11.26

Freud's all about reading into the meaning behind dreams and stuff like that (or at least that's what I've gleaned from the reading, I know close to nothing about Freud otherwise), so would learning his techniques not be useful in picking out the hidden meanings and subtle nuances within the very works we've already read? Be showing us what to look for and what those things mean, Freudian (<-is that a word? yeah, right?) techniques would be extremely useful in the study of not just literature, but literary theory. Now that we've learned WHAT these theorists are looking for, Freud can help us figure out WHY that is, and WHAT it means. Or, at least, that's the theory.

Besides, even if we were to completely ignore the work we've done so far (unlikely), Freud would be very useful in analyzing the authors of the next few pieces we work on. It is because fiction is so like a dream, both within our control and just barely beyond it. What somebody writes (as opposed to what may have been said in previous classes) DOES have some basis in how they think, or what they believe, or what they've been through. Cut back to the beginning of the term, with the car chases. If we read a story with a very realistic and believable car chase Freud, or rather, somebody with Freudian ideas, would conclude that the author has had some experience with car chases. I know that this methodology is flawed, at best. Just look at A Million Little Pieces, the author didn't go through that, but god damn it if it's not believable.



I thought this passage, about the difference between latent and manifest dreams, was relevant to my interests:

"Among the most surprising findings is the way in which the dream-work treats contraries that occur in the latent dream. We know already [...] that conformities in the latent material are replaced by condensations in the manifest dream. Well, contraries are treated in the same way as conformities, and there is a special preference for expressing them by the same manifest element. Thus an element in the manifest dream which is capable of having a contrary may equally well be expressing either itself or its contrary or both together: only the sense can decide which translation is to be chosen."