Extra Credit: Freud’s Unconscious - The Psychoanalysis of a Dream, and Its Dreamer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnNJwUlLzR0
 

The Documentary, "Freud’s Unconscious - The Psychoanalysis of a Dream, and Its Dreamer" has many insightful things to say about how Freud interpreted dreams. There was quite a bit of mention of his childhood and how it impacted his future dreams. Interestingly, there was only a very slight allusion to his Jewish upbringing even though the importance of childhood was heavily discussed. The reference to his Jewishness was a book which was present in Freud's house growing up, a copy of the Philipson Bible which is actually the Tanakh, a compilation of Jewish Literature (including the Old Testament) which vastly predates any bible. The narrator claims that his memory of the book is a key biographical moment of Freud's life, and yet did not mention Judaism at all, something else that is doubtlessly a key biographical factor in how we view Freud.

The vast majority of the documentary was dedicated to analyzing a dream Freud had which involved him reading a book on botany. The narrator claimed that dreams are overlapping bits of disconnected information. The information can then be interpreted perfectly in a way which makes logical sense. Dreams don't have a singular meaning, rather the disconnected memories and such each have their own meanings. I'm not sure Freud would have necessarily agreed with the narrator's analysis of his dream, or his method of analysis at all. The narrator claimed dreams are not tools to use in psychoanalysis, which Freud definitely did not believe as he used dreams to help his clients in therapy. He said that there is no such thing as unconscious meaning.

The dream in question is interpreted in the documentary to be a compilation of important memories which Freud found important to who he became as a person. Supposedly his dream was making an unconscious association between a moment when he tore a book, and a moment where he was tearing flowers. The narrator then brings in the opinion of Leclaire, a student of Lacon, a fellow psychoanalyst.

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