How sex rules our dreams

[mazHur]

How sex rules our dreams
Gritty, emotional, smelly and dirty: new evidence supports Freud’s long-debunked theory that sex fuels our dreams

by Patrick McNamara 3,700 words

• 
  When I was a hormone-addled adolescent in the late 1960s and early ’70s, I would often look up at a poster of Sigmund Freud on my brother’s bedroom wall. The title on the portrait – something like ‘Freud: explorer of the unconscious and discoverer of the meaning of dreams’ – depicted a hero of intellectual freedom and creative thought. When you looked at it closely, the portrait seemed to writhe and come alive. In the drug-fuelled style of those decades of ongoing sexual revolution, the artist had depicted the nose as an erect penis, the cheeks as a female behind, and the eyes as female breasts. One side of the face was a voluptuous female whose legs wrapped around the body of a muscular male on the other side of the face and, of course, both heads were thrown back in dramatised ecstasy. I recall some of my brother’s stoned friends gazing at the portrait with bewildered looks on their faces, apparently unsure if the writhing torsos they saw were really there or not.
  
  Right from the start, I saw Freud as a kind of secular saint because he was willing to take an unbiased look at himself through the raw material of his dreams. If he found in those dreams a mass of broiling sexual impulses, so be it. Those impulses had to be accepted, understood and explained within a larger picture of the human mind.
  
  Popular now
  The surprising psychology of the compassionate crowd
  Beauty is truth? There’s a false equation
  Why did humans evolve to be so fascinated with other animals?
  It was on the night of 23 July 1895 that Freud had his famous ‘dream of Irma’s injection’ – the first he analysed. In the dream, Freud met Irma, a young widow and ailing patient under his care, at a party – ‘A large hall – numerous guests.’ He took Irma to the side, reproaching her for not taking his advice. ‘If you still get pains, it’s really only your fault,’ he said. To which Irma replied: ‘If you only knew what pains I’ve got now in my throat and stomach and abdomen – it’s choking me.’ Freud was alarmed. Irma looked pale and puffy. When Freud looked down her throat, he found a big patch of white. And he knew the origin of the infection: not long before, his friend Otto had given her an injection of trimethylamine. ‘I saw before me the formula for this printed in heavy type ... Injections of this sort ought not to be given so thoughtlessly ... And probably the syringe had not been clean,’ Freud later wrote in his masterwork, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900).
  
  He thought his dream represented wish-fulfilment: by blaming Irma’s treatment failure on others, he could relieve himself of feeling guilty. But how was it a sexual wish? Freud noted that while the party was apparently a birthday celebration for his wife, his attention had focused on Irma, who reminded him of a young widow he desired to treat instead; his friends, including Otto, were portrayed as competitors. Freud’s commentary also revealed that the reference to trimethylamine came from his close friend, Wilhelm Fliess, who had labelled the substance a ‘product of sexual metabolism’ found in semen.
  
  To Freud, ‘Irma’s injection’ represented clear support for his theory that dreams amounted to sexual wish-fulfilment. But critics piled on. There was the obvious fact that his theory seemed to be based on idiosyncratic associations, quite literally open to endless interpretation.
  MORE HERE....http://aeon.co/magazine/altered-states/was-freud-right-about-dreams-all-along/