The Interpretation of Dreams - Freud

* project workI have only ever read reference of Freud, and now that I've read directly about him and a book of his works, I don't understand a sustained obsession with his work.
  "I suppose lockdown turned into a dream for you".
Yes it did, lots of people associate the conditions of lockdown to dreaming,
or actually dazed themselves so much that it felt like it. For me, so much
sleep meant I was perpetually in a semi-waking state, affording me many
lucid dreams and drawn internal monologues of imagined realisations about
the non-real universe existing in my dreams.
"trapped in your own head?"
No, I'd say I was bored and alone. Nothing really interested me and the world
was distant and vacant, only blue light imitations of reality were offered to
me.
Dreaming offers an escape. Theories are still quoted on how dreaming could
be the "guardian of sleep". Your mind tricking you out of reality to relieve
your real senses. This is a theory used by Sigmund Freud in his argument for
dreams existing as "wish fulfillments" to the mind. To Freud, all dreams have
the purpose of fulfilling a wish that can draw your consciousness away from
your body. In "The Interpretation Of Dreams" Freud presents a method of
analyzing your dream under the premise that to understand how your dream
fulfills a wish, you can understand your psyche, therefore discover the source
of mental illness and such.
Freud offered a try at rationalising dreams and their content, which results
in the same problem which occurs in philosophy. Freud was a trained
physician in an age of revolutionary science, read in German idealism and
romanticism as part of natural-philosophy of the day, and therefore seeks
solutions to problems by digging down, categorizing, picking apart the
pieces of an object to discover its base elements and root source. But in
applying this logic to dreams he creates a science of a poets game, often
even quoting works of writers and poets who produce work based on dreamcontent
associations.
Being able to understand your unconscious desires(wish fulfillment) will
enlighten you and show the inner mechanism to understanding of your mind
- this has been met with contention, proven wrong and proven not to deliver.
Freud is titled as the "father of Psycho-analysis" and often of psychology,
but since then the science of psychology has flipped to exclude as much as
possible theories produced by Freud and his successors.
I parallel this with some theories in philosophy, with the goal in metaphysics
to unravel the universe rationally and realise philosophy as a science - This
being met with contradiction and debate long enough to know that there will
not be a final interpretation of reality and Being.
dreams are confused, incoherent and exist only in the psych, which means
they make no sense bound to reality but Freud insists that if you can dream
it, it will originate from experience and through this argument makes wild
associations, the most famous of these are phallic innuendoes.
Freud reads meaning without reason for specific selection, just because
he can make an association. It's true that everything has connotations and
influences but dreams are by nature - incoherent to the point of complex.
Much like the literary scholar dissecting one line from Nathaniel Hawthorne's
"The Scarlet Letter"; many associations and potential word-plays; paragraphs
discussing potential intentionality behind one word used among many,
Freud seeks something intended by the subconscious when finding links
between "dream-content". But Freud uses this technique only in relation
to the record of the dream, the recollection. from this point, the dream has
already been translated from mental thought, whether that be the sounds,
smells, visuals or feelings of the dream, into written word and from that point
he interprets. "Freud was interested in slips of the tongue" says the author
of the foreword Mr Oxford posh bloke Stephen Wilson, when writing about
Freuds consideration of the unconsidered parts of the dream as of when
it was recorded. But this both shows Freud as thinking he can see sources
of dreams before the dreamer can, and also he thinks he can account for
a complete dream interpretation, without experiencing the dream himself,
which I would describe as like being to tell of the personality of a dog from
reading the dog's entrails.
Freud, I think, came from a time of German-Idealism which emphasises
emotional self-awareness as a necessary pre-condition to improving the
human condition. In German-Idealism, only the consciousness is knowable
and the best way of perceiving reality is through some subjective feeling
or intuition, through which we participate in the subject of our knowledge,
instead of viewing it from the outside. Everything is an experience, and
not an object for manipulation and study, and, once experienced, the
individual becomes in tune with their feelings and this is what helps them
to create moral values. This approach actually occurred in response to the
over-rationalisation of philosophy when influenced by the enlightenment
period. Freud is against the categorizing of dreams, instead opting to have
one solution to study all dreams and reworking the method based on the
content and history of the patient, which I would parallel to different literary
techniques.
I would like to point now that I have written too many notes on what I read
and then feel they are important when they probably are not.
Modern social sciences often use Freud only as a base to explain the
development of modern day theories, and treatments in psychiatry. The only
mentions I have enjoyed in my scouting for Freud-bashing literature include:
• Freud's Women by Lisa Appignanesi, John Forrester - Which discusses
Freud in Feminism. I found it an uncomfortable read, I returned it to
the library at about 1/3 complete. Uncomfortable because of how two
sided it is, how Freud's theories of hysterics and female penis envy are
seriously considered.
• Freud and Psychoanalysis: An Exposition and Appraisal by Richard
Stevens. - Which explains why Freud's technique never worked but
gives props to him for "revolutionising". I gave up after two chapters but
skimmed the rest for quotes like a good student.
• I went back to read Reassembling the Social by Bruno Latour as
I could remember a description that compares Freuds technique
of dream-content association with Latour's and John Law's Actor
Network Theory. Latour describes Freud's short-fall in broadening his
associations, and makes the argument that Freud way hasty to provide
solutions to patients.
• One or Several Wolves is a critique of Freud by Deleuze and Guattari
in their writing "A thousand Plateaus"at this point I haven't come
across anything as opposed to Freud (though I haven't read that
much yet). Deleuze and Guattari don't really bother deconstructing
Freud's arguments, they more or less completely disregard them.
They deconstruct Freud's definition of neurosis and psychosis. Freud
claims that neurotics are those who are "capable of making a global
comparison between a sock and a vagina, a scar and Castration", but
then they some how are incapable of perceiving larger connections
within the world. Freud disregards what the pair call "multitudes" and
ideas of collective consciousness, impulse and pack mentality. The
Wolfman case study is used as many analyses have been made by
different experts and the to commonly agreed ones oppose Freud's. The
pair label it Freud's "reductionist" method of psychoanalysis and they
see Freud's use and development of the theory of the Oedipus complex
as idealist since it tries to give voice to the unconscious but fails.

Chaos Monkeys, Inside Silicon Valley - Antonio Garcia-Martinez

This book has been a lingerer for long enough before prompt to read. My dad had recommended this book a while back having correctly judged my course as having a shared pool of people as of whom have the mentality to "start up" new tech and/or are involved with such. On a similar topically resonent note to this, my dad had shown me PG (Paul Graham), an original silicon vallee, having started what would grow into eBay, who had before that persued a career in Philosophy after recieving a masters at university, who now ran a start up school and wrote essays on the culture and philosophy behind Silicon Valley. My dad didn't know what to think of PG, being involved in tech himself he wouldn't dismiss PG's argument, but also I remeber my dad pointing out the first comment under PG's article in HackerNews : "Paul Graham thinks everyone who doesn't own a tech business hates their job and works in a factory!".
This book Lays flat those contradictions behind the mindsets of the tech start up industry, heavy in its own beaurocracy and back door deals, visa owning employees, the chaotic evolution of social media and online marketing and lays bare the hijinks, trade secrets, and power plays of the visionaries, grunts, sociopaths, opportunists, accidental tourists, and money cowboys who are revolutionizing our world. "Chaos Monkeys" is a look at some of today's most interesting social networking companies. Garcia Martinez describes his time at AdGronk and how he and his co-founders went about building the company. When he moves to Facebook he focuses more on the advertising and technical side of things with a side of the innerworkings and decision making. Tech entrepreneurs are society's chaos monkeys, disruptors testing and transforming every aspect of our lives, from transportation (Uber) and lodging (Airbnb) to television (Netflix) and dating (Tinder).
He tries to give practical advice, which I think is hilarious since I doubt anyone will want to do a start up after the way he describes it, he obviously is unhappy, and its clear why. He is force out of facebook, forced to sell his start up and abandon his friends, and then outside of this he is left by his wife who has custody of his child. It's clear the book is a vessel for him to get back at people in the industry such as "Zuck" but all this sarcasm and nihlist discontent for his existence in this space could probably be the only way for this book to be delivered. He describe the cult- like Silicon Valley, company loyalties and the hush-hush developments that people never get to hear about becuase the workers of Silicon Valley believe in what they are doing, believe in a technofied world and the pace of technological development, which is one of my personal fears.

AND : Phenomenology of the End- Franco Bifo Berardi

****A Marxist theorist and activist in the autonomist tradition, he worked extensively with Félix Guattari on schizoanalysis, and within this book draws upon the philosophical thought of Gilles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, Martin Heidegger, Slavoj Žižek and Jean Piaget. In the text was rather like watching The Matrix, requiring multiple single readings to gain understanding. AND focuses upon the media, technology, post-industrial capitalism, digital connectiv-ity, alienation, over-stimulation and automation. The phenomenological approach assumes that we cannot know or understand everything in totality, unlike Galileo, who thought the formalisation of all knowledge was possible. He provided the starting point for those seeking to 'digitise' communication by numbers, although 'political power has never actually been able to control the entirety of social relationships, and reason has never been able to reduce the infinite complexity of reality to knowledge'. Berardi compares technological changes with biological mutation: meaning had been created through language, but has now been invaded by the machine, which is causing pathological effects as the digital and organic interface. Modern malaises includ-ing ADHD, panic and dyslexia are described as the result of this, with the connec-tion between man and machine limited by organic factors, and humans able to construct meaning between each other in a way that computers cannot replicate. One of Berardi's key theses is that we are moving from an age of conjunction to an age of connection. Conjunction offers a collective subjectivity, a 'community of desire, not of necessity', in which meaning is co-created through interaction and interpretation, and each meaning is an unrepeatable event, particular to a moment in space and time. In connection, control is asserted by the rules of the game, where functional interaction, compatible interchangeable elements with finite possibilities leave no margin for ambi-guity or nuance in messages.

The Arcanum - Janet Gleeson

      This book is interesting based on lots of contexts, the fact my mum reccomended it having remembered the audiobook being read on BBC 4 in the 80s, The early form of dramatization of a real story - a docudrama or such, the book is about that strange moment in history that contations witches, science, war, tiny european kingdoms, emergent democracy and more. Reading this brought european history into more finite definition for me, reading the inclusions of lots of small scale nations that have not existed for hundreds of years. How a king can have a monopoly on actual countries is crazy, since none of them border they cannot merge. Pre-universal economic understanding, with the notion of making gold.

The story of a Johann Frederick Bottger, a precocious young 18th century chemist who in a misguided attempt to prove his worthiness to a King (August the Strong of Saxony and Poland) promises that he has the ability to create gold out of ordinary metals. The King orders Bottger locked away in a castle for years so that he can provide this creation for the King's benefit.

Eventually, in desperation for some freedom and to avoid execution for fraudulently representing himself, Bottger instead comes up with the formula (the Arcanum) for making hard porcelain in the manner of the Chinese. Chinese porcelain had been highly prized in Europe for its delicacy, beauty and durability. The Europeans could not replicate porcelain until Bottger figured out how. Once he did, August the Strong opened a factory in Meissen, Germany (where it still remains) which produced highly sought beautiful and delicate objects. The book details the intrigues in the factory as well as the plots and conspiracies throughout Europe in efforts to steal the porcelain formula and compete with August's monopoly on this lucrative, highly desired and valuable luxury.

Gleeson manages to provide historical and political background as well as a real taste of life in the 1700's in Europe.
    

Another Science is possible - Stengers
      Stengers wants a decelerating of the pace of scientific activity and argues for the renouncing of secular science and the reclusion of science from the public and perhaps wider relevance. The pace of scientific discovery, as Stengers makes clear is not in itself the problem. It is rather a question of what this process has become entangled with.

Stengers uses allergory from her past career in chemistry, though without flexing any particular authority over specific science as she applies her point to industry and scientific application of scientific mobilisation. This of course being research agenda and tech development that serves our true humankind master system - the economy. This point allows itself to distinguish between the needs of humanity - medical research, and the needs of the economy. Which is the thing that Stengers makes a lot of the book about, the economy has melded into the research movements and is guiding all research and informing all desicions and conclusions. The book is an apt counterpoint to those who urge us to "unleash latent productive forces" and "accelerate the process of technological evolution" in the name of neo-Marxist emancipation. Stengers' own feelings on this matter are certainly clear.

The point on public inteligence resonates with me, on several levels. I will brutally describe one complex and long comparrison she makes like this: The film industry is complete transparent in the way that any ordinary person can study and understand the many fineite details of a film's production, but the same cannot be said about academic or scientific reseach. Firstly because of the pay wall of journals, the secular in crowd nature of the scientific community and the arrogence of certain scientists to disbelieve in the intellegence of the public and refusing critism from people with "no authority". Stengers is believes that this could be resolved and is fustrated at scientist asking for the public to leave them alone. I like this point because of the comparrison I can draw from tech new like on hackernews, my dad can understand the innerworkings of lots of different softwares and tech industry but the public has been kept ignorant of these things that basically run every part of their life.

"fast science" was an observation made by Alfred North Whitehead, Stengers' philosophical inspiration, that the most important discovery of the nineteenth century was that of "the method of training professionals," of creating "minds in a groove". The productive capabilities of well-grooved minds was never in question. However, such professionals were necessarily discouraged, if not prohibited, from asking big questions or wider questions that were left to the philosophers.

This resonates with the inter-disipinary of design in my degree, obviously one way the book has been mentioned so many times in lectures. It also allows me to make good discussion with my partner who is currently studying for a masters in physics and thinks that this point is totally idealist, allowing me to be the poetic and social visionaire of the two of us.
    
It's also interesting hearing about the differences in the translated versions and the different editorial decisions made between publishers.

The Snowden Files - Luke Harding

      Harding writes like a novelist, making the whole drama of it into a strange Bond like spy fiction as opposed to a political analysis of the Snowden situation and backstory. He tries to explain the reasons behind Snowden in his actions, the main reason for Snowden was he wanted to expose NSA and other international intelligence agencies' capacity for subvert survailence and private info harvesting. 

Its intersting, Harding's analysis of the internet, drawing on Snowden as a subject to expand on the individual capacity while opperating on the internet, how someone can be anyone, the libertarian utopic extent that Snowden is capable of assumning the vigilante hero online when in real life he is so status quo, and how this capability online has seeped into his real life, affecting his actions but not his manner. Harding suggests Snowden as being a "Walter Mitty" and has used this to break from fantasy. What's striking is not so much the range of Snowden's fantasies as the depth of his political commitment. He emerges as a committed Republican, a libertarian, a huge fan of Ron Paul, a gun lover and believer in national security with a tendency to suggest that anyone who thinks otherwise deserves to be shot.

Snowden hates liberals, he hates whistleblowers and wikileaks. He hate government and believes in the autonomy of the CIA, having absolutely nothing against spying, what he is scared of is that no one has set a limit. Harding parallel's Snowden's belief in Ron Paul's idea to go back to the gold sandard becuase Snowden is anticipating the collapsing state like a collapsing economy because of government not setting a limit on inflation. He sees the politicisation of surveillance as part of the same pattern - "Obama just appointed a fucking POLITICIAN to run the CIA." 

Snowden went from loyalist to whistleblower – Obama. While Democrats were complaining about government overreach during the Bush years, Snowden hoped that regime change in the White House would signal a return to proper oversight. But when Obama morphed from a critic of the security state in opposition to its number one enabler in government, Snowden concluded that any safeguards were gone. In his eyes the entire US government was now operating outside its constitutional remit. Alarming that the NSA's activities was that no one was in charge: this had become a system that was "automatically ingesting" vast amounts of human communications, indiscriminately, blindly.

Snowden is probably right that what's scary is that so much power is in the hands of people with so little idea of what it means. When it turned out that the NSA had been bugging Angela Merkel's phone, with disastrous political consequences, no one could say what the point had been.

The second half of Harding's book describes the aftermath - "In America, journalists and editors were alternately brow-beaten and threatened by various high-up officials. In Britain, in the most bizarre episode of all, two heavies from GCHQ supervised the destruction of the Guardian's hard-drives that were thought to contain the illicit files. Greenwald's partner was detained and searched under anti-terrorism laws by British police officers at Heathrow, who were on the hunt for more Snowden material. The Americans persuaded the French to bar the plane of Bolivian president Evo Morales from their airspace, on the suspicion that he had smuggled Snowden himself aboard (Snowden was by now holed up in a Moscow airport)."

Harding gets  well over enthused at being able to retell this epic adventure of journalist vs state, describing all the many inconveniences that people following him would do, window cleaners loitering outside meetings, taxis getting lost.

"What is so astonishing about the secrets that Snowden revealed is how much in the dark everyone turns out to be. No one really understands what it all means. The pace of technological change and its extraordinary reach mean that a lot of this stuff is entirely new: this isn't Nixon's world any longer but it's not Deep Throat's either. Snowden is a quirky figure – a distinctive product of the American right, in ways that some of his European champions on the left ought to find uncomfortable – but he is also a thoughtful one. He is correct in thinking that something has fundamentally changed in our relationship to power. He would like to turn the clock back to the late 18th century when the American constitution said what it meant and meant what it said – the "originalist" dream. That's not going to happen. It's not even clear that we can turn the clock back to the late 20th century. This is a new world and a scary one."