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50 greatest books: The Interpretation of Dreams

The great mysteries of the human mind

JEFFREY MOUSSAIEFF MASSON

From Saturday's Globe and Mail

Latest comment posted at 12:47 PM EDT 18/04/08

Freud's most important book ...Read the full article

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  1. lotusland maritimer from Sault Ste Marie, Canada writes: A fair comment. The structuring of the unconscious into superego id and subconscious was certainly a useful tool but Freud of course didnt invent it like Heraclitus didnt invent change. More important than his dream theories are his completely nonsensical theorising about sexuality especially Oedipus Narcissus and other complexes. Turns out the little girls who were fantacising about having sex with their daddies unfortunately really did and were disturbed by it. His whole edifice collapses like a deck of cards when it's realised that its basis is a figment of his prurient imagination, there is simply nothing behind it. Rien nada nichts. One could dismiss a good part of twentieth century theorising as a delusion misdirected by two very false prophets who claimed scientific validity where all they produced were silly cults, psychoanalysis and Marxism. No serious psychiatrist or neuroscientist or literary critic or philosopher takes any of these intellectual hoaxes seriously any longer. Or political scientist or historian. Unless they belong to the cult. Which is not to say that their critique of capitalism is not valid, nor that the verbiage of Freudism is not useful in categorising mental processes and structures.Which is also not to say that the fad of deconstructionism the wobblier scaffolding of structuralism and the hokum of behaviourism is any better than these pseudoscientific intellectual hoaxes.To have no overarching simplistic theory of everything might distress some anal retentives and the unenlightened bourgeoisie but unfortunately we have to live with it. Folks not only do we not have any answers even the question keep receding further and further.We have seen done read believed it all in our salad days and it may distress us immensely but IT WAS ALL BUNK. What makes say Machiavelli or I almost said Plato but there are platonists but say Descartes or Pascal so superior is that they did not hatch a sinister cult. That was and is unforgivable.
  2. lotusland maritimer from Sault Ste Marie, Canada writes: Ah dream time although that is not what the writer meant. To me the most useful recent concept I learned since fractals chaos and successive creations by supernovas was the Australian aboriginal concept of dream time. Which of course doesnt mean rem or nonrem sleep or meditation or even formal mysticism but if I understand it correctly and intuitively is the idea of the other world or the other reality which is clearly identified as being not the day to day reality of our material world rocks stones here today ten cm of fluffy snow on the spruce boughs but all our mental and psychic processes where Freudianism for deconstructed people is just as valid as any animism or higher religion or the most abject superstition and indeed the most rigorous higher mysticism. No big deal and no secret simply the feeling or thought that I am one with the universe. In the simple materialistic view which is not so simple after all all these thoughts and ideas are nonsense irreal not unreal as that is something I dont intend but in the Abo dream time they are all valid. In dream time we can travel in time and space and imagination and become shapechanged altered creatures and in a dream time there is everything on the smorgasbord of legend tale religion fantasy and Platos cave or Pascals infinities. Its just that some of us prefer preferred dreamtime not sordid nightmares, pleasant dreams. Are they true or delusions? In dreamtime they are true. Of course when material reality becomes you dreamtime and vice versa you have attained enlightenment. Which is more accessible to an Aboriginal than a Viennese shrink.
  3. Mike Quinlan from Gatineau QC, Canada writes: Dear Lotus-- Who was it who said the point is not to explain the world but rather to change it? I am sad to say that you have completely lost me with your second post. By the way you dont have to be in ''dreamtime'' to travel in time and space and imagination, must of us do that quite readily in our less than fully aware lives. Our egos keep us conveniently trapped in our habitual stories and emotional reactions to them.
  4. lotusland maritimer from Sault Ste Marie, Canada writes: Wikipedia has pretty good explanations of aboriginal dreamtime. My only contribution is to steal it for ourselves.
    I humbly enfold our western myths as just another dreamtime including these two peudosciences as well as all the others we think are any more valid.
    That's precisely is the problem someone elses dreamtime became many another's nightmare.
    Fundamentalism is the delusion that someones dreamtime is reallly real.
    Another curious dreamtime is Scipio's dream.
  5. lotusland maritimer from Sault Ste Marie, Canada writes: Rereading Somnium Scipionis by Cicero gave me the creeps again. The Greeks and Romans Plato and the Stoics knew a hell of a lot more than we credit them for. No coincidence that Raphael places Timaeus in Plato's hand and that most of Dante's Comedy is from these sources. So much for dark Middle Ages.
    They knew about the spherical globe of Earth and possibly about supernoval creation ekpyrosis for starters. There's even more there.
    Bon voyage and happy dreams.
    BTW the Dalai Lama is giggling and laughing often as he spends most of the time in his dreamtime. In the real world he would have no reason but to cry.
    Another famous saying: if a saint were sad he would be a sad saint.
    BTW BTW were Freud and Marx happy joyous cheerful fellows or angry mad furious raging chumps. I rest my case.
    I should remember that when I am in a foul mood whose bad dreamtime did I bungle stumble fall into? Surely not theirs.
  6. Jeff Pritchard from Canada writes: Disregarding lotusland's diatribe above, Freud's conception of the "death instinct" remains one of the most explanatory narrative arcs for the idiotic behavior of Western governments, and the docile citizenry that allows them to rule, in recent history.

    We don't want to survive because we don't think we deserve to live. And we may be right!
  7. John Smith from Canada writes: Once again, the reviewer for the book fundamentally fails to make the case why this book and why Freud are important in the context of society. Unfortunate the review is caught up in the content of "Dreams" and not its importance and impact (can't see the forest for the trees might apply). While lotusland mariner is justified in critiqing the content of Freud, it does not deal with the issue that Freud, right or wrong, pervades all modern discussion from top to bottom. As one quote from another source plainly puts it, "The work of Sigmund Freud has become, for us, like water to fishes. It is barely regarded as theory - something that could prove to be right or wrong. It has become the lens through which we perceive all of reality." Freud's work has permeated how all people think about thinking (incorrectly perhaps, that does not alter the impact on society). Freud invades everyday life from the grocery store to the television talk show. The common person is highly likely to "quote" Freud even when they have no idea of where it comes from or its validity. It might be bunk - but Freud changed society and his influence remains welded to everyday life and pop culture.
  8. Jim Cohoon from Chilliwack, Canada writes: This may not have been Freud's most interesting book, but it may have been the most important or 'seminal' of his works (no Freudian pun intended). He was certainly not the first to pry into the human subconscious, but after this book, there followed almost a century, and untold thousands of books, relating in one way or another to the subconscious and its effects on human behaviour. One significant spin-off has been psycho-sociology, in particular relating to politics, where 'myth' bridges the conscious and subconscious. The political biographer T.H. White once wrote of Richard Nixon: "All civilizations rest on myths, but in America myths have exceptional meaning.... The true crime of Richard Nixon was simple: he destroyed the myth that binds America together." Freud himself might have concurred; he wrote: "It seems extremely probable that myths ... are distorted vestiges of wish-phantasies of whole nations." I suspect Freud would have found much of interest in the current Bush/Cheney 'war on terror' -- and its rationalization and perpetuation involving many American 'wish-phantasies' and myths (of 'freedom' and 'victory' etc.), not to mention possibly the working out of various subconscious national dreams or nightmares involving demons projected onto 'terrorists'. That myths and the subconscious still play a very important role in human behaviours and politics is obvious, at least to those who make the effort to look behind the conscious mind's constant imperative to deceive itself and others about its true underlying motives. Even when 'conscious', humans mentally exist in a semi-dream state. Danger arises when subconscious demons dictate the nature of consciousness, especially that of our political leaders.
  9. lotusland maritimer from Sault Ste Marie, Canada writes:
    Perverse and pathological sex is one thing but murder suicide OK thanatos is something else again. BTW of course the Greeks antedated ole Sigi by a scarce two thousand plus years. Namely gyne ........ thalamos.........thanatos. ie woman is at her greatest in bed and in death. A very Greek thought at that. So much for novelty.
    All the same it was only one of many such gems and not proscripitive but descriptive and privative. Not a whole worldview merely a cri du coeur.
    Still I dont think it was all of the Greeks dreamtime but was it all of Freuds?
    En thalamo kai thanato that's all?
    And they lost Aristotles tome on humour or comedy?
  10. Dave T from midwest, Canada writes: “The sea at morning like a presumption of the mind” was how I began a paper on the writer in question, (quoting St. John Perse from his arid Wasteland like Anabasis), but really attempting to apply libidinous associations of the idea. Then I proceeded to slam Freud for the determinism of his constructs, torpedoing the idea that if the subconscious mind has a will of its own, it is to undermine the repression of the instincts and reassert the primacy of gratification. Surely one recognized the dark deterministic nature of such repression existing in the first place, let alone commencing in infancy: after all, even Mikhail Zoshchenko’s book Before Sunrise reads as little more than satire. Surely too, our lives do not play out according to the repression of our instincts and the tabooed subterranean cries in our subconscious. And then there is the case of Vladimir Nabokov, who had little use for Freud, and who compared some of his central tenets to a play you are watching onstage where everything leads to but one and only one inevitable outcome. How’s that for a dagger in the heart? Years later, I have softened: Freud did classify what the big ideologies of previous generations failed: that we have a rich, untapped gold mine of an inner structure, and an inner life that sometimes searches for and struggles to find its connecting points, an inner structure that cannot grasp the totality of the external world. In one sense, then, the publication of the Interpretation of Dreams in 1900 could not have been more symbolic; literally, the moment where the economic man of the 19th century gives way to the psychological man of the 20th.Accepting that more or less puts us all in the same boat, which is to say that my final position on Freud’s contribution to the history of ideas is not found in his inquiry into the meaning of dreams, but rather the idea that we are not that different from each other. In the same boat, indeed, the big sea and its presumptions all around us.
  11. John Smith from Canada writes: Good comments Dave T from midwest. And agree that importance of book is not the "interpretation of dreams" yet one walks away from the review thinking this to be the case.

    Thus far the selections of 50 most important books has been good (although I would debate The Great Gatsby). Unfortunately, it seems the Globe wants to pair off the 50 most important with the 50 worst arguments stating why.
  12. E Maclachlan from Canada writes: I was heavily influenced by 'Interpretation of Dreams' but it's not easy reading. Nor are any of the choices so far.

    These are perhaps the most important books, but hardly the greatest books. The criteria is wrong.

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