This post is about sex!

Not really. Only in so far as everything in Freud is about sex.

Okay, so I'm getting ready to write a paper about Freud and dream analysis and theory, and I thought I would do a little thinking out loud, as it were. Or weren't.

So, here is how dreams work, in a nutshell.

First, there are three levels of the mind. Later, Freud will come to call them the id, the ego, and the super-ego, but in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), he hasn't invented that terminology yet. So we get a Conscious (Cs.), a Preconscious (Pcs.), and an Unconscious (Ucs.). The Ucs. (id) is basically a primal, wish-driven want machine. Most of these wishes are sexual and formed in infancy. These wishes have been repressed because they're inappropriate—this is the classic "sleep with your mother/kill your father" issue that everybody knows about. Or other terrible things that you want to do and think are inappropriate also end up here, although I'm not sure how that relates to infant sexual fantasies. Doesn't matter. What we need to know: Ucs. = "bad," powerful wishes.

So all that sort of hangs out in your Ucs., but because it's unconscious, you don't know about it, and what's more, you can't know about it. The Ucs. has no way to access the Cs. directly and let you know that you're having these issues, because you've repressed them so efficiently. Go super-ego. So this is where the Pcs. comes in. The Pcs. is basically there to keep you from exploding from these unconscious desires—I haven't found this directly in the text, but I get the impression that if your Pcs. goes haywire, you have a psychotic break and open fire. So. Your Pcs. takes random crap that your Cs. has noticed throughout the day—say, that there's a long hallway lined with blue chairs in the IMU (student center), and essentially allows the Ucs. to cathect (cathect: imbue with cathexis, which is wish-energy) the image. This is a compromise that allows dreams to work. Because you're horrified of your unconscious wishes, you can't be allowed to experience them directly. However, they can't go unexperienced, either. So the Pcs. and the Ucs. work together to express them, but to sort of...hide that expression from you. This process is called overdetermination, and it's why you'll dream of something completely benign and wake up sweating and terrified. Like my hallway above. I know it's absolutely harmless—it leads from the information desk into a ballroom. However, in the dream I had a few nights ago, I was deadly certain that I didn't want to go down the hallway because there was something bad at the other end and I would be in the wrong place if I did.

However, that's not all overdetermination does. Overdetermination also imbues things with about a zillion meanings, because remember, your brain is trying to protect you from that really baaad thing that you're wishing. So if there are multiple meanings, it's going to be harder for you to be hurt by that wish. So my hallway is like, my wish to have attended a different school, my desire to kiss the German guy, and my latent desire to kill my parents for having another child, or something. I don't know. You can't really analyze your own dreams, because you can't remember them (that's repression again!) and really you're just incapable of accessing what your Ucs. is trying to tell you.

So now the question is, how do we apply this to literature? According to Freud, the way you know when you're on the right track as an analyst is when the patient reacts to what you've proposed as an analysis. Of course, literature can't really "react," per se. When was the last time you saw the letters of your page rearrange themselves to spell "Damn, you're brilliant!"? (Last week, hm. Were you high? As a kite, yes, I see.) So we have to see if a psychoanalysis of text makes the text "resonate." Does a psychoanalytic reading open up more questions? Does it lead us to a deeper understanding of the unconscious intentions of either the text or its author?

Okay, I think I've got the basic points of this down, so I'm off to see what I can do with Reverend Dimmsdale's cathexis. (Oooh, dirty!)