mythology. After her father is murdered, Electra avenges his death by slaying her mother and her mother’s lover. According to Freud, every girl prefers the affection of her father and subconsciously wants to take her mother’s place.
While investigating this complex, Freud’s attitudes toward women also steered him into the highly controversial concept of “penis envy,” whereby every girl experiences the wish to be male and blames her mother for not giving her a penis. The complex could be resolved only when a girl renounced her desire to be a boy, repressed her attraction to her father, and identified with her mother. Free of feeling inferior, a girl would develop into a healthy woman.
“What does a woman want?” Freud famously asked in later life—and clearly, he was clueless in many ways. In his research, Freud always relied on the male as the “norm” of development. And he accepted the male and female stereotypes of his day. “Anatomy is destiny,” Freud insisted in one sweeping statement. What he meant was that gender was the most important factor in shaping a person’s life. One of the early female psychoanalysts, Karen Horney, disagreed with him right from the start, the first of many women—and men—to do so.
Another important outcome of his self-analysis was his reliance on dreams as keys to unlocking a person’s state of mind. He’d written down his own dreams ever since childhood. Now he studied hundreds of dreams in addition to his own, eagerly seeking descriptions from all his patients, from Martha and his children.
Dream interpretation goes back thousands of years. Dreams were once thought to predict the future or reveal ways to cure the dreamer’s illnesses. Educated Europeans of Freud’s time believed that dreams were meaningless bits of trivia, a result of indigestion perhaps. Even in “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” Freud had called dreams “simply hallucinations motivated by the small residues of energy that are ordinarily left over” from the day and come out during sleep.
But now he became convinced that dreams had an important purpose: to shed light on unconscious desires or wishes. In 1900, he published The Interpretation of Dreams , a landmark study of why dreams originate and how they function.
Freud pictured the human mind as an energy system, like a machine. The mind’s energy he called “libido”—the biological urge to reproduce, seek stimulation, and achieve goals. This energy would seek whatever outlet it could find. If denied physical expression by the person in everyday waking life, the energy would seek release through dreams, through stories we tell ourselves while sleeping. Wishes sprout like mushrooms in our unconscious sleeping minds. In the language of The Interpretation of Dreams , a wish can be satisfied by an imaginary wish fulfillment, or dream. According to Freud, even nightmares are the disguised expression of wish fulfillment. Dreams were a link to the unconscious—in fact, they were “the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.”
In a dream, he believed, everything is in disguise, every object or event stands for something else. His book provides a guide for the decoding of the symbols, or dreamwork, as Freud called it. In the first paragraph he states: “Every dream reveals itself as a psychical structure which has a meaning and which can be inserted at an assignable point in the mental activities of waking life.”
That common dream about being in a public place, among strangers, with no clothes on? We might feel shame and anxiety, but Freud pointed out that the strangers don’t seem to notice. “Dreams of being naked are dreams of exhibiting,” taking us back to the “unashamed period of childhood. . . . We can regain this Paradise every night in our dreams.” We are wishing to be an uninhibited child again.
Or that dream about taking an important exam for which one has not studied? This
While investigating this complex, Freud’s attitudes toward women also steered him into the highly controversial concept of “penis envy,” whereby every girl experiences the wish to be male and blames her mother for not giving her a penis. The complex could be resolved only when a girl renounced her desire to be a boy, repressed her attraction to her father, and identified with her mother. Free of feeling inferior, a girl would develop into a healthy woman.
“What does a woman want?” Freud famously asked in later life—and clearly, he was clueless in many ways. In his research, Freud always relied on the male as the “norm” of development. And he accepted the male and female stereotypes of his day. “Anatomy is destiny,” Freud insisted in one sweeping statement. What he meant was that gender was the most important factor in shaping a person’s life. One of the early female psychoanalysts, Karen Horney, disagreed with him right from the start, the first of many women—and men—to do so.
Another important outcome of his self-analysis was his reliance on dreams as keys to unlocking a person’s state of mind. He’d written down his own dreams ever since childhood. Now he studied hundreds of dreams in addition to his own, eagerly seeking descriptions from all his patients, from Martha and his children.
Dream interpretation goes back thousands of years. Dreams were once thought to predict the future or reveal ways to cure the dreamer’s illnesses. Educated Europeans of Freud’s time believed that dreams were meaningless bits of trivia, a result of indigestion perhaps. Even in “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” Freud had called dreams “simply hallucinations motivated by the small residues of energy that are ordinarily left over” from the day and come out during sleep.
But now he became convinced that dreams had an important purpose: to shed light on unconscious desires or wishes. In 1900, he published The Interpretation of Dreams , a landmark study of why dreams originate and how they function.
Freud pictured the human mind as an energy system, like a machine. The mind’s energy he called “libido”—the biological urge to reproduce, seek stimulation, and achieve goals. This energy would seek whatever outlet it could find. If denied physical expression by the person in everyday waking life, the energy would seek release through dreams, through stories we tell ourselves while sleeping. Wishes sprout like mushrooms in our unconscious sleeping minds. In the language of The Interpretation of Dreams , a wish can be satisfied by an imaginary wish fulfillment, or dream. According to Freud, even nightmares are the disguised expression of wish fulfillment. Dreams were a link to the unconscious—in fact, they were “the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.”
In a dream, he believed, everything is in disguise, every object or event stands for something else. His book provides a guide for the decoding of the symbols, or dreamwork, as Freud called it. In the first paragraph he states: “Every dream reveals itself as a psychical structure which has a meaning and which can be inserted at an assignable point in the mental activities of waking life.”
That common dream about being in a public place, among strangers, with no clothes on? We might feel shame and anxiety, but Freud pointed out that the strangers don’t seem to notice. “Dreams of being naked are dreams of exhibiting,” taking us back to the “unashamed period of childhood. . . . We can regain this Paradise every night in our dreams.” We are wishing to be an uninhibited child again.
Or that dream about taking an important exam for which one has not studied? This
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