Sigmund Freud’s biographers often note that we all “speak Freud.” The Freudian slip is a well known concept, as is Freud’s idea of the Oedipus complex. But do we take dreams as seriously as Freud took them? Published at the dawn of the twentieth century, The Interpretation of Dreams came to be seen by Freud himself as “the most valuable of all the discoveries it has been my good fortune to make.” Not only are dreams—a form of involuntary psychic activity that, for Freud, reveals and fulfills repressed wishes—the “royal road to the unconscious,” but their interpretation is paradigmatic of the work of psychoanalysis writ large. Dreams are no different, for psychoanalysts, from “hysterical phobias, obsessions, and delusions,” displacing unconscious content with which the dreamer cannot easily reckon. At the root of their interpretation lie two key concepts, “condensation” and “displacement,” and the idea that to unravel dream images—to decompress and reorganize them for the sake of self-knowledge—requires first narration, then conscious analysis.
In this course, we will read significant selections from The Interpretation of Dreams alongside key critical engagements with its central argument. We will learn Freud’s method of dream deciphering through the concepts of condensation and displacement and put this to practice by reexamining the dreams that Freud analyzes in the book, many of which were his own. With an eye to the context of its genesis in fin-de-siècle Vienna, we will ask what attracted Freud to dreams to begin with, before turning to dream research carried out by his disciples and successors: Carl Jung, Erich Fromm, Hélène Cixous, and Thomas Ogden. Finally, we will discuss the relationship between dreams and fiction, dwelling on what happens to the dream once it has been “translated” into language. Students will be encouraged, but not expected, to keep a record of and present their own dreams.
Note:
There *is* no physical Brooklyn Institute. We hold our classes all over (thus far) Brooklyn and Manhattan, in alternative spaces ranging from the back rooms of bars to bookstores to spaces in cultural centers, including the Center for Jewish History, the Goethe-Institut, and the Barnard Center for Research on Women.
We can (and do) turn any space into a classroom. You will be notified of the exact location when you register for a class.
