Freud as Evangelical Preacher

The Interpretation of Dreams

Sigmund Freud interprets dreams like fundamentalist preachers interpret the bible.

I wanted to like Freud. I really did. But having made it 3/4 of the way through this massive book, I just gave up. It wasn’t just that the writing bored me half-way to hades, or that the elitism and misogyny and arrogance and insecurity were so bloody everywhere. It was the ‘this means that’ model of interpretation.

Parts of the book were very nearly interesting. Sigmund had clearly studied the subject long and hard, listened to countless dreams of other people, and had been brutally honest about his own dreams. And those recurring dream incidents that so many people have (losing teeth, flying, and being caught in public with virtually no clothes on), are always interesting to hear. Well almost always. Freud has an uncanny gift of turning interesting stories into turgid, yawn-inducing, time-wastage.

But he seems to have a special key (God knows where he acquired it) that he uses to interpret dreams: mostly they are about sexual intercourse and masturbation. My favourite example was a scene in which someone entered an alleyway between two houses, almost incidental to the account. For Freud there was no question - this was a reference to the vagina! Really? And this is what makes him evangelical.

Namely, he imposes his own arbitrarily constructed blue-print onto the dream (like a fundamentalist preacher). He links it back to something that happened to the dreamer within the last 24 hours (i.e., invents some contemporary relevance), then passes his judgement (the most pious hobby). Not to mention, that the smug certainty of his pronouncements is gut-punchingly painful.

I thought Freud was supposed to be a genius. I have yet to read his other books, but unless there is serious improvement, I wonder why anyone thinks he’s a genius at anything other than convincing the world he’s a genius.

Still, Sigmund Freud has forever undermined one of my long-cherished convictions: that reading primary sources is always worthwhile.