. Surely that public nudity dream is an anxiety dream. No. Freud would explain that as a secret wish stored up from childhood, a wish to in fact be naked in public. And he would point to the fact that in these dreams, the figures of the public surrounding one's naked self, despite one's embarrassment, are never typically pointing and laughing, but they are practically always neutral and indifferent. So this is not an anxiety dream, but this is a primal wish, an age old wish from when we were younger. When I think of my own anxiety dreams, there's one that has lingered behind after many years. In fact, I have a few that have lingered. There's a dream that I had when I was very little. I can still remember it, it still terrifies me today. But there's a dream that I had a few years back that I still think about from time. Time. Let me tell you about this dream. I was going through a difficult time when I had this dream and I had something of a monkey on my back. Pay attention to the words, the cliches we use without thinking, because our unconscious latches onto them and presents them in visual form. Freud knew this. Freud knew that our unconscious dreams in puns and clever representation. So I actually dreamt of a monkey, a vicious monkey with sharp teeth that was very angry on my back. Sounds like a real anxiety dream, doesn't it? My unconscious had physicalized and anthropomorphized the thing that I was dealing with at a time and combined it with that well known saying, I've got a monkey on my back. But we might think, well, where's the wish there? Well, in the dream, I turned around, I got the monkey off my back, it shrieked and I looked it right in the face. And as I did so, it shrunk. It ceased to be as much of a threat. There's the wish. I want to get this monkey off my back. And looking your demons in the face has the power to diminish them. If you turn away from what's troubling you, your problems grow in size. If you look them right in the face and address them, you can handle them. Is it fair to call that an anxiety dream? I think so. I think that is a kind of anxiety dream. But is it more fair to see the wish fulfillment, the release from anxiety, to see that dreamer's wish fulfillment? Absolutely. And that's just one of many cases that I have personally experienced where I can see what on the surface appears to be an anxiety dream is actually a wish for fear. But here in the dream of Irma's injection, the wish fulfilled is the absolving of Freud's culpability with this patient and the placement of the blame onto the very colleague who criticized him. Now Freud goes into much more depth analyzing this dream in his book in Part two, the Method of Interpreting Dreams. So if you're interested in reading a little bit more about that one, then the case study is there for you to do so. But that's the crux of it. The wish fulfilled was the wish that Freud would not be the one to blame for this patient's poor state, but rather the colleague that he has dislike for disagreement with the colleague who criticized him. Freud would tell us that dreams are much more overt in their purpose as wish fulfillment. When it comes to the dreams of children, dreams often in simple cases appear as wish having already been fulfilled. And these are often comfort dreams or Bekohemlichkeitstraum. He would cite the example of a young girl who dreamt of eating strawberries, strawberries that she wasn't allowed to eat the day before. So in the dream, she gets to eat the strawberries that she wanted to eat. He would give another example of a boy who dreamt of eating cherries. The previous day, this young boy had given his uncle a gift of a basket of cherries, but he himself was only allowed a small taste. He awoke from his dream with the news that he has now eaten all the cherries. So it's pretty simple stuff. And we think, I wish I could eat this. And then our child selves will go to sleep and we will dream that we are indeed eating what we wanted to eat. I think if animals could talk, talk, we would see that their dreams are similarly overtly wish fulfillment. When I watch my dog Sasha sleeping, she flicks her paws quickly and she whimpers in much the same way that she does when she chases after a squirrel or some birds outside. I wouldn't be surprised if all she dreamt of was discovering sticks, burying bones, chasing tennis balls and eating treats. But when it comes to adult humans, dreams get much more complicated. And there is a process of what Freud called dream work underway, which essentially disguises the wish being fulfilled. Sounds like great poetry, doesn't it? It sounds like great dense literature where the meaning is underneath. Now, there are still times, of course, in our adult lives where our wishes are obvious. If you've ever tried to quit an addictive substance, for example, you'll know that you see that substance in your withdrawal dreams. So it's pretty straightforward. What's going on there? Freud would give some interesting examples. He would speak of a woman who had fallen pregnant, but she dreamed that she had gotten her period. And in this case, he interpreted her wish to be that she could enjoy her freedom a little longer before the difficulties of motherhood began. Whilst another woman had dreamt of spots of milk on the front of her blouse which indicated that she wished she would have more nourishment for her second child than her first. In both cases, the dreams divined the future because they were both announcements of pregnancy. So those are some simple, straightforward wish fulfillment examples. But more often than than not, dreams look entirely ludicrous. That is, until we interpret them and Freud outlines his methodology for doing so. Dreams. And this is another important tenet to have memorized, one that applies just as fully to poems, plays and great literature as it does to dreams. Dreams have two aspects to them. They have manifest content and. And latent content. What does that mean? Manifest content is the surface. The images. They are symbolic and they represent something beyond what you see. You read a poem, for example, and a Rose is rarely just a rose. The rose itself is manifest content. But it symbolizes something, doesn't it? It's a figuration for love, or at least it could be. Latent content is that which is hidden beneath the surface. What is represented and pointed to, alluded to, suggested. A secret meaning connects manifest and latent content with a meaning which can only then be revealed through analysis. Dreamwork is the mental process that translates the latent content into manifest or surface content and makes the meaning unrecognizable, recognizable. The task of dream interpretation, Freud says, is to unravel what the dream work has woven when it comes to latent content. For Freud, as you likely already know from his reputation, the latent content typically contains the fulfillment of specifically sexual or erotic impulses. The majority of dream symbols serve to represent persons, parts of the body, and activities invested with erotic interest. Freud was, say, in particular, the genitals are represented by a number of often very surprising symbols. Later in life, when it was pointed out to Freud that his beloved cigars were incredibly phallic. No, Freud smoked cigars all day long, which ultimately led to incredibly painful mouth cancer. Later in life, when this was pointed out, Freud would say, convenient that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Now, there are five mechanisms at play during the dream work. To take the meaning of the dream and disguise it to the point of incomprehensibility. Part one is condensation or compression. The dream work brings several elements or thoughts into a single one, gathering fragments into a solitary unit. Unit. This is what makes it difficult to understand the meaning of a dream. We can see in dreams that figures, the people we see are typically composites. Freud would also say that the figures are elements of you, your own psyche, your thoughts and fears and desires in the mouths of other people. If you see your father in your dreams, you might find it instructive to interpret whatever he is doing as your own behavior, particularly if you're a man. And this is true when it comes to seeing your mother, if you are a woman. But Freud would say, in our dreams, one figure will be comprised of many people, what Freud called a Sammelperson. Again, we see this in great literature, too. The overlap between dreaming and poetry continues to be instructive. And it's no surprise that Freud was steeped in the literary tradition. We can get an example of a Sammelperson, a composite in great literature from one of our recent book club discussions, where we read through Shakespeare's sonnet. Who is the rival poet that the Bard depicts? Well, it's no one person, but rather it is a composite of multiple rivals that the Bard encountered across his life, like Marlow, Chapman, Johnson and more, all rolled into one. So there is condensation in our dreams and in our literature. And there is also what Freud called displacement. That means substituting incidental thoughts for more meaningful ones, thus brushing, pushing the meaning to the side and concealing the wish. Like with literature, the incidental is not in fact incidental. Nothing is without inherent meaning in art and unconscious picture making alike. Another part of the dream work is what is known as representability. This is the process by which dream work transforms dream thoughts into pictures, visual images thrown on the mind's eye. Freud said you then have secondary revision of the dream content. This makes the dream present as a coherent scenario. This is most startling when the dreamer is awake and recollecting the dream or attempting to report it, we will often distort the content of the dream. In order to make it coherent and rational, we'll put a narrative around it. This distortion via revision does not dilute or misinterpret the dream. However, it is just as instructive as to our state of mind and unconscious wish and will help us uncover the motives of the dream. Then you also have an aspect of dramatization in which thoughts will be transformed into situations. We are all closet dramatists, and we might say that playmakers like Shakespeare are genius in proportion to how well they can tap into the deep unconscious wellspring of the human condition and find the universal lurking in the individual. Shakespeare was able to dream in public whilst awake. Now, on top of all of this dreamwork going on in the service of disguising the wish that needs fulfilling, dreams also always contain the remains of the day, what Freud called Tagesreste. Our dreams hark back to our childhood and they are a working through of age old traumas. But curiously, the images are always composed of things that we have seen or thought about during the day, or most typically, things we have consciously forgotten, or things we didn't even know we registered. And to Freud it is always without any possible exception, the sense data impressions of the previous day, the day prior to the dream that arise when we close our eyes. To me, I've always felt like dreaming is like a psychic sweeping up. It's a clearing out of the things lingering in our psyche after a day. The reason why we tell people to sleep on it, either when making an important decision or in order to cool off from a heated argument. It's because we know we will process it, deal with it and come to better terms with things whilst asleep and we will feel better or differently in the morning. There's this old advice for couples, married couples, to never go to bed angry. And I like that advice. That's good advice. But if one cannot do that, if they cannot put the argument to rest during the day, you'll typically find that sleeping, sleeping on it makes you feel differently in the morning. Now I want to turn our attention to one of the most influential theories in all of human thought and an idea that Freud uncovered thanks to his deep reading. More than a psychologist, I see Sige as a great essayist in the Montanian tradition and a man who stumbled upon Shakespearean and Cervantine truths of the human condition thanks to how powerfully he brought himself to the great books. When we talk of great ideas that changed the world, we might think of Darwin's theory of evolution, we might think of Nietzsche's idea of the superman and the will to power. And we might think of Freud's idea of the Oedipus complex. Oh yes, we're going to go there now. And if you want a quick summation of this theory, theory, then put on the song the End by the doors and skip it forward to 6 minutes and 20 seconds and listen to Jim Morrison up to around the 8 minute mark. Freud was deeply attentive and sensitive to the wisdom lurking in fairy tales, folklore, myths, legends and works of classic literature. Seeing our dreams as deriving from the saints source as our oldest stories. He would see the tale of the emperor's new clothes familiar to us in the version by Hans Christian Andersen as stemming from our dreams of public nudity, which as we have noted are apparently not due to a fear or anxiety of being nude, but rather an immature wish that we could be nude in that story for fear of the power of the emperor's raiment and as an indication of their loss loyalty. Everyone pretends not to notice that he is buck naked. The deceiver is the dream and the emperor is the dreamer himself. And the moralizing tendency of such tales betrays an obscure awareness. Freud said that what is involved in the latent dream content are forbidden wishes which have been sacrificed to the power of repression. And what's repression? Well, repression is a psychological defense mechanism in which societally unacceptable thoughts, desires, feelings, even memories are blocked, suppressed, tamped down and withheld from conscious awareness. To understand human behavior, we must understand the unconscious process of repression. In later writings Freud would see repression as a result of conflict between the, the id, the animalistic instinctive drive of the psyche, the ego, which is our rational self, the moderating entity and the superego, which we might call our morality. The part of the psyche that incorporates the norms, values and ideals of society. To speak very reductively, of course, we repress our desires, typically sexual, the desires that the superego deems to be societally inappropriate. But they still emerge, not only in our dreams, but in slips of the tongue. Freudian slips we call them today. In the jokes we say there's a lot of truth in what we say for laughs and in neurotic symptoms. To Freud, our desires are remnants from infancy. And nowhere is that more clear than when we dream of a conflict or indeed the death of a parent. What lies at the bottom of our dreams is a memory from our earliest childhood. And we can trace a po back to dreams and dreams back to infancy. Indeed, the same can be said for religion too. Religion and art both spring from the same eternal unconscious and universal source. Freud would say that when we look back upon our childhood, we see it as a period without shame. And thus it appears to us as paradise. And paradise with a capital P is nothing but the mass fantasy of the childhood of the individual, he was would say. And this is why in paradise human beings are naked and feel no shame in each other's presence until a moment comes when shame and anxiety awaken and sexual life and the work of culture begins. But dreams can take us back to this paradise every night. But they can also take us back to the age old conflict of son against father and daughter against mother and sibling versus sibling. The Cain and Abel story, Just like the story of the fall from mankind, just like the story that Dostoevsky presents in the Brothers Karamazov. The Cain and Abel story, as John Steinbeck would say, is everybody's story. Freud says that if anyone has a dream in which they are grieving the death of their mother, father, brother or sister, whilst that to him would indicate, despite the grief, a wish fulfilled, because you can be grieving in your dream, but you're still secretly wishing for it. He would say that despite that being a wish, he never takes such dreams as evidence that the dreamer wishes them dead. Now, the theory of dreams does not make so great a demand. He says it is content to conclude that sometime in China childhood he has wished them dead. Freud knew that this wouldn't pacify his critics, but he would elaborate. Yes, those who love their siblings and their parents deeply today, if they dream of their death, that of course does not mean they want them to die. They don't actually want them to die. What it means is their infant self once wished that during a conflict. But this was born out of a lack of understanding as to what death really means. The adult knows what death means, and so hearing a child wish death upon someone who has wronged them. I wish you would die. I wish he would die. We hear that all the time. This is very common. But this is not the same thing as an adult wishing death upon someone. Because what does a child know of death? Truly, of the undiscovered country from whose born no child traveler returns. Freud brings that Hamletian quote into his work. All they know is that death is a cessation of presence. It's an absence, it's nothingness. It simply means a stop to the other person providing a conflict. It means the other person is away from them. If one brother is tormenting another and the tormented brother wishes he would die, what they truly understand that to mean is they wish the torment would stop. But just because they don't understand the implications of what they are saying, that doesn't mean they don't wish this with a significant amount of emotional intensity. So intense is such a wish, in fact, at this young age, that it gets stored up and remains decades on and then crops up in the psyche of the adult who cannot fathom why they would dream of such an abhorrence thing. And as usual, dreams of death, like dreams of sex, come clothed in symbol. Freud gives the example of a woman who had a recurring dream ever since she was 4 years old. She dreamt of a flock of children, all her brothers, sisters, cousins. They were romping in a meadow and then suddenly they grew wings. They flew up into the air and were gone. She may not have known it, but Freud knew this to be a dream of death wished upon her siblings. In its original form. We have seen flying as a stand in for death at the hardcore literature book club with one of our recent reads with Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon. When it comes to dreaming of parental death, it's typically the death of the same sex parent. Sons dream of the death of their father. Daughters dream of the death of their mother. Put crudely, Freud says it is as though a sexual preference were established very early. It's as though the boy saw a rival for love in his father and the girl in her mother, and removing them could only be of benefit to the child. Our new Moses, Freud would tell us that the sanctity of the Ten Commandments blunts our perception of reality. And perhaps we do not dare to Notice that the greater part of mankind put themselves above obeying the fourth commandment at the lowest levels of human society, as much as at the highest parental respect habitually yields to other interests. And you can find Freud's discussion on this in the part of the Dream book called the Material and Sources of Dreams and the section called Typical Dreams. The dark tidings, he says, that reach us in myth and legend from the primeval days of human society, give us some idea of the power of the father and the ruthlessness with which he wielded it. That is most disagreeable. Kronos, that's the father of Zeus, devours his children rather as the boar devours the mother son's pharaoh and Zeus castrates his pharaoh father and then takes his place as ruler. The more absolute the father's rule in the ancient family, Freud says, the more the son as rightful successor is forced into the position of enemy and the greater his impatience to come to power himself through the death of the father. Even in middle class families, by refusing his son his independence and the wherewithal to support support it, the father is helping to develop the natural seeds of enmity in him. The physician is often enough in a position to notice that in his grief at the loss of his father, the son cannot suppress his satisfaction at gaining his freedom at last. So this is why Freud calls the death of the father as the most significant period in a young man's life. It is tragic, it's something that you mourn and you feel deeply unhappy about, but there comes a sense of freedom. In effect, you now have to become your own father. So the battle between child and parent is ancient and the death wish towards one's parents derives from earlier childhood. Freud learned this from looking inside himself and to his own family history. As, as we said, the death of his father kicked off a very intense four years, almost half a decade of work and self reflection and self examination where he had to come to terms with these really controversial and conflicting and unpleasant feelings and ideas arising from within him. He learnt this from examining his own life, but he also learned this from reading specifically the play Oedipus Rex by Sophocles. Now, interestingly, we talk of Freudian readings of Shakespeare, for example. Today there are many different ways to read Shakespeare. We can do a feminist reading, we can do a postcolonial reading, we can do a Marxist reading, we could all these readings, ecocriticism and we can do a Freudian reading. We talk of that and we apply Freud in the modern age to so many Great books. He's particularly instructive when it comes to the late Victorian era, but he instructive for all great literature, really. But as Harold Bloom would observe in his Shakespeare the Invention of the Human, it would really serve us better to conduct Shakespearean readings of Freud because the influence of England's greatest poet is everywhere in Freud's work. Indeed, the influence of England generally as a culture is in Freud's work too. Freud worked in Virginia, Vienna, in an office right around the corner from where I used to live when I was living in Austria. And interestingly, he professed to despise the city all of his life, but he had been intensely reluctant to leave it. He ended up needing to leave it for good when the Nazis stormed through the city. His work was already being tossed on bonfires over in Germany. Him being a Jewish man, it wouldn't have been smart for him to remain behind. He departed for London. He spoke brilliant English. And I love the fact that Freud was in love with the English culture and the country. He loved the fog and the rain, he loved the drunkenness and conservatism, and he also loved the stubbornness of the country and the country's inbuilt need for justice. And he fell deeply in love with English poetry. The influence of Shakespeare is everywhere in his works, and yet he is somewhat loathe to admit it. The Oedipus complex could have just as easily been called the Hamlet complex, and yet he chooses to deal extensively and first with the play of Sophocles in the Interpretation of Dreams, only submitting Hamlet to analysis in a footnote that is so incredibly extensive and bloats almost to the entire page that honestly, he would have done better to have given it prime place in the actual body of the text. But of course, we might say that he had an overwhelming degree of debt to the Bard and thus did not want to reveal the extensiveness of his indebtedness. Now, I want to do something fun here. I want to do a close analysis, and I want to really appreciate some of Freud's literary analysis. To read the parts of Freud where he pivots into literary analysis is to read one of the greatest essayists and most sensible literary critics of all time, though Freud is really no critic, but rather an interpreter. That's quite clear from the title of the book, the Interpretation of Dreams. He interprets literature. And if you have read your G. Wilson Knight, you'll know that we want to be interpreters rather than critics, because being an interpreter is a much higher calling and interpretation. Places the interpreter within the traditional of the art. They are analyzing itself and they become a part of the grand celebration that is the literary tradition. They become a part of the experience. Freud was an incredibly deep reader and he loved so many works of literature. He loved Cervantes, Don Quixote. He read the Greek dramatists deeply. He read Shakespeare deeply. Though contested that the so called man from Stratford didn't actually write Shakespeare, he drew no nourishment and wisdom from Goethe. He would quote Faust, he drew wisdom from Moliere, Schiller, Rabelais, Lessing and Nietzsche. Nietzsche particularly was a very, very strong influence. He read the complete works of Nietzsche in order to put words to feelings within him. But he very swiftly entered into an agonistic relationship, as is perfectly fitting for engaging with Nietzsche. And he fiercely resisted him, even denying that he had read much of him. Later. This is what Harold Bloom would call the anxiety of influence. And if you want to know Harold Bloom's strongest influence in his critical or interpretive writings, then you must go to Freud, because Freud's influence is everywhere in Bloom's works. When I read Freud's literary commentary, I cannot help but think how incredibly powerful it is to have a unifying theory, a backbone, a central thought to guide your work, that you stay rooted to your entire life. Heidegger said that a man should think one thought and one thought only all the way through. And for Freud it was the idea of unconscious desires, drives and urges and repression. And whilst his steadfast and stubbornly unyielding attitude in the face of any theories contravening his. And he famously fell out with disciples who took his ideas and ran with them in their own direction. Most notably of course, Carl Jung. He really resisted theories that went contrary to him, which is a glaring sign that what is being conducted here is not science. Scientists want their theories to be put to the test. If they are correct, they get to keep the theories. But they sure as heck want to find out if they are wrong so they can modify or discard their theories. Scientists want to test everything and put it up to the mobile, most intense scrutiny. Freud didn't like this, he didn't allow this. There's no dissent or modification. And yet what we have before us, when he appreciates great literature in his work, is nothing short of a marvel, a miracle in literary analysis. And I would like to appreciate his tender examination of Oedipus Rex with you. Now, here is just a small sliver of analysis and we can see where Freud's Oedipus complex, which he called the nucleus of all neurosis, originated from. Let's see his writings on Oedipus Rex and then let's see what he has to say about Hamlet. If you've got the Oxford World's Classics paperback edition of the Interpretation of Dreams, this is about 200 or so pages in. In the section titled or subtitled Typical Dreams in the section the Material and Sources of Dreams, here is Freud conducting noteworthy literary analysis. He talks of King Oedipus and the drama of that name by Sophocles. Oedipus, son of Laius, King of Thebes, and Jocasta, is abandoned as an infant because an oracle had proclaimed to his father that his son, yet unborn, would be his murderer. So Freud is starting by setting the scene. He's giving some necessary, some required synopsis here. He's got to tell us the story and give a quick summation as a reminder for those who've read it. But to fill people in who haven't, what you want to do with literary analysis is you want a bit of synopsis. You kind of want to replay the key parts of whatever you're analyzing, but then you do want to leverage that into deeper probing and try and pull some insights out of the work. So Oedipus had been abandoned as an infant for the threat to his father he would be his murderer. He is rescued, Freud says, and grows up as a king's son at a foreign court, until he himself consults the oracle about his origins and receives the counsel that he should flee his home city because he would perforce become his father's murderer and his mother's spouse. On the road from his supposed home city, he encounters King Laius and kills him in a sudden quarrel. So he's killed his father. Then he arrives before Thebes, where he solves the riddle of the Sphinx as she bars his way. And in gratitude, he is chosen by the Thebans to be their king and presented with Jocasta's hand in marriage. My goodness, these ancient stories are pretty intense. They're pretty sublime and sweeping and devastating, aren't they? Freud continues to summarise the play. He reigns long in peace and dignity and begets two sons and two daughters with his unbeknown mother. So not only has Oedipus slaughtered his father, he's murdered his father, but he has now conceived with his mother. He reigns long until a plague breaks out, occasioning fresh questioning of the oracle by the Thebans. At this point, Sophocles tragedy begins the messengers bring word that the plague will end when the murder murderer of Laius is driven from the land. But where is he? And then Freud takes a quotation from the play and embeds it. Where shall we hope to uncover the faded traces of that far distant crime? Freud continues, the action of the play consists now in the gradually intensified and skillfully delayed revelation, comparable to the work of psychoanalysis, that Oedipus implies himself is Laius murderer, but also that he is son of the murdered king. And Jocasta, shattered by the abomination he has in his ignorance committed, Oedipus blinds himself and leaves his homeland. The oracle is fulfilled. So that's interesting. He is seeing the play, the uncovering, the leading to a revelation as akin to psychoanalysis. But we can see such a thing as being akin to literary art, analysis and interpretation too. Freud says Oedipus the king is what we call a tragedy of fate. Its tragic effect is supposed to depend on the contrast between the all powerful will of the gods and the vain struggles of men threatened by disaster. What the deeply moved spectator is meant to learn from the tragedy is submission to the will of the divinity and insight into his own powerlessness. So he pins down the sweeping theme of this drama and he isolates it. But then Freud goes on to say that modern dramatists have tried to achieve a similar tragic effect, but the spectators have looked on unmoved. Because I suppose modern man is rather removed from this idea of the will of the gods and fate and destiny. It's not something that occupies us. We don't think about it on a day to day basis. We don't really have it as part of our culture anymore. And so Freud then takes the assertion of the theme and he brings it into the present and offers a piece of advice for how a production might make this age old drama relevant and endlessly pressing. If Oedipus the king, he says, is able to move modern man no less deeply than the Greeks who were Sophocles contemporaries, the solution can only be that the effect of Greek tragedy does not depend on the contrast between four fate and human will, but is to be sought in the distinctive nature of the subject matter, exemplifying this contrast. So he establishes a theme. This is a theme that if you were writing an essay for school on the play, might get you some top marks. Yes, it's about fate and the will of the gods and supplicating ourselves to the higher powers. But he says no. He creates a little dialogue within his literary criticism, a Little bit of an argument to get his theme across. And he says, this is not the effect Greek tragedy depends on. There must be a voice within us that is ready to acknowledge the compelling force of fate in Oedipus. But his fate moves us only because it could have been our own as well. That's significant. We watch these dramas, we read these books, we watch these tragedies for what they have to say about us. And we are moved to the degree the extent to which we see our own potential life performed on stage. His fate moves us because it could have been our fate, Freud says, because at our birth, if the oracle had pronounced the same curse upon us as it did on him, then it would be no less true in potential. So it's the relatability aspect. Yes, it's macabre, yes, it's grotesque, yes, it's terrifying and disgusting and shocking. But the fake could be all of ours. It was perhaps ordained that we should, all of us, turn our first sexual impulses towards our mother. Our first hatred and violent wishes against our father. Our dreams convince us of it. King Oedipus, who killed his father Laius, and married his mother Jocasta, is only the fulfillment of our childhood wish. So now he's saying it's not just a matter of circumstances. Circumstances if this and if that, if we'd been in that situation, then this could have happened. He's saying, no, no, this is the universal truth. This is the drama we play out in our infancy, and it's dressed up on stage. It's put into really regal aspects and is made captivating for our pleasure. But it hits on something deep inside us that perhaps we do not want to acknowledge. Freud continues to say that we're more fortunate than King Oedipus because we have succeeded, at least insofar as we have not become psychoneurotics, in detaching our sexual impulses from our mothers and forgetting our jealousy of our fathers. We recoil from the figure who has fulfilled that ancient childhood wish with the entire sum of repression which these wishes have since undergone within us. As the poet brings Oedipus guilt to light in the course of his investigation, he compels us to recognize our own inner life, where those impulses, those suppressed, are still present. This is how you write great literature, and this applies not only to Oedipus Rex, but to Hamlet too, and the brothers Karamazov and any great book that has resonated through the ages and universally, despite its unpleasant themes, it hits something deep within, within our ancient psyche. And Freud quotes the chorus, the Greek chorus of Oedipus Rex, and says, behold, this was Oedipus, greatest of men. He held the key to the deepest mysteries, was envied by all his fellow men for his great prosperity. Behold what a full tide of misfortune swept over his head. This admonition, Freud says, refers to us too, and our pride, who have grown so wise and powerful in our own estimation since our childish years. Freud goes on to say that there's indication within the text itself that this idea of killing the father and sleeping with the mother, this came from ancient dreams. Freud says essentially that Sophocle must have taken what was recognizable as a common dream or a dream that he had and then dramatized it. He says Jocasta consoles Oedipus, his mother, at a stage where he has not yet learned the truth, but is troubled by the memory of what the oracle proclaimed. She refers to a dream which many indeed do dream, but without. Or so she thinks it's having any significance. And we get another quotation. Nor need this mother marrying frighten you. Many a man has dreamt as much. Such things must be forgotten if life is to be endured. And so we see where Freud is uncovering his Oedipus complex. Don't let this mother marrying frighten you, because many a man has dreamt as much and such things must be forgotten if life is to be endured. And we might think that such things must be repressed if life in civilization must be endured. Until Freud, who says that we must uncover what we repress and come to terms with it. The dream of having sexual intercourse with the mother is dreamed by many today as it was then, and they recount it with indignation and amazement. It is clearly the key to the tragedy and the complement to the dream of the father death. The Oedipus story is the imagination's reaction to these two typical dreams. And just as the dreams of the adult are filled with feelings of revulsion, the legend too is bound to include the horror and self punishment in its content. Now, what does Freud say about the tragedy of Hamlet? If you've been reading Shakespeare in my proposed chronological order, if you've been journeying through the complete works of Shakespeare with us as part of the Shakespeare project, then you may find this interesting. At time of recording, we're nearing the end of Shakespeare's career. We've gotten to Cymbeline, and our next play will be the Winter's Tale. And it's been some time now since we came to what I think was the pinnacle of his career. That's Hamlet, Hamlet. And then the tragic procession. King Lear, Macbeth, the great tragedies, Anthony and Cleopatra, Othello were the pinnacle. We can see with Shakespeare that post Hamlet, his influence really becomes himself. He's no longer wrangling with his peers or predecessors, he's wrangling with his prior self. And he comes up against difficulty, because how can you best Hamlet? Once you've written Hamlet, where do you go? This is what Freud has to say about Hamlet. Another great creation of tragic poetry is rooted in the same soil as Oedipus the King, Shakespeare, Hamlet. But the change in treatment of the same material reveals the difference in the inner life of these two cultural periods, so remote from each other. The advance of repression over the centuries in mankind's emotional life. In Oedipus, the child's wishful fantasy on which it is based is out in the open and realized as it is in dreams. In in Hamlet, it remains repressed. So Freud is saying, over the centuries, over the years, we have become more and more and more repressed. And indeed Freud was writing at the tail end of the 19th century, going through to the earlier 20th century. The Victorian era was an incredibly repressive era. Now there's sex absolutely everywhere in the Victorian age. You can read devotional poetry from the likes of the Bronte sisters and you can find erotic yearning there. You can find erotic yearning in Thomas Hardy. There's this popular legend that says that the Victorians covered their bare piano legs for fear of impropriety. Now that's not quite true, that's a bit fabricated, but there's an element of truth there. We can see where that originated from, because the Victorians were incredibly uptight and sexually repressed. But this was already a marker of mankind back in the Renaissance era. In Hamlet. This complex, Freud says, remains repressed. And we learn of its existence as we learn of a neurosis only through the inhibiting effects it produces. Curiously, Hamlet has shown that the overwhelming power of modern drama is compatible with the fact that we can remain quite unclear about the hero's character. The play is based on Hamlet's hesitation in fulfilling the task of revenge laid upon him. What the reasons or motives are for this hesitation, the text does not say. The most various attempts at interpretation have not been able to identify them. According to the view argued by Goethe, Hamlet represents the type of human being whose power of action is paralyzed by the over development of the activity of thought. Now, as Freud remarks, the plot of Hamlet does not tell us that the central protagonist is entirely incapable of action. We see him in action once in sudden passion, when he stabs the eavesdropper behind the arras. And when he dispatches the two courtiers to the death intended for him. The thing about Hamlet is he flies from extremes. At the beginning of the play he is incredibly passive and uncertain and hemming and hawing. And he doesn't quite know what to do or how to do it. And then when he does take action, it's rather extreme. He flies from one extreme to another. But Freud pulls out an interesting theory as to his inaction and his passivity. Hamlet can do anything except take revenge on the man who removed his father and took the latter's place beside his mother. The man who shows him his own repressed infant wishes realized. Now that's an interesting theory. So if you know the story of Hamlet, you'll know that it opens shortly after the funeral of the deceased King Hamlet, Hamlet's father. And he has been bumped off by his brother Claudius. And then Claudius has posted himself dexterously to incestuous sheets and he has married his dead brother's wife, his sister in law. And so now Hamlet's uncle is the king and in a father surrogate position. Now there are arguments that say that the relationship between Claudius and Queen Gertrude may have been going on for quite a while. There is a potential that Claudius is actually Hamlet's father. But that's a very interesting theory. The ghost of King Hamlet comes to his son and tells him to get revenge to avenge his murder, his unrighteous murder. And Hamlet hesitates. Now we can talk really in depth about why he might do this. If you haven't listened to our Hamlet the then you might want to check it out. Give the play a watch. It really is one of the greatest things ever written, ever performed on stage or committed to the page. There are many reasons why he's not gonna hastily go in and just slaughter his uncle. One main reason is he doesn't know whether to trust the ghost. Does this ghost actually have good intentions? Is he not leading him astray? But Freud's idea is that his inaction and his passivity actually shows Hamlet's own repressed infant wishes realized. Essentially. Good. I wished you dead so I could have my mother. Freud says if anyone wants to call Hamlet a hysteric, I can only acknowledge that it is an inference. My interpretation admits the sexual revulsion which Hamlet expresses in the dialogue with Ophelia is congruent with it. The same sexual revulsion which was to take increasing hold of the poet's psyche in the following years, reaching its extreme in Timon of Athens. Freud knows his Shakespeare. This is very, very deep, brilliant literary criticism. Whether you agree with his framework and his interpretation is a whole nother matter. He knows his Shakespeare. And again, if you've read Shakespeare with us, you'll know that Timon of Athens is a really misanthropic play. There comes a point in his career, after the tragic recession when he's getting on a little bit where Shakespeare is clearly ill. You can tell that there are references to illness and sickness and doctors, and he's getting more and more ill. And not only that, he's getting incredibly jaded with his career, with the theater world, with being a public figure. And so his older plays seem really bitter and rancid and jaded and dark. And they can be quite unpleasant to read. And I think Freud's right. That does reach a pinnacle in Timon of Athens. Freud says, of course, it can only have been the poet's own inner life that confronts us in Hamlet. Here's the thing about Shakespeare. As Jorge Luis Borges would say, Shakespeare is everywhere and nowhere in his works, and we emphasize the nowhere. And often what we see in Shakespeare is a reflection of us. But if he appears anywhere, I think he appears in the sonnets. Yes, there's a lot of Persona going on there. There are aspects that appear in Henry IV with Falstaff, and he definitely appears in Hamlet. That's his most personal play. Again, Freud stresses that the drama of Hamlet was written immediately after his father's death, 1601. Now, this is kind of complex because it wasn't written just after his father's death. He had most likely been working upon and reworking Hamlet since the very early part of his career. There is an Ur Hamlet from the decade prior that we're not sure if it was Shakespeare's or not. And then Hamlet was performed before his father died, though they were expecting his death, and then will revised it quite significantly post his father's death. But we can see that with most of his plays, anything to do with fathers and sons is there post. Post the death of his father. But of course, Shakespeare also lost his son Hamnet, and Hamnet is another way of saying Hamlet around that time, too. So he's definitely trying to purge something in this play. Just as Hamlet deals with the relationship of the son to his parents, so Macbeth, written in much the same period, deals with the theme of childlessness. Incidentally, just as every neurotic symptom, even the Dream is capable of over interpretation, indeed demands it, if we are to understand it fully. So every truly poetic creation will have arisen from more than one motive and more than one impulse in the poet's psyche, and will admit of more than one interpretation. What I have attempted here, Freud says, is only an interpretation of the deepest layer of the impulses in the psyche of the creative poet. This is incredibly important to keep in mind, not only when it comes to dreams, but when it comes to literary analysis. In many cases with works, there are many, many interpretations that are incredibly valid, and they can be, and often are conflicting. If we're not talking about factual understanding, interpretation of character and theme cannot really be wrong from one person to another. If you're reading sensitively, your interpretation is your interpretation, and there are elements in the text that have facilitated or injured the opinion that you have come to. And it's very interesting. This is one of the things I love about literary studies the most. It's very interesting to entertain multiple theories, conflicting theories at the same time. And one of the most difficult truths to reconcile in life is the fact that two conflicting things can be true at the same time. But there we go. There is Sigmund Freud, the literary critic and psychologist, and there's a huge crossover with literary criticism or interpretation and psychology, at least I think so. It's another thing that I love about the great books, is that you can probe into the depths of human nature. You can wrangle with the complexity of human character. As Freud says, we are moved dynamically this way and that. We're very complex beings. We can be conflicted beings. And dream analysis, just like literary analysis, can help us understand ourselves, can help us understand other people, and actually can help us to divine the future. Here's how Freud ends the interpretation of dreams. What of the value of dreams for our knowledge of the future? He asks. Of course, that is out of the question. Instead, one should rather ask for our knowledge of the past. For in every sense, dreams come from the past. It is true the ancient belief that dreams show us the future. Future is not entirely without some truth. For by representing a wish as fulfilled, a dream does indeed take us into the future. But this future, taken by the dreamer to be in the present, is shaped by the indestructible wish into the image of that past. Now, what are some practical steps for journeying through Freud? This was just a taste of the great men, man. There is so much more to explore in his body of work. We have just barely scratched the surface in talking about this one book and isolating some key ideas from it. How can you continue to journey through Freud? And also, how can you apply Freudian analysis to your books, to your literature? Well, I would implore you, if you find this interesting, to make Freud your lifelong companion. Like monster, like Nietzsche, like Shakespeare. There are two avenues that you can take when it comes to reading Freud. You can pick and choose his works based on your interest at a current moment in time. We've spoken about the interpretation of dreams. I would also recommend investigating civilization and its discontents. Read his writings on id, ego and superego. Read his Totem and Taboo. You can do that. You can pick and choose, or you can do a chronological reading, which you know I absolutely adore, swiftly moving through the entire sweep of his work to see the progression of his ideas. And as you read Freud, you may find it instructive to, like the great man himself, turn the spotlight on you, turn inward and attempt to make the latent manifestation. Treat yourself to a journal specifically for your dreams and keep it by your bed. I have journals for all the different works of literature that I read, but I also have a very special one that has my impressions from the pictures my mind makes when I go to sleep. And these impressions are hastily scrawled upon waking up. I love flicking through these old dreams and peace them together and trying to probe into what's going on deep inside me. So try to note your dreams down when you wake up and you'll probably only be able to remember a couple of images. You're not going to remember much. Note the dreams down and then free associate on them. You might talk about it. You might write around the imagery and try to form a connection. Connection and write a hypothesis on the page as to what your dream may have meant and seek to uncover the latent content. And then you can take this practice into your poems and into the literature that you read. When you read something, you want to ask yourself what connections spark off in your mind at this moment in time. You can do a Freudian analysis with the great books by reflecting upon the book you have just read or have read earlier in the year and not going back to it immediately, but just trying to isolate what remains. What characters remain, what dialogue remains, what ideas, what images, what sections. You won't probably remember the entire book, but there will be some key passages that are super fresh in your mind. And some will be those passages that linger on everybody's mind because they are iconic. But some will be unique to you and may have something to tell you about what you're going through right now. And with the great books as well, you want to go for unity. As you bring unconscious insight into the light. You want to knit these complex, seemingly disparate threads together. How does one do a Freudian reading of a work? Well, it all goes back to the unconscious. Yeah, the unconscious. Conscious is the reservoir of desires, thoughts and fears that often dictates our conscious behavior. And we cannot access all of our unconscious. It's like an iceberg. The conscious mind is the tip above the surface, and the unconscious is the bulk beneath. And you're not going to be able to get to all of it. But our unconscious manifests in our behavior, in slips of the tongue, neurotic symptoms, and our dreams. So when you're reading a book and you meet a character, you might want to try to evaluate what's going on unconsciously. What do they need unconsciously? How are they in conflict with themselves? Not just other people, but great books give us characters in conflict with others and themselves. Is there a conflict going on with their stated conscious desires and their unconscious needs? We're talking about needs versus. You might ask yourself, what is this character repressing? What are they not saying? And writers create irony this way. Dramatic irony and subtext. Ask yourself what the early life of the characters you meet could have been like, and how does their past continue to weigh upon and shape their present, often without their consciously knowing? The real story is often between the lines. And so you need to uncover it, you need to interpret it. And if you really want to play with fire, then you can also try to do a Freudian analysis of the writer themselves. Certainly we've just seen that Freud did this with Shakespeare, but again, we might say that he was extending his own self analysis to Shakespeare in identifying the urge to produce Hamlet. This is a very difficult reading to do, a psychoanalytical reading of a writer, just like a biographical reading, because what do we really know? What we know is often what we bring to them. But you can do a Freudian analysis for an entire time. An era like the fin de siecle, the late 19th century, there are some wonderful Victorian Gothic works in particular that really lend themselves to Freudian analysis and explore the dark side of our humanity. I'm thinking of books like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I'm thinking of the Picture of Dorian Gray. But we can also see in the pastoral works of Thomas Hardy, for example, we can see the repressed sexual impulses and the individual versus society. So you can take your Freud to an entire era to a specific book and to yourself. And I would like to wrap up today by saying a huge thank you for listening. Thank you for talking about Sigmund Freud and the Interpretation of Dreams with me. I would love to know your thoughts on anything we have discussed today. Let me know and see what other deep readers have to say about Freud at the Hardcore Literature book club@patreon.com hardcore literature we have a fascinating discussion thread for this work which is filled with valuable and thought provoking insights. And if you enjoyed this discussion today, then we also have an extensive back catalogue of many more lectures, read throughs and bookish discussions for so many great works that you can dive into at your own pace on demand. Works by writers like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Thomas Hardy, Milton, Dante, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, Toni Morrison, Lady Murasaki, John Steinbeck, Walt Whitman, and many more. Once again, that's@patreon.com hardcoreliterature and at time of recording we are at the beginning of our exciting reading program for 2025. We are deep reading 100 Years of Solitude and we are also appreciating some great epic poetry with Ovid's Metamorphoses. We're continuing on our journey through the complete works of Shakespeare and we have so many more exciting writers to meet on the horizon. We're going to read Chaucer, Homer, Flaubert, Faulkner, Jane Austen, Daphne du Maurier, Alexandre Dumas and many more this year. Thank you again for listening. I appreciate you happy reading and bye bye for now.