Träume sind Schäume.
-- old folk-saying
I am currently combing slowly through Freud’s groundbreaking
work of 1899, Die Traumdeutung -- “La clef des songes” -- “The Interpretation of Dreams”. Meanwhile, this page can serve as a
scratch-space for matters oneiric.
Don’t worry -- I won’t be pinning your ears back with my own dreams, which are mostly boring or
annoying or both.
[Pronunciation of Die Traumdeutung: dee TROWM-doy-toong. Traum is cognate with English dream; deutung has no cognate in modern English, but is prehistorically related to the German word for 'German', deutsch.]
[Pronunciation of Die Traumdeutung: dee TROWM-doy-toong. Traum is cognate with English dream; deutung has no cognate in modern English, but is prehistorically related to the German word for 'German', deutsch.]
~ (I) ~
In our essay on Eliminative Materialism, we made fun
of Edward Wilson’s celebration of the neuroscientists’ would-be
physicalist-reductionist supersession of Freudian semantic-based
oneirology. It was not much beyond the level of “The
red chemical makes you dream of flying, the blue chemical makes you dream of
penguins” -- or rather, it did not even rise to the level of such an actual
correlation, but basically said simply, “Since we know in advance that
everything reduces to chemicals, dreams do too” -- an exercise precisely as
enlightening as droning on about the chemistry of paper and ink, in
an attempt to explain Paradise Lost; or to announce, after painstaking
statistical analysis, that that work turns out to be exhaustively composed of
just twenty-six
-->
Basic Building Blocks (shades of the nucleotide code!), in
what scientists are calling an “alphabet”.
The most you could say about their efforts is that they at
least are opening a door to possible physiochemical groundings of oneiric
events (without explaining the latter in detail -- indeed, without getting
anywhere near the pyschosemantics of the thing), in a way unanticipated by
Freud, benighted as he was back in
the bad old days of metaphysical speculation. Only, it turns out he was perfectly aware of such maneuvers,
which had already fashionably flourished in his day (with vacuous results) --
indeed, he went so far as to speculate (perhaps humorously) that someday,
someday, such blandly-blankly chemical underpinnings might explain everything
(compare his remarks quoted here) -- yet remained, after an extensive
review of that and kindred literatures (dutiful reviewal of which takes up the
painful first one hundred pages of his tome), unimpressed.
Let him tell it:
Vorläufig wollen wir uns über
die Überschätzung der nicht aus dem Seelenleben stammenden Reize zur Traumbildung nicht verwundern. Nicht nur daß diese
allein leicht aufzufinden
und selbst durchs Experiment zu bestätigen sind; es entspricht auch die somatische Auffassung der
Traumentstehung durchwegs der heute in der Psychiatrie herrschenden
Denkrichtung.
-- Sigmund Freud, Die
Traumdeutung (1899)
Nor was this an amateur’s or outsider’s assessment: Freud had been trained as a physician, not as a philosopher, so
he knew whereof he spoke. And it
is to his moral credit that, so far from lording it over non-doctors in
physiological matters (as doctors
even today are wont to do),
he not only upheld the independent integrity of psychical productions as such
(as does anyone with any sense, when it comes to literature or mathematics),
but laid aside his own training-advantage in the debate as to how the
newly-developing field of psychoanalysis should go forth, staunchly upholding,
in the face of oppostion, the validity of “lay analysis”.
He goes on:
Die Herrschaft des Gehirns über den Organismus wird zwar nachdrücklich betont, aber alles, was eine Unabhängigkeit des
Seelenlebens von nachweisbaren
organischen Veränderungen oder
eine Spontaneität in dessen Äußerungen erweisen könnte, schreckt den Psychiater heute so,
als ob dessen Anerkennung die Zeiten der Naturphilosophie und des metaphysischen Seelen
Seelenwesens wiederbringen müßte.
You needn’t change a word of that, to apply it to the
intellectual ambience in the laboratories of today. -- He ends with an epigram: “Das Mißtrauen des Psychiaters hat die Psyche gleichsam unter Kuratel gesetzt.”
*
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The Positivist conception of dreams, whether that of the 19th
or the 21st century, is basically “it was just something you ate”
(chemicals!). Freud’s take
was initially seen as demeaning, depicting us in the grip of the (scarcely
salonfähig)
Unconscious. (It sounds even
scarier in German, if you pronounce it Uunbewuussten.) But that theory at least is semantic all the way down, in keeping
with our humanity. Compare the
humanity of his classic essay “Mourning and Melancholy”, treating of the
manic-depressive, vs. the pop-a-pill present age, treating (while not treating of) the lately-rechristened “bipolar”.
~
For our own remarkable experiments in the dream-laboratory, click here:
~ (II) ~
I happened upon a file of my recorded dreams from 1982,
bracketing the time when our first child was born. I shall not bore you (nor bore myself) with
telling any one of them; but
certain generalizations might be worth noting.
(1) As I read
them now, three decades later, very few of them ring any sort of memory-bell,
or even hold an particular interest:
it was not like biting down on the madeleine. But the culprit is not simply the passage of so many
years: many of my diary entries
from that time (and even earlier) elicit an appreciative chuckle, or a pang.
(2) These
dreams, as recorded in writing, now offer a blind alley to interpretation,
evoking no associations or insights.
Yet the accounts are each accompanied with a commentary written the
morning after the dream, and these are
in some cases quite
fact-packed, surprising, and insightful.
But they are heavily dependent
on the day-remnants, memory of which (these being in themselves mostly trivial)
has long since evaporated.
(3) In no
instance do they carry any evident Jungian numinosity -- no portents of the
future (which they have had thirty full years to let come to fruition) -- no useable ideas. So maybe I’m just a shallow guy; yet I don’t think so: the depth goes into my poems and
books; the dreams are orphans.
~ (III) ~
Though movies sometimes try to blur the distinction with
their soft-focus “dream sequences”, real dreams are quite different from
fiction, and even from fantasy. To
take a typical example at random (reported by Jonathan Towers, and reprinted in
Io, vol. viii, 1971):
I had a nightmare last night, I
woke up hysterically crying … It was that Aunt Et had a new husband who was
sort of in between a kid and a man, and using the man part, his role as
husband, to put me down. … The
dream was all about animals, this chicken that had to be born itself to have
chicks, had to create a white round very cellulose shell around itself, but
then to be born, she also had to go through the Smelly Cat’s body and be
ejected out the anus, which was a process I really empathized with … watching
the bulge in the cat’s stomache and then moaning with pain and then relief at
the ejection of the chicken …
The OTT latter part could in principle be depicted (its
look, though not its meaning) in the wacky-surreal style of early cartooning
(“Minnie the Moocher”, “Betty Boop”), in which the lines between rational
creature and beast and inanimate (in those cartoons, nothing is inanimate) are repeatedly and
gleefully transgressed. Or,
you might hallucinate the thing (I once had something very like the extravagant
early animations, after several days in the hospital lying on an ice-blanket with
a raging fever). But the
first statement, so po-facedly retailed, “in between a kid and a man, and using
the man part”, is visually undepictable.
~ (IV) ~
Nun dämmert mir aber ein neuer Sachverhalt. Die Zärtlichkeit des Traumes gehört nicht zum latenten Inhalt, zun den Gedanken hinter dem Traume; sie steht im Gegensatz zu diesem Inhalt …
-- S. Freud, Die Traumdeutung, IV.
Dream-interpretation, like literary criticism (or intelligence
analysis), has its inevitable part of subjectivity; yet here, we feel dismay. If, a given dream feature failing to prove analytically fruitful, we may equally
replace it with its opposite, then
truly, there are no rules.
This recalls the 18th-century quip against the
then-unscientific pastime of etymology, as being one “in which consonants
matter little, and vowels not at
all.” The poster-boy for such woolly lack of methodology is
lucus a non lucendo
lit. ‘It is called a grove because it doesn’t shine’ (or, freely: ‘…
because it doesn’t grieve’) which
actually was itself a satire, not a genuinely proposed etymology.
Freud’s gambit was abetted by his reliance upon then-fashionable erroneous
theories of primitive language, according to which there was once no negative
particle, and a word might mean equally a given thing and its opposite --
he had read Abel’s Der Gegensinn der Urworte
(1884) ).
The latter thesis has been maintained (sometimes in earnest, sometimes
in jest) with respect to early Arabic, summarized in the chestnut: “In Arabic, any given word can mean:
(1) a given thing; (2) the opposite of that; (3) something obscene; and (4)
something about a camel.” I have
addressed (and refuted) that assertion, in the chapter “Enantiosemantics” in The Semantics of Form in Arabic.
And yet and yet … That connection of lucus with lucere [the
latter from lux ‘light’) is not
nearly as absurd as generally made out:
in fact, the suggestion of such a connection is correct.
To point the apparent absurdity, the Latin word lucus in that phrase is often translated ‘dark grove’ (that is what you’ll find online). But it doesn’t mean ‘dark grove’: it denotes
‘a clearing (in the woods)’. And here the present of lux is plain.
Indeed, it becomes explicit in the German word Lichtung ‘clearing’, compare Licht (light).And thus, perhaps there is more wisdom in Freud's gambit than is apparent.
~ (V) ~
Freud offers several dreams which, on the surface, are irksome, but which (so he argues)
are at a deeper level, wish-fulfillments
-- the core characteristic of dreams, in his system.
Now:
I once dreamt
(many decades ago) that, just by thinking, I could make objects move. -- I
awoke in terror.
That is a dream which , on the surface, might seem a
wish-fulfillment -- that of omnipotence:
Yet it is a nightmare. It
illustrates the horror of “the Omnipotence of Wishes”.
This telekinesis dream is the flip side (seemingly opposite, but from the same record
-- cf. duality) of the brain-in-a-vat scenario. In the one, you can do everything; in the other, you can do
nothing: but none of it has
meaning, and it comes to the same thing.
-->
~
Was für Krimi liest
wohl Dr. Sigmund Freud?
Schauen Sie mal!
~
~ (VI) ~
The eminent British sexologist (and period eccentric)
Havelock Ellis worked
contemporaneously with Freud, and plowed many of the same fields. Their relations were cordial, but
intellectually superficial:
neither seems deeply to have influenced the thought of the other.
In part two of volume three of his immense undertaking, Studies
in the Psychology of Sex, Ellis offers a chapter “The Synthesis of
Dreams: A study of a series of one
hundred dreams”. He opens with a
nod to Die Traumdeutung (which “marks an epoch”), then proceeds to an
extended exercise which fundamentally borrows nothing from the Freudian program
and contributes nothing to it.
Ellis’ approach he calls dream-synthesis,
as against Freud’s dream-analysis; and comments that the relation of the former
to the latter is like that of geography
to geology. To that, a Freudian would probably assent, merely noting
that, of the latter two, only Geology belongs to the natural sciences.
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