D2: Psych class notes

"Irma" and "Aliquis": Two Freudian fictions

I have been invited to give two guest lectures to a seminar in relational psychoanalysis being given by Dr. David Mark {David: I'll link whatever you like here}. The first was last night. I arrived late, wet, and harried and got said about half what I had intended. I did suggest that I was easy to find by googling, but I'd like to provide a convenient set of links to my online Freudiana: drafts of published papers, primary sources for classes, lecture notes, and recorded classes.

• Doug Davis online curriculum vita
• course page for Haverford college "Foundations of Personality," Spring, 2004: Irma link, aliquis link, video clip with David Suchet as Freud discussing Emma with Fliess
• Doug's January, 2003, lectures on the Irma dream in the aliquis episode
• a transcript of Doug's faculty research talk, "Writing Freud," at Haverford in November, 1990
• Davis, D.A. (1994). A   theory for the 90s: Freud's seduction theory in historical context. Psychoanalytic   Review, 81, 627-640.
• Freud-Fliess letters. (excerpts: do not quote or reproduce).

If there is evidence of interest in this resource, I'd be glad to respond to questions and to provide additional material here.

The "royal road"

Thanks to the Classics in the History of Psychology web resource, we have easy access to Freud's first attempt to describe his work for a general audience, the lecture delivered at Clark University in 1909. This is an excellent short overview of the theory developed in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900).
Dreams are discussed in Lecture 3:

Interpretation of dreams is in fact the via regia to the interpretation of the unconscious, the surest ground of psychoanalysis and a field in which every worker must win his convictions and gain his education. If I were asked how one could become a psychoanalist [sic], I should answer, through the study of his own dreams. With great tact all opponents of the psychoanalytic theory have so far either evaded any criticism of the "Traumdeutung" or have attempted to pass over it with the most superficial objections. If, on the contrary, you will undertake the solution of the problems of dream life, the novelties which psychoanalysis present to your thoughts will no longer be difficulties.

Do our attempts to understand our own or others' dreams by Freud's methods bear out Freud's claim that we will thereby become sympathetic to Freud's other theories, or to psychoanalysis as practice?

Freud, Sigmund (1910). The Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis. First published in American Journal of Psychology, 21, 181-218.

The Dream of the Botanical Monograph

Note: If you're not enrolled in Haverford Psychology 311 (or an alum of same) this thread will be perplexing without a browse of www.haverford.edu/psych/ddavis/p311.03.html, the course syllabus for this seminar.

To view the text of the dream with markup, click here.
Let me be more clear about my Freud dream assignment for Monday. I want you to build a little conceptual picture of how a dream of Freud’s is constructed – how the pictures and words point to major themes in Freud's life at the time, and how his associations to these lead him to the alleged meaning of the dream. So, let’s say I've heard that one of Freud's particularly interesting dreams is called "The Botanical Monograph,” and that there's an appendix in The Interpretaion of Dreams listing all the dreams used in the book. I notice quite a few references to this dream, and I turn first to the initial long one, on pages 129-135 (in Joyce Crick's translation). I make two lists, of the associations and explanations connected with the idea of "botanical" and with the idea of "monograph." I notice points of contact or analogy between elements in each of these lists -- the notion that a book can be pulled apart like an artichoke, for example -- and I underscore these for further consideration. Then I browse the several other fairly detailed references to this dream in chapters 5 and 6, asking myself how these relate to the earlier account (and whether they might perhaps take us further along aline of interpretation that Freud did not wish to explain earlier). I try to write a paragraph in which the core meaning, the essential lesson of this dream is told in simple and straightforward words, and I imagine adding resources to Doug's little hypertextual representation of the dream so that it will be more fully understandable by other students.