As I said before, I’m not a scholar of psychoanalytical theory. I will not write complex theoretical posts because I have neither the knowledge nor the interest to do so. Given that most of the people in this country are grievously ignorant about psychoanalysis, I want to provide the most basic information my readers might find useful in their approach to the subject.
I vastly prefer the Jungian model of psychoanalysis to the Freudian for the two simple reasons I want to share with you.
1. Four and a half years ago, I was packing up my stuff at the apartment where I’d lived during my doctoral studies in preparation to moving back to Montreal. A grad student accumulates a lot of books and papers, as I’m sure you can imagine. All I did for weeks was pack books into boxes (I’m an old lady, so that was before the Kindle era.) I didn’t see the light of day for these book-filled boxes. And when I slept, I persistently dreamt of packing books into boxes, which is not surprising, given that it was all I was doing all day and every day. At that very time, I was reading Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. Imagine how I felt when I discovered that dreaming of packing books into boxes meant I was feeling sexual desire for my brother.
To begin with, I don’t even have a brother. And at that moment, I was completely sexually satisfied because I had just met N., and we were living together. I analyzed and overanalyzed my every thought but, as hard as I tried, I could not convince myself that the dream I was having had anything to do with some imaginary unfulfilled sex drive and not with the very real situation I was living daily. If a box filled with books cannot sometimes simply be a box filled with books, I had no use for that theory.
Jung, bless him, changed all that. He believes that any dream analysis should start with the discussion of what has happened to the analyzand recently. To give an example, a Jungian analyst shared the following story at a Russian-speaking forum:
“One day,” he wrote, “an analyzand told me of a dream where he was persecuted by horrible monsters. I was an inexperienced analyst, so I immediately proceeded to analyze the dream. I created an entire theory of what the monsters in the client’s dream could mean. And then, I remembered to ask him what he had been doing on the day before he had that dream. “Oh, nothing special,” the analyzand responded. “Went to work, came home. Then my wife and I watched a horror movie before going to bed.” So it turned out that the monsters that persecuted this client had not come from the depths of his subconscious. They had come from the horror movie.”
The Jungian analysis of dreams never goes beyond what feels right to the analyzand. The interpretation is correct when the client feels that it makes sense to her or him.
2. Freud’s “penis envy” was his great blunder. It is also the big gun that people roll out whenever they want to ridicule psychoanalysis. I’m sure that when those people get to laying the foundations of an entire field of knowledge, they will not make a single mistake. Freud, however, was not only birlliant but also human and, hence, fallible. He really messed this one up.
Jung, however, departs from the “penis envy” model of gender entirely. His alternative theory of animus / anima has always made a lot of sense to me. When I look at my own life through the prism of this theory it makes every possible sense to me.
Clarissa's Blog 
Freud’s views are interesting because should anyone actually adopt them and take them seriously, they would be completely inimical and repulsive human beings, whom nobody would desire to relate to. Consider the male who actually took seriously the idea that women suffered from penis envy. How he must cosset and protect his precious possession and keep it away from all women, who necessarily suffer from having eyes like knives. How neurotic and anti-sexual must such a person necessarily become. How unable to relate in a natural and ordinary manner.
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Basically, what I learned from my thesis is you shouldn’t go near psychoanalysis. You wouldn’t handle agent orange with your bare hands. You need special precautions and special training. Psychoanalysis is very hostile to fluid ways of thinking — intuition in the Jungian sense. It attacks these and sets about trying to replace them with rigid formulaic meanings that are hostile to the processes of life.
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Tell that to my analyst who keeps exhorting me to at least give intuition a try. 🙂
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Just don’t try it to the extent that you are independent of analysis –i.e. you’re a free agent.
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One needs a very high degree of freedom even to start analysis.
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It may be so, who knows? I’ve read Deleuze and Guattari’s criticisms of psychoanalysis, though.
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I’ve read them, too, but my life remained as crappy after reading them as it had been before. 🙂
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Oh. So no conversion?
Seriously, I haven’t ever encountered any psychoanalyst. I’ve encountered quite a few Freudian academics who read certain attitudes into me that I did not have, whilst discounting the ones I did have. I found that intrusive to say the least. Also demoralizing. I’m sure they didn’t mean to make my life feel crappy — they just felt like they knew something I didn’t.
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“I’ve encountered quite a few Freudian academics who read certain attitudes into me that I did not have, whilst discounting the ones I did have.”
– Now, this is very important: if you meet a person (not as a client who is paying them money to receive analysis) but just meet them in any other context and they start “psychoanalyzing” you, the ONLY reason why they do that is to manipulate you and acquire power over you. This is a way of manifesting aggression towards you.
” I’m sure they didn’t mean to make my life feel crappy — they just felt like they knew something I didn’t.”
– If anybody needs therapy, it’s this kind of person.
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Certainly, that would be true. There have been people who have expressed aggression in this way towards me. Much of this aggression is in erasing what I’ve had to say or not asking. Gender stereotypes prevail to a tiring degree. It makes you wonder what the threat is such kind of people are trying to deal with in their lives? Why the need for such extreme patriarchal methods?
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” It makes you wonder what the threat is such kind of people are trying to deal with in their lives? Why the need for such extreme patriarchal methods?”
– Often, the realization that there are women who don’t fit into the rigid patriarchal stereotypes becomes very threatening to people. They feel like their entire identity is under threat if it turns out that such stereotypes have no value. They have paid a huge price (usually, their sexual realization) to believe in these stereotypes and now you appear and let them know that this sacrifice has been in vain? I’d be angry, too. 🙂 🙂
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I think it’s more to do with academic stakes than sexual ones.
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I don’t know. I’ve been bullied by female teachers and profs quite a lot and I don’t think it had anything to do with their academic insecurity. But that’s my case, of course.
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Hmmm. In my case, I don’t know. It’s very strange, because they have sometimes, perhaps typically, thought it wise to adopt my father’s perspectives on me in order to fulfill whatever was on their agenda.
That is odd indeed, because my father was mistreated as a child, went to war, lost his country, and has has all sorts of psychological problems as a result.
So why would they want to emulate the perspectives and attitudes of someone who had so many historically induced psychological problems?
I know there is the view that what males say is necessarily authoritative and objective, but adopting a pathological posture in order to have a go seems excessive.
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Upon reflection, I expect the attacks I received came as a result of certain Internet trolls portraying me as a ‘feminazi” because I kept asking how certain types of abuse were tolerated and even perceived as normal. I guess some guys assumed that I was attacking normal behaviour, but this was far from being the case.
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I am deeply convinced that people who seriously use the word “feminazi” have severe sexual issues.
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They didn’t use the term, but there was an overt air of misogyny in around at the time and I was being attacked from all sides, simply for having non-traditional views about many things. That is why I say my PhD was in many respects a rite of passage. I didn’t expect idiocy to come even from high places.
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My PhD was a rite of passage I barely survived and I’m speaking quite literally here. I’m still thinking I could have done without this particular rite, though. And this is how I learned that idiocy abounds pretty much everywhere. 😦
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Yeah, so it goes. I had some good luck, too, as my supervisor was too ill to supervise me in the last year or so. That was, of course, bad, but actually very good when it came to doing the examiners’ revisions, as I put whatever I wanted to say in the MS, making it, if anything, more strident.
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“as I put whatever I wanted to say in the MS, making it, if anything, more strident.”
– Good for you! I just gave up and wrote the kind of crap I was told to. 😦 I just had no more energy to fight. 😦
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I had a little energy to fight, because in martial arts training, we are always taught, “Your last round is the most important!” Your last round is when you are most tired — which I was.
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Hey, Clarissa! How are you?
Since you mentioned my beloved psychoanalysis, let me just point out a few things.
1) The Interpretation of Dreams speaks of a method to understand dreams. It is NOT a dictionary, so you can’t find a Dreamopedia inside it. Maybe you should give it another try. Freud speaks of the dream of a child who wanted to go visit the lake. Then in the dream, the child is visiting the lake. Plain and simple, the desire to see the lake originated the dream where the child fulfills that desire. Your dream might be the same thing, at least at certain level. If you were my patient, we would probably try to understand the MEANING of those boxes in your life at that moment.
2) There is a VERY interesting book that deeply explains how Freud used his theory to interpret dreams. I believe its called the Wolfman. You’ll see there that Freud don’t translate anything in the dream without checking with the patient’s life.
3) Dreams are related to desires. There are more to this than just wanting to have sex with someone. Sexuality in psychoanalysis goes way beyond sexual relations. The simple and honest desire to feel good with yourself is a proper desire and it can activate dream formation.
4) You think penis envy is a bad? How about castration anxiety! Much worst.
5) No real psychoanalyst will NEVER use psychoanalytical interpretations during a casual conversation. The clinical setting is important.
6) Freud died in 1939. Many other psychoanalyst have developed this science further. Here are some good names: Winnicott, Lacan, Bion, Green, Dunker, Roudinesco, Kuperman and Figueiredo.
7) Freud used a biological model for the mind, he was trying to understand instinct. I biological life, reproduction is the most important thing. Biology defines life as the ability to reproduce. That is why psychoanalysis places sexuality on its center.
8) You blog is AWESOME!
Artur
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Thank you for these good points, Artur!
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