So while reading this text, I couldn't help thinking that Freud is a kind of full of bullshit. The way that he analyzes dreams and goes so in depth with the meaning seems ridiculous. I'm sure that dreams have meaning but the way he dissects them seems so unbelievable, he goes so far as to dissect the meanings of the words that appear in our dreams and looks at every single possible association that goes along with it. I'll give him credit for his psychoanalytic method in the sense that it opened up doors for the field of psychiatry, but I feel like some of his interpretations are just based on nothing, like there's really no proof that all these associations that he uses to analyze elements in dreams really have anything to do with deconstructing the meaning behind the dreams. I feel like he interprets the dream to suit his diagnosis, which would be easy enough to do. Interpretation is always more or less biased- each person will see it in a different way.
Then I began thinking about how this is related to literary theory and I came to the conclusion that Freud's method of interpretation is similar to how we interpret literature. I remember having to read Shakespeare in highschool and the teacher would dissect every single word and show how it had all these different meanings in relation to the text, context (history), etc. and I remember thinking that there was no way that Shakespeare could have thought of all these meanings while writing his plays- if he had, then it would have taken him forever to complete anything. A lot of the time we overanalyze things but this process does allow us to find new meanings that the author might not have originally intended on- so in this way it becomes more personal to us. I guess we can do the same when we analyze dreams- we can give them a meaning that is personal to us.
Why would we want to make a text "personal to us"? What would that mean, either for a literary text, or for a dream text? Would it mean the same thing, or something different?
ReplyDeleteFrom the basis of psychology, on a scientific level, his theory is really problematic (mostly for coming up with an elaborate theory from very little data)
ReplyDeleteFrom a literary standpoint, I agree with your comment on overanalyzing. With relation to making a text personal to us, I think it has to do with making a text mean something here to us (and with the word "mean" i see another red flag, what does it mean to mean...). Or rather, when reading a text, we come to it from a certain sujective perspective which biases the way that we read the text (the way we interpret it, what we pay more or less atention to, what we notice and what we miss, etc.) So I think making a text "personal to us" is making the text coherent with the way that we are think (ie. seeing in teh text what we want to see).
tiana
In response to the question, I would say I agree with Tiana. I think that we make the text "personal" to us so that we can see in the text what we want to see (i.e interpret it for our own means). This way it gives us meaning because it concurs with our point of view. Why would we want the text to be personal to us? Mainly because it becomes familiar and perhaps through this familiarity we can gain something from it- a new experience, a sense of understanding, etc.
ReplyDeleteHi Monica,
ReplyDeleteI like how you compare the analysis of dreams with literary criticism. I think this would lead us to reader-response theory. I only know the name of this theory but I think it might be based on just what your high school teacher was doing with Shakespeare and just what you are proposing about creating your own meaning or understanding of a text. We can analyse literature based on our own experience, baggage, perspectives. We can construct a meaning of our own, which is independent of the author's intentions, which we can rarely really know.
I find this idea extremely liberating. Any reader can create any meaning. This can apply to other forms of art. When I was younger and I attended modern dance shows, I was one of the “What-does-it-mean?” people, and when I did not understand, I felt like I had failed and was missing out on something. Once, a friend of mine – an actress, not a dancer – said: It doesn't matter. You don't need to know what it means. And in a piece I saw performed and choreographed by a Hungarian modern dancer (including nudity – which, of course, was my favourite part), an audience member asked, during the Q & A period, what the nudity represented or what it meant. The choreographer-performer did not answer and asked her: What does it mean to you?
Maybe we don't need doctors to analyse our dreams, we need graduate students of literature.
Best,
Mélanie
I completely agree with you when you say that everyone is going to have their own interpretation for everything in life. That's humanity and maybe that's why we don't really see eye to eye with Freud because he tries to propose one single way to analyze dreams when in reality...there could be many. I mean, my dreams are up for my own interpretation.
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ReplyDelete"my dreams are up for my own interpretation."
ReplyDeleteWell, indeed. And this of course is Freud's method: his interpretations are not "just based on nothing," they are produced by (or in dialogue with) the dreamer him or herself.
Meanwhile, Monica's remarks open up a whole can of worms:
"This way it gives us meaning because it concurs with our point of view. Why would we want the text to be personal to us? Mainly because it becomes familiar and perhaps through this familiarity we can gain something from it- a new experience, a sense of understanding, etc."
I'm struck, for instance, by the tension here between familiarity and novelty. For if something is familiar, surely it is *not* new. If something "concurs with our point of view," then how are we learning from it?
Surely, we only learn from things that do not already "concur with our point of view," or from things that deviate or vary from what is already familiar.
Perhaps we only learn from texts that, at first sight at least, appear to be "kind of full of bullshit."
Anything else is not learning: it's merely the confirmation of familiar prejudices.
Yes, I agree with Jon that it is problematic to say that we can learn from things that are already familiar to us. That sounds more like confirmation as he said...but perhaps you mean that it reveals new ways of viewing personal beliefs or "prejudices"? In this case, while the underlying sentiment is familiar, the way in which we access it, view it, is un- or defamiliar...to go back to Shklovsky's terminology.
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