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S2 Episode 15: Freud- Dreams and Relationships
5 Plays6 months ago
Today we sit down to discuss one of the most influential minds of the 20th Century: Sigmund Freud. We discuss his theory of Dreams, as well as the Oedipus complex
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Transcript
Warning: Mature Content
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi everyone, before we start this episode, we just want to tell you that we will be discussing topics that are related to sex and could be disturbing for young people or anyone with a particular aversion to this.
00:00:15
Speaker
However, please do watch until a minute, sort of 10, where we will be talking about dreams and there will be, just before we start, the other part of the episode, there will be sort of a disclaimer.
Introduction to Episode and Shift in Focus
00:00:26
Speaker
Hello and welcome back to the Debatable Discussions podcast.
00:00:30
Speaker
You are here for Season 2, Episode 15, as we change the focus, well quite majorly in many ways, from politics, on which our past few episodes have been on, and now we travel to the world of psychology.
Overview of Sigmund Freud's Theories
00:00:45
Speaker
Today we're going to be speaking about probably the most influential psychologist of all time, in a lot of people's opinion, Sigmund Freud.
00:00:53
Speaker
He came up with theories such as the meaning behind dreams and as well as the very famous Oedipus complex, which we're going to go into.
00:01:03
Speaker
Furthermore, as John said, although we are taking a quick break from politics, we will be probably back next week as the results of the US election come piling in.
00:01:15
Speaker
And we hope that we can offer a good analysis on what they mean.
Dreams as Wish Fulfillment
00:01:21
Speaker
So John, should we start about Freud?
00:01:24
Speaker
Who is he?
00:01:25
Speaker
So yes, Sigmund Freud is, as you said, Diane, that probably one of the most famous, um,
00:01:33
Speaker
neurologists, psychologists of all time.
00:01:37
Speaker
So he is an Austrian neurologist and he's most known for founding the theory psychoanalysis.
00:01:43
Speaker
And this sort of describes the human soul as this apparatus that emerged along the path of evolution.
00:01:50
Speaker
And a cornerstone of this theory is the Oedipus complex of which he is known very well for in the worlds of philosophy and neurology.
00:02:02
Speaker
Yeah, furthermore, he also had some groundbreaking work as long alongside Carl Jung on dreams and what they mean.
00:02:11
Speaker
So I think we should get started with that.
00:02:13
Speaker
So in Freud's opinion, dreams are just hidden desires.
00:02:17
Speaker
They're sort of suppressed ideas coming from our subconscious and every dream sort of has, you know, a meaning that we want to do something or we want to get rid of something.
00:02:35
Speaker
Yes, as you said, it's this sort of idea he has that dreams are a wish fulfillment.
00:02:42
Speaker
So they represent our unconscious desires that the conscious mind represses.
00:02:49
Speaker
So if you've got deep down emotions or feelings, these come out in your dreams.
00:02:55
Speaker
However, they don't come out in your conscious mind in the day.
00:02:58
Speaker
Now this theory actually is very popular.
00:03:01
Speaker
The vast majority of people in most countries believe in this idea of wish fulfillment, mainly because it's quite appealing to human nature.
00:03:10
Speaker
Many of us will know that we get quite sort of crazy dreams.
00:03:14
Speaker
And so perhaps these are our unconscious desires.
00:03:19
Speaker
These desires that only come out when we're in this sort of subconscious state at night.
Dream Argument: Reality vs. Deception
00:03:25
Speaker
Therefore, Freud's idea is actually the most accepted one.
00:03:29
Speaker
He may be quite a wild neurologist, yet he is widely, this theory of his is widely recognized, this sort of accepted theory in dreams.
00:03:38
Speaker
What do you think, David?
00:03:39
Speaker
Yeah, so as you said, John, very well there.
00:03:43
Speaker
Freud's big idea is this subconscious.
00:03:49
Speaker
He's one of the first people to very pertinently and heavily
00:03:54
Speaker
relay on the subconscious and all I have to say is as long as it comes to Dreams I mostly agree with him I think
00:04:07
Speaker
Although, you know, not every dream is symbolic of exactly what it is.
00:04:11
Speaker
For example, if you know, you have a dream where you want to jump off, where you jump off a building, I don't think that is a, you know, inherent desire of yours to jump off a building.
00:04:20
Speaker
But I think it does relate something in relation to, Carl Jung here would say on the other hand, that they're more sort of like dreams or symbols of something.
00:04:31
Speaker
I do think they're actually in contradiction.
00:04:33
Speaker
I know, you know, they work together.
00:04:35
Speaker
They also had their, you know, arguments and stuff as every academic has.
00:04:39
Speaker
But I do agree with Freud in that a dream, for example, about you, you know, falling off a cliff or something may be relating to your subconscious wanting to let go of something or someone, for example.
00:04:56
Speaker
Yeah.
00:04:58
Speaker
Yeah, no, I agree with you there.
00:05:01
Speaker
And that sort of idea of tapping into your unconscious, as you said, does have a sort of innately true nature for many people.
00:05:10
Speaker
But the main thing about dreams, which makes them a very interesting thing to look at for philosophers, neurologists,
00:05:15
Speaker
is that you're never entirely sure what's happening.
00:05:18
Speaker
I mean, dreams only make up a small part of your sleep, in fact.
00:05:22
Speaker
And the craziest thing about dreams is that it is sort of an illusion, effectively, from reality.
00:05:29
Speaker
And there's actually quite an interesting argument called the dream argument, which encompasses this idea of dreams creating an illusion which tricks our senses.
00:05:39
Speaker
So the dream argument is that the act of dreaming provides preliminary evidence that the senses we trust to distinguish reality from illusion should not be fully trusted.
00:05:50
Speaker
And therefore, any state that is dependent on our senses should be at the very least carefully examined and rigorously tested to determine whether it is in fact reality.
00:06:01
Speaker
So this idea is principally that if our senses are being deceived in dreams to create an illusion, maybe in the real world when we're not dreaming, that is also an illusion as our senses do deceive us.
00:06:15
Speaker
So it sort of links to this idea, this main idea that do we just live in an illusion like our dreams?
00:06:24
Speaker
I mean, that's a very big question a lot of people ask.
00:06:29
Speaker
There's no test.
00:06:32
Speaker
You can't really prove you're not dreaming because you say, well, for example, like pinch me or something.
00:06:39
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
00:06:40
Speaker
You have dreams where you do, you know, a lot of people, I think, have dreams of being like a war.
00:06:48
Speaker
In our research for this episode, I've
00:06:52
Speaker
or in dangerous situations.
00:06:54
Speaker
And that is an anxiety, is what Freud would think is a subconscious anxiety coming out into the light.
00:07:01
Speaker
Well, you know, you do feel things and things do happen to you, but I don't think there is a test.
00:07:08
Speaker
And also I wanna pose another question here, John, is, and there's obviously no answer for this because, you know, scientists have been trying, but they can't find one.
00:07:20
Speaker
There's very interesting things in dreams that they sort of happen and they just sometimes just completely erase from your memory.
00:07:28
Speaker
Why do you think that is?
00:07:31
Speaker
Oh, I think that's quite a good question, actually.
00:07:33
Speaker
And it's sort of, I think the interesting thing about dreams as a topic as well is that it is at this intersection of sort of like philosophy and science and, you know, you saw it with Sigmund Freud.
00:07:48
Speaker
He sort of combined these two fields, evident in his work in dreams.
00:07:53
Speaker
But the fact that they are raised from your mind
00:07:55
Speaker
I think maybe that could just be simply because these are your unconscious desires, which when you become conscious are going away because they're not conscious desires, they're unconscious desires.
00:08:07
Speaker
And perhaps the nature of us wants these desires to stay as being unconscious.
Freud's Stages of Human Development
00:08:13
Speaker
and not to enter our consciousness.
00:08:15
Speaker
However, for that question, and I think it's a very deep question, why do dreams instantly erase?
00:08:21
Speaker
I mean, maybe there's a more scientific explanation because you only get dreams in a certain stage of your sleep.
00:08:28
Speaker
So maybe that's just natural as you shift stages in your sleep.
00:08:33
Speaker
But then perhaps it's also got the more perhaps more philosophical answer in that.
00:08:39
Speaker
It's you shifting from your unconscious to your conscious desires and consciously that's how you erase that dream perhaps.
00:08:47
Speaker
I mean, what do you think, Dan?
00:08:49
Speaker
Yeah, I think you're spot on there, but again, it's impossible to tell, frankly.
00:08:56
Speaker
But I do think that there may be a sort of switch
00:09:01
Speaker
from your conscious to subconscious and then sort of the information sometimes does transfer, sometimes it doesn't.
00:09:09
Speaker
But now I think we should move on to what I personally think is the more interesting side of Freud.
00:09:17
Speaker
It's a bit more controversial, brings a bit more discussion.
00:09:21
Speaker
And that is the Oedipus complex.
00:09:23
Speaker
And Freud, he's very sort of set on one idea throughout his work, is that basically everything in life has to do with sex and pleasure.
00:09:34
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:09:35
Speaker
That is very Freudian way of thinking, isn't it?
00:09:39
Speaker
In case any of our viewers are...
00:09:42
Speaker
a bit more hesitant when it comes to these topics.
00:09:47
Speaker
Perhaps our younger viewers as well.
00:09:49
Speaker
And our younger viewers.
00:09:51
Speaker
Probably I suggest that you skip for a bit.
00:09:58
Speaker
But basically there are five stages in Freud's sort of development of an individual.
00:10:06
Speaker
And he believes that in all these, again, there's one very important thing.
00:10:12
Speaker
Freud refers to sexual as pleasure.
00:10:16
Speaker
For him, sexual, so the word sexual doesn't just refer to the act of intercourse.
Castration and Oedipus Complex
00:10:21
Speaker
He also refers to just pleasure, so eating, he would say that eating like a pizza is sexual, you know.
00:10:27
Speaker
Quite wacky, yeah, that is quite bizarre.
00:10:30
Speaker
Well, you know.
00:10:31
Speaker
So these are the five stages and they happen at different, you know, obviously at different stages of someone's life.
00:10:36
Speaker
So the oral stage happens from birth up to about 18 months.
00:10:43
Speaker
And this is when you learn to eat and, you know, put things in your mouth, basically.
00:10:49
Speaker
Then you have the anal stage, which happens from, you know, 18 months up to about three years.
00:10:57
Speaker
And this is, you know, when you learn to go to the toilet.
00:11:01
Speaker
And he believes that the oral stage sort of the ego develops.
00:11:07
Speaker
There's the phallic stage.
00:11:11
Speaker
from three to six years old, which is basically the moment that a child allegedly, I don't think I was, but you know, is aware of their body.
00:11:21
Speaker
So in, in, in, and this is where the Oedipus complex, the castration complex comes in.
00:11:26
Speaker
And we're going to talk about that later.
00:11:29
Speaker
And then there's the latent sort of period in your teen years.
00:11:34
Speaker
And then
00:11:36
Speaker
The last one is actually called the genital level, when Freud believes that, you know, the body has reached maturity and people do begin to have sexual intercourse.
00:11:47
Speaker
Now, I think what I find very weird about this and very interesting, at the same time, I heavily recommend to everyone to go and do a bit of research in this because a 20 minute episode is not going to be enough.
00:11:59
Speaker
Yeah.
00:12:01
Speaker
is that Freud believes that every single one of those actions, so for example, how a child goes to the toilet is going to determine how they're going to interact with authority, for example.
00:12:10
Speaker
So Freud believes that if a child doesn't wash his hands after going to the toilet when they're two, this is going to have a major impact in their professional life.
00:12:22
Speaker
And that's a very interesting sort of avenue to explore and research, but that's not our main focus.
00:12:28
Speaker
Our main focus is the Oedipus encastration complex.
00:12:32
Speaker
So they're very related, but I'll ask John, could you explain what they are actually?
00:12:38
Speaker
What are we talking about?
00:12:39
Speaker
So, well, I'll give a short sort of oversight of both.
00:12:43
Speaker
So you've got the castration concept.
00:12:45
Speaker
So this was first presented by Freud in 1908.
00:12:49
Speaker
And this is his theory, and this is quite a complicated way of saying it, and so you may want to give a slightly simpler way after.
00:12:56
Speaker
But it's...
00:12:58
Speaker
It's this sort of idea of childhood development from his polymorphous perversity of infantile sexuality to the infantile genital organisation which forms the basis of adult sexuality.
00:13:11
Speaker
And it's, as you sort of indicated there, it's the trauma induced by the child's discovery of the anatomical difference between the sexes gives rise to the fantasy of female emasculation or castration.
00:13:25
Speaker
So it is quite a...
00:13:27
Speaker
Yeah, it's quite a far reaching, a bit wild, wacky theory.
00:13:31
Speaker
And then there's the Oedipus complex, which is very well known and very linked to Freud.
00:13:39
Speaker
And this refers to a son's sexual attitude towards his mother and concomitant hostility towards his father.
00:13:46
Speaker
And Freud thinks of this as sort of like an unconscious psychic structure.
00:13:52
Speaker
And it can be simplified into the very well-known phrase, every young boy wants to kill their father and sleep with their mother, which is quite famous and quite bizarre as well when I think you think about it.
00:14:07
Speaker
Yeah.
00:14:09
Speaker
But yeah, so the castration complex, I'll just quickly simplify that a little bit.
00:14:13
Speaker
Basically, Freud's basis is that every human inherently is actually bisexual.
00:14:21
Speaker
But at the age of three to six years old, when a boy discovers that he has something a female doesn't have, and vice versa, there is this sort of tension.
00:14:34
Speaker
And Freud believes that every, you know, young boy's fear, so every fear comes from the fear of being castrated and being emasculated and losing the male appendage.
00:14:46
Speaker
And this is why, you know, the boy is afraid of his father and wants to sort of push him aside and craves the attention of his mother.
00:14:55
Speaker
Now, this also goes in reverse.
00:14:57
Speaker
Whether a young woman is angry at her mother for being deprived of the male appendage.
00:15:07
Speaker
What does this mean?
00:15:08
Speaker
Basically, Freud thinks that every young woman is angry at her mother because, you know, it's her mother's, you know, through her mother's birth, no, through her mother giving birth to her, she doesn't have a penis and therefore she's sort of weak and desires the affection of her father who does possess this.
00:15:30
Speaker
Now, Freud also believes this is the link to why women want to bear children.
00:15:34
Speaker
He thinks that every woman wants to bear children because they hope they will bear a son with a penis.
00:15:41
Speaker
So I think we explore this a bit.
00:15:44
Speaker
This is a bit insane psychology for a Monday evening, but let's go ahead.
00:15:52
Speaker
What do you think, John, first of all?
00:15:55
Speaker
Yeah, so I think... I mean, the Oedipus Complex...
00:15:59
Speaker
It is quite a wild theory.
00:16:01
Speaker
When you look at it, it does reveal a sort of perhaps an innate thing that more primitial males felt, and that was the desire to effectively conquer the household.
00:16:15
Speaker
And you do that by killing your father to become the dominant male.
00:16:19
Speaker
However, I don't think I think whilst it's sort of when you think about it innately sounds quite appealing.
00:16:26
Speaker
The Oedipus complex, however, I think is quite deeply flawed.
00:16:30
Speaker
First and foremost, it goes against the natural aversion to incest that all humans have.
00:16:37
Speaker
You know, it's quite, humans are quite naturally averse to sleeping with their mother.
00:16:42
Speaker
And furthermore, it goes against unnatural aversion to killing our own fathers.
00:16:49
Speaker
I don't think there is any innate complex in children to kill their father, hence why there's such a strong connection between usually sons and their fathers and such a strong affection, a sense of affection between them.
Critiques of the Oedipus Complex
00:17:03
Speaker
More over, I mean, whilst it is a theory, it does lack any empirical sort of basis.
00:17:11
Speaker
You can't really test this.
00:17:12
Speaker
Perhaps like with most of the psychology, you could say that is.
00:17:15
Speaker
But nevertheless, I do feel that at the very most, it's a theory.
00:17:20
Speaker
It's not practice.
00:17:21
Speaker
Lastly, to be said as sort of criticism for the Oedipus Complex is some ideas from a feminist and social worker, American social worker, Florence Rush.
00:17:34
Speaker
So she said this was more of a cover for sexual abuse of children by their parents created by Freud.
00:17:40
Speaker
And she called this the Freudian cover up.
00:17:43
Speaker
So this is the theory that argues that in developing his theory of infant sexuality, he misinterpreted his patients' claims of sexual abuse as symptoms of repressed incestuous desire.
00:17:55
Speaker
So perhaps this sort of suggests that Freud may have had an ulterior motive for creating this theory, evident in how the theory sort of advocates and allows for sexual abuse.
00:18:10
Speaker
What do you think, Diane, about the Oedipus concept?
00:18:14
Speaker
So before we go further, I do want to just say that, and we forgot to mention this, but Freud's sort of basis for these fears is that actually humans don't have a natural aversion to incest.
00:18:29
Speaker
Okay.
00:18:29
Speaker
And he believes that it's all sort of a social convention developed over sort of
00:18:35
Speaker
millennia um but he doesn't believe that sort of naturally a child would be or a father or a mother would be like averse to you know um but moving on as you said is a very interesting theory i think and if we look at it from sort of
00:18:59
Speaker
not necessarily primal way, but sort of, I think, a more metaphorical way.
00:19:05
Speaker
I don't subscribe to the theory.
00:19:08
Speaker
I actually want to kill my dad.
00:19:09
Speaker
You know, I don't.
00:19:11
Speaker
I don't think anyone does.
00:19:12
Speaker
I mean, you know, some people probably do, but whatever.
00:19:16
Speaker
I think what Freud actually means to say is that there is sort of a period in teenage years where you sort of begin to see the flaws in your parents.
00:19:28
Speaker
And for young men, this comes from idealizing your father.
00:19:34
Speaker
You stop and you begin to see his flaws and you sort of move away from that idealized version.
00:19:41
Speaker
I think every teenager has been at a point where they're like, they think they know more than their parents in some way.
00:19:48
Speaker
For example, your parents don't allow you to go to a party and you get upset.
00:19:51
Speaker
You're like, what do they know?
00:19:55
Speaker
And I think this is what Freud means to illustrate here is that
00:19:59
Speaker
Every teenager, because this is in his fourth stage of development, every teenager has a sort of phase when they begin to sort of hate on, in quotation marks, the parent that has the same sex as them.
00:20:14
Speaker
And sort of wants, sort of the protection and affection of the other parent is likely to be a bit more permissive in Freud's eyes.
00:20:24
Speaker
But if we get down to the very basic sort of
00:20:29
Speaker
literal meaning of what Freud means, I do find some issues, which you have said.
00:20:37
Speaker
I think, for me, the biggest issue with the Oedipus complex is that Freud puts a very heavy emphasis on sort of...
00:20:51
Speaker
everything being connected to the penis.
00:20:55
Speaker
Yeah.
00:20:57
Speaker
I think, as you said, there's no evidence for that.
00:21:00
Speaker
I think that's a bit weak of a claim to say that everything is connected from women wanting a penis and men being afraid to lose it.
00:21:09
Speaker
Yeah.
00:21:09
Speaker
Because there is no evidence that doesn't say that it's actually the other way around and that women are afraid that they're going to have a penis and men want it cut off.
00:21:19
Speaker
So...
00:21:21
Speaker
I think that's a bit of a weak theory and I think it can go the other way around quite easily without anyone being, oh, well, that doesn't work because of this.
00:21:29
Speaker
And now as to, you know, the criticism of Freud, well, I can see it.
00:21:36
Speaker
I think, but I think he is such an intellectual giant, a Titan, frankly.
Metaphorical Interpretation of Freud's Theory
00:21:44
Speaker
When it comes to psychoanalysis, he basically made it up from the ground.
00:21:48
Speaker
Yeah.
00:21:50
Speaker
And, you know, in psychology, every person has, every, you know, big person has a groundbreaking theory, which may or may not be true.
00:21:59
Speaker
Pavlov, if I'm not mistaken, believed in determinism.
00:22:03
Speaker
I think he received a lot of backlash back in the day.
00:22:06
Speaker
So I don't really sort of buy the intellectual criticism of Freud for, you know, reasons of his, you know, personality.
00:22:16
Speaker
I quite, but that's just a personal thing of mine.
00:22:19
Speaker
I don't really like to mix sort of the work of someone with their private life.
00:22:26
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think Freud was quite a large drug user.
00:22:30
Speaker
Oh yeah.
00:22:31
Speaker
Quite heavy on the coke.
00:22:32
Speaker
Yeah, so I do think perhaps in his personal life, private life, that did probably quite largely infringe on his work.
00:22:41
Speaker
Going back to sort of your metaphorical interpretation of the Aedipus complex, which I think is, it's in a sort of metaphorical sense of the hostility that young boys face towards their fathers.
00:22:56
Speaker
I think perhaps that is true.
00:22:58
Speaker
And I think that is definitely evident.
00:23:00
Speaker
The one sort of bit, though, that I still find, I just can't really...
00:23:06
Speaker
grasp the idea of in a metaphorical sense is this idea of the sexual attitude that Freud believes that young boys have towards their mothers.
00:23:15
Speaker
I think whilst they may feel hostility towards their parents, I still think whilst they may grow an affection to the opposite sex parent, I definitely don't think by any means this is sexual.
00:23:28
Speaker
and i mean freud really as we said earlier on in the episode he does sort of quite like to talk about sexual attitudes and things like that and i think perhaps in a gentler sense if you take freud if you take an interpretation of the oedipus complex
00:23:47
Speaker
it is very it can be very easy to grasp effectively because it is an innate thing that perhaps many boys experience however i think if you interpret it you really need to not interpret it in my opinion in the sexual way that freud means and i think this is because that really just eliminates it to
00:24:09
Speaker
to being approachable to about 99% of people because, you know, even if they may feel slight hostility to authority, to the authority that their parents oppose, I definitely don't think that sort of translates into any sort of sexual affection towards one
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
00:24:24
Speaker
parent.
00:24:24
Speaker
So to summarize, today we talked about Sigmund Freud, a very famous late 19th century and early 20th century Austrian neurologist.
00:24:35
Speaker
In particular, we talked about Freud's theory of dreams, and this is in the form of a wish fulfillment and that our dreams represent our unconscious desires.
00:24:47
Speaker
Then we moved on to talk about the Oedipus complex and this in a nutshell is as me and Diane said, a young boy's desire to sleep with their mother and kill their father and it refers back to Freud's rather sexual way of thinking and how a son's sexual attitude towards his mother is evident and also has a concomitant hostility towards his father.
00:25:13
Speaker
Many thanks for listening to this episode.
00:25:16
Speaker
We hope you enjoyed us tackling a bit more of a different topic today.
00:25:22
Speaker
And as always, if you did enjoy the episode, do leave us a comment down below.
00:25:27
Speaker
Leave us a review.
00:25:29
Speaker
And do give a listen to our episode on the US election two weeks ago.
00:25:34
Speaker
We gave our final predictions before the election and we will be back.
00:25:40
Speaker
on election week with an episode on what does this mean?
00:25:46
Speaker
Many thanks and we hope to see you soon.
00:25:48
Speaker
Yes, thank you for listening, everyone.
00:25:49
Speaker
And I'll see you soon, Dan.