A difficult but brilliant book

Would you listen to The Interpretation of Dreams again? Why?

It's great to go to the original writings of Freud, especially to the Interpretation of Dreams, which is one of the founding texts of psychoanalysis as a whole and the book of which Freud was most proud. Freud even updated it a number of times as he progressed his theoretical framework in the following decades because he felt it was such an important text.

People who regard Freud's theory of dreams as quackery often forget that he was a neurologist before he developed psychoanalysis. It's a very demanding listen but Freud was a clear and compelling writer. The Interpretation of Dreams makes you realise the profundity and sophistication of Freud's thought as a whole.

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Freud

The book is great. It's amazing that even a hundred years after its publication, readers cannot accept it.
The recording is okay, except for the actor cannot pronounce French and Italian citations properly. But I guess one cannot have everything at the same time. He's done an excellent job with this recording, anyway.

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It must be of interest

I liked some parts but i found it hard to listen to and stay focused when Freud would quote in french, so it would hold focus if a deap interest was there in understanding this piece of work from Freud

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Intereating , a bit hard to finish

A must for any psicologist. Nowadays we now that many of Freud theories are not at all accurate. Still, this book manages to explain a great deal about dream theory. Prepare for some French and German also.

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Disappointing

Another reviewer deals with the content of the book and I agree that it's difficult to listen to the whole thing as it gets very repetitive and far-fetched.

The reading style does not help. It is seriously bland. I have listened to other non-fiction audiobooks where I've begun to believe that the reader is the author as he/she is so keen to enthuse and persuade. Not so with this recording - no particular point is emphasised, there's no sense of wonder - it all adds to the feeling of arrogance. Towards the end I felt a sense of doom whenever I heard this man's voice.

And a niggling point - the sections in French and Latin get quite long in the opening chapter and if they're anything like the brief Italian bit, they're not particularly well-pronounced. Why not just translate them?

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Fundamentalist Preaching

I wanted to like Freud. I really did. But having made it 3/4 of the way through this massive book, I just gave up. It wasn’t just that the writing bored me half-way to hades, or that the elitism and misogyny and arrogance and insecurity were so bloody everywhere. It was the ‘this means that’ model of interpretation.

Parts of the book were very nearly interesting. Sigmund had clearly studied the subject long and hard, listened to countless dreams of other people, and had been brutally honest about his own dreams. And those recurring dream incidents that so many people have (losing teeth, flying, and being caught in public with virtually no clothes on), are always interesting to hear. Well almost always. Freud has an uncanny gift of turning interesting stories into turgid, yawn-inducing, time-wastage.

But he seems to have a special key (God knows where he acquired it) that he uses to interpret dreams: mostly they are about sexual intercourse and masturbation. My favourite example was a scene in which someone entered an alleyway between two houses, almost incidental to the account. For Freud there was no question - this was a reference to the vagina! Really? And this is what makes him evangelical.

Namely, he imposes his own arbitrarily constructed blue-print onto the dream (like a fundamentalist preacher). He links it back to something that happened to the dreamer within the last 24 hours (i.e., invents some contemporary relevance), then passes his judgement (the most pious hobby). Not to mention, that the smug certainty of his pronouncements is gut-punchingly painful.

I thought Freud was supposed to be a genius. I have yet to read his other books, but unless there is serious improvement, I wonder why anyone thinks he’s a genius at anything other than convincing the world he’s a genius.

Still, Sigmund Freud has forever undermined one of my long-cherished convictions: that reading primary sources is always worthwhile.

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Mad as a box of frogs

I bought a couple of psychology books and unfortunately, as this was the last one I came to, I had already been put off Sigmund and his theories. He seemed to adopt an incontestable attitude to his work and theories to the exclusion of all other people?s opinions or thoughts. As such, he fell out with his prot?g? Jung and as I understand it was not overly popular within his profession. This comes through in The Interpretation of Dreams as one cannot help feeling by the way it is written that you are being preached to on topics that the author believes to be absolutes and above criticism. He (the capable narrator) talks as one would about absolute certainties and it comes across as the arrogant monologue of a closed-minded individual. As for the content of the book, I managed but 4 or 5 hours before stopping and had been warned that his interpretations stretched credulity on many occasions with the most tenuous assertions about how a seemingly innocuous dream, through a sequence of ludicrous translations, brings poor Sigmund to the irrefutable conclusion that the person on the couch wants to take liberties with his own mother. In my humble opinion, Sigmund?s family life and his relationship with his own mother should provide all the enlightenment that a reader would need to draw their own conclusions about Freud!

In conclusion, I would not recommend this book if you want an overview of Freud?s theories. \"A short introduction to Freud\" (available on Audible) should suffice. I enjoyed it.

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