Chapter One: The Freud Effect Chapter One THE FREUD EFFECT WHEN I LIVED IN LONDON some years ago, I used to pass a blackened bronze statue on my daily walk to Finchley Road, a busy, dismal, yet useful thoroughfare teeming with shops and amenities in northwest London. On overcast days, the statue was dull and mute. When it poured, rained, or drizzled, in typical London fashion, heavy raindrops accumulated on the tip of the figure''s nose, plopping into a puddle in his lap. On those magical sunny days when the ceiling of clouds was lifted from the city, revealing a big blue sky, the statue shone. But I was oblivious to all of this. I''d just had a baby, and I bumped my stroller along the cobblestone streets of my new neighbourhood, navigating my way through the dense and disorienting fog of sleeplessness. One day my husband joined me on my trek to the shops. We took the shortcut to Waitrose, meandering along narrow backstreets, past the local wine store, pharmacy, and café.
Rounding the corner toward Finchley Road, Dimitri stopped and looked up. Staring down at us was the statue of a balding, bearded man with raised, inquisitive eyebrows, clad in a distinguished three-piece suit. He sat with his hands perched on his hips, leaning forward toward the road, casting a watchful gaze on the passing crowd. "Hey, it''s Freud," said Dimitri. Staring down at me was the father of psychoanalysis, the Austrian neurologist who popularized dream interpretation and the man forever known to proclaim that dreams are the attempted fulfillment of our repressed wishes. I stood there, wide-eyed, as if waking up to this new sight. With my line of vision raised from the stroller, I noticed a sign pointing to the Freud Museum around the next corner. For almost half a year, I''d been living only a few blocks away from the house where Freud had spent his last days.
How, you might wonder, could I have been so unaware? For starters, I was a new mother living thousands of miles away from family and friends. When Alexander was eight weeks old, Dimitri and I packed up our worldly belongings, which at the time consisted mostly of Ikea furniture and bright, loud baby toys, along with boxes of research for this book, which began many years ago. We moved from Toronto to north London''s Belsize Park, a leafy neighbourhood with a charming village vibe, teeming with buggies, dogs, and local shops along winding cobblestone streets. I soon found that I was living a cruel irony. My dad is a sleep doctor who opened one of the first independent sleep laboratories in Canada when I was a kid. Let''s just say that we talked about the importance of sleep. A lot. My newborn son decided that he didn''t like to sleep at night.
And then there was the kicker: I was writing a book on dreams. I''m sure Freud would''ve had something to say about this. The world around me was dreamlike, seeming both unknown and familiar. I''d visited London over the years, so there was a familiarity to the city. I had memories of long walks through Hyde Park, going treasure hunting among the stalls of Camden Market, and cheering on street performers doing magic tricks, acrobatics, and singing opera from the cobblestones of Covent Garden. Yet I was so sleep-deprived that I was seeing things through a different lens. I was operating in another mode, much like a dream, which shaped how I experienced the world around me. I remembered only snippets of a day''s worth of memories.
No wonder I''d gone months without noticing Freud staring down at me. But I didn''t need a statue to feel Freud''s presence. He was one of the twentieth century''s most influential thinkers. He remains engrained in our culture and collective psyche. While Freud was not the first to study dreams, his work propelled dream research into the next century. To this day, the mere mention of his name can spark heated debate. Some would say that dream research is still weighed down by psychoanalytic baggage. And while some of Freud''s ideas are outdated and have been debunked by scientists, several of his theories laid the groundwork for research that continues to this day.
It''s been more than 125 years since Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams , and this great, controversial figure continues to be quoted by students, scientists, and avid dreamers. Even grade-schoolers know who Freud is. He laid down the royal road to the enigmatic unconscious mind. So I decided that I''d better pay a visit to Freud''s last home and refuge, the epicenter of dream analysis. The House of Dreams TWENTY MARESFIELD GARDENS IS a stately, red brick house with three floors of white framed windows, impeccably trimmed hedges, and a blossoming almond tree that Freud used to admire. The gloriously sunny spring day I was there many years ago, Bobby, the museum''s elderly guard dog, dozed underneath its canopy of white flowers, ignoring me as I walked along the stone path and through the front door. Inside, the foyer was spacious and elegant, with a spiral staircase and polished wooden floors. To my right I found a narrow doorway leading to a dark, still room that smelled of old books, having lost the scent of Freud''s beloved cigars.
This was Freud''s study where he wrote and saw patients between 1938 and 1939 during the last year of his life. In the late thirties, as the Nazis overtook Austria, Freud knew he was in grave danger. He was among the Jewish writers whose books were burned by the Germans. So he took refuge in London, living his final year in exile. Comparing his family''s living conditions in Vienna to London, Freud wrote in his diary that they went from "poverty to white bread."1 His study was spacious and grand, about five times the size of my own writing space. It spanned the length of the house and had tall windows on either end, overlooking the front and back yards. Dark bookshelves filled with leather-bound volumes reached the high ceiling.
A four-step wooden ladder stood in front of the shelves, its edges rounded and worn from Freud''s dress shoes climbing in search of hard-to-reach books. If the burgundy velvet drapes were open, I could have peered into the lush back garden where Freud liked to relax on a swinging lounge, shaded by its canopy. He would take his papers into the backyard and read with his feet up, pausing to chat with visitors. Near the back window, I found his famous analyst''s couch, draped in a once-colourful rug, its royal blue, plum, and cream patterns now faded and worn. I imagined his patients with their heads propped against two now-flattened pillows, giving detailed accounts of their dreams during therapy sessions. Freud would listen from his forest-green velvet tub chair at the head of the couch, out of his patients'' sight, encouraging them to let their minds wander. In the late 1800s, Freud unveiled psychoanalysis, a psychotherapy technique that explores the conscious and unconscious mind in order to uncover and analyze people''s fantasies and fears. To unveil what was tearing at people''s psyches, Freud devised the method of free association, asking them to relay whatever was on their minds, regardless of how silly or inconsequential these thoughts may have seemed.
Yet he found that there were limits to what the conscious mind revealed. Freud believed that dreams harbour our fundamental instincts, including sexuality, aggression, and self-love. Some of our instincts are too painful, embarrassing, or damning for our fragile conscious to bear, so they are held captive by our unconscious. Freud used dream interpretation to analyze and free our instincts and wishes, including those we repress. While Freud studied the dreams of patients, colleagues, and friends, his regular subject was himself. He''d been fascinated by dreams since he was a boy, and had always been an avid dreamer, observing and recording his nightly fictions in a journal. With The Interpretation of Dreams , Freud wanted to show how his dream interpretation methods could be used to unearth the layered meanings of dreams. According to Freud, there are two types of dream content to analyze.
There is the manifest content, which is what we recall when we wake up. This includes what Freud described as "day residue," references or fragments of events from the previous day. The manifest content isn''t supposed to make sense on its own. Freud believed that the real meaning of a dream could be found in its latent content, the subterranean layer of a dream that lies beneath its surface. This includes our disguised wishes and instincts. Reflecting on our personal associations, experiences, and emotions, we can interpret the latent content of our dreams and discover hidden meanings. Freud is famous for seeing the erotic in life''s seemingly ordinary objects. "The majority of dream-symbols serve to represent persons, parts of the body and activities invested with erotic interest," wrote Freud in a 1911 addition to On Dreams , a condensed version of The Interpretation of Dreams .
"Sharp weapons, long and stiff objects, such as tree-trunks and sticks, stand for the male genitals; while cupboards, boxes, carriages or ovens may represent the uterus." Yet Freud didn''t believe that all of our wishes are sexually charged. He felt that we are motivated by other instincts, including aggression and narcissism. Freud devised the idea that dreams are the attempted fulfillment of a wish by analyzing one of his own dreams known as Irma''s Injection. In the dream, Freud was at a large gathering where he saw his patient Irma. They chatted about her health, and he announced rather bluntly that if she was still in pain, it was her fault. Irma told Freud that he had no idea of her.