Dreams

Does Freud deserve any acknowledgement? In my opinion he deserves bucket-loads. For someone who wrote over thirty volumes, at least, of work he is perhaps the most shortchanged intellectual of modern times. He is reduced to caricature too often. The problem was Freud was of his time which extolled the belief and aspiration of the well rounded individual, the doctor who knew not only of medicine but of Greek and Latin, the thorough empiricist who may dissect hundreds of eels yet will as well provide sincere attention to religious scripture (even if there is no belief of the scripture). In his work where he truly tackles just about everything it seems too mazy, too self-indulgent, too impractical. As if the human mind and humanity at large would have easy to comprehend, and communicate, blueprints.

Freud tackled the unconscious. Freud pioneered in a time of incredible concentration and fastidiousness, the Victorian era, study of motivations, the mind, was the shell is that humankind embody. It must be noted that such things were completely unknown and not of interest. Likewise if a man were to then insist on giving the man with African ancestry the vote, the notion would of fallen on deaf ears and mere stupefaction. It is important when weapons exist which can cause apocalyptic damage that we can with the most extreme detail understand the wielders of such power. A footnote on the tackling of psychology and the unconscious (which I consider full psychology, looking at the complete picture of the mind): even now I can vouch that psychology lecturers differ on the mere existence of the unconscious and that while one will argue that the unconscious exists due the the evolutionary drive to ease cognition, thinking and other mental skills another will claim that the unconscious doesn’t exist due to the same factor, i.e., evolution would have no need to create this complicated machination of the mind which multiple levels. If the specialists of the area still dispute the basic phenomenon so tritely it is clear that the topic doesn’t bode well for harmonious discussion and debate.

The unconscious is that which is not conscious. By nature of being the unconscious it is meant to be difficult to translate into consciousness. Also, by nature of what is of the unconscious not belonging to consciousness it is hard for consciousness to identify what belongs to the unconscious (like the speaker of one language cannot identify words of another specific language).

As for dreams I can vouch that they have a connection between lived experience and are more than incoherence. I want this committed to writing before I forget. After a night out where I made a barbed joke and heard “that’s a classic joke from you” and then felt guilt over the idea of having made stinging jokes unknowingly I had a dream where I possessed knives and went around trying to hurt people, although I appeared to be on a movie set and was unsure whether I was apart of a movie, hence not really hurting people, or actually seriously hurting them. This example is a clear illustration of conscious material and concerns appearing in the unconscious, that is, in dreams. By the fact dreams are not commanded, not of conscious volition, they are a unique part of the unconscious. An example Freud used to illustrate the existence of the unconscious is the period of hypnosis where people are “under” and are receptive to commands, etc.

We are always thinking. We must, when possible, thoroughly think about thought.