So its 4 am. Why in the world am I still up trying to do my English homework? It may seem absurd, just as Freud does, but it’s really not, because I had a little nap earlier on. Well, I know I will regret this in a few hours, but I finally got myself to focus on Freud, and cannot stop until I have completely expressed my views on him. Freud is one man who not only interests me but also drives me crazy. I really would want to meet him one day, if he wasn’t already dead, just to figure out what kind of a person he is, and where his absurd thoughts come from. The first time I came across this man was in my ap psych. class last year. He is a profound thinker, who was obsessed with the human mind and internal drives. While I found interest in some of his ideas, I wanted to question his thinking and give him a wake up call for others. I mean he’s probably a nice guy and all. It’s just that some of his thoughts and ideas just seem absurd. All of us are humans, and so we all of course are always thinking, and finding ways to perceive and define the world around us. We all ask others and ourselves a ton of questions, to gain knowledge and help ourselves define the world a little better. So Freud was the same, except he questioned the world a little differently than we do. He questioned things like dreams, internal desires, the conscious, the unconscious, pleasure, pain, etc.

I found interest in his approach to dreams and his idea of symbolism and internal desires in dreams. I found the idea of the id, ego, and superego very interesting, as it classifies our internal desires and seems to make sense. However, I find his focus on ‘sex’ to be disturbing, especially with his whole pyscho-sexual stages of development and the sex drive being present in infants and children. Obviously he doesn’t mean it in a bad way, but simply as a drive that can be fulfilled for an infant by sucking to get food. However, he thinks that if needs are not met, it will later affect the baby’s personality in a bad way. In totality, I find this idea of his to be absurd.

I found Freud to be a little bit confusing in the reading, with his scrutinizing and analytical approach to the idea of pleasure and pain. He looks closely to see its relation to “the quantity of excitation present in the psychic life” and discusses something called “traumatic neuroses”. He is the kind of person who just seemed to make matters more complex than they really were. His abstract thinking is a cause of this. However, I enjoyed reading the case of child-play in which a child was studied to see how he reacted to pain and pleasure within his play. It was very interesting to discover that an 18- month old child was able to deal with the pain he received when his mother left him by turning the idea into a game of asking his toys appear and disappear. When his mother died when he was 5 years old, the boy was not sad at all. This shows the profound effects one’s childhood can have on their future. The boy turned the pain, when he was young into a game, it seems that even when he got older, he still thought of it as a game. This idea of the importance of childhood has also come up in some of Freud’s work, and may be one of the few things I could agree on with him.