Beyond The Pleasure Principle

Although, as my friend in class stated, reading psychoanalysis does have an effect on the reader in a sense where s/he starts reading more into her/his own daily choices in ways that s/he never thought about before.  It has to do with the realisation of the power of the unconscious and its relationships with the psyche internal different drives.

Two days ago, I was reading “Beyond The Pleasure Principle” chapter of Freud’s Reader before going to bed. Later on, I had this dream that really annoyed me, woke me up feeling bad about myself and immediately trying to find a link that connects it to what I read. In the back of my mind, and not sure if this is true, I think that I had a similar dream few days ago, also after reading another Freud text.

The annoyance in the dream came out of the moral failure highlight of it. Now, thinking about it, it is the ending of it that defines the dream in much the same way Freud tries to argue about “death drive” in that chapter “The goal of all life is death”.

The dream goes as follow: I go to a hospital suffering in a kind of diarrhea. The nurse asks me about my insurance card and I gladly present it to her just to figure out that the card I am giving her is not mine but is the card of a friend of mine. At this point, feeling slightly uncomfortable, I disregard this fact and state that it is my card. During my dream, I realize that there is another friend of mine working at the same hospital, and at the end of it, the nurse came by and interrogates about my forgery, stating that she figured that out through my friend, and leaving me in a state of shame and scare about the consequences of my acts.

The emotions towards the end of the dream were pretty strong. I am sure that this has nothing to do with the “wish fulfilment” notion of Freud’s interpretation of dreams, but still confused of what have triggered it. It made me think of what happened some time ago when I was trying to fill a form for the university and my pen ink ran out, I used one of the available pens and kept it with me. In a way I felt that was wrong, but could that be a repressed emotion that got exaggerated in my dream?

I hate those incidents when you find yourself making the wrong moral judgment and knowing it! It keeps on hunting you, no matter how small it is. Damn you unconscious! I hear you, you don’t have to repeat.