Note: you should know all the terms that appear in italics.

With Freud, we continue a process begun with the Enlightenment and specifically with Locke:  humans use their intellect to decipher situations that had previously been acceptable.  Thus Locke talks about the divinity in a way that makes him completely rational and understandable: God does things reasonably, nature is reasonable, mysteries are few and far between.

At the same time, the achievements of this rational approach are ambiguous or paradoxical.  In IH 51, Copernicus and then Galileo (using the new human invention, the telescope), showed that earth is not at the center of things. Writing slightly earlier, Darwin showed that man did not have the privileged place in history upon which man had insisted. Freud uses his human intelligence to show how out of control we are, how invisible to us are the problems that really bother us.  With these three movements, man’s planet loses its centrality, man loses his privileged place in the world, and then man loses his sense of self-control.  "This new philosophy casts all in doubt" was John Donne’s comment on Copernicanism: the remark got truer and truer in the centuries that followed.   He was right about the doubt.  We could no longer trust the Bible's literal truths.  But he was also wrong: human beings were leaving fewer and fewer things open to doubt.

I’ve chosen Freud’s discussion of dreams partly because of the time constraints we face. If we want to come away from Freud with some specific knowledge of how he thought, how he approached problems, and what his influence was, the dream studies are an obvious choice.

Let’s start with the summary, page 239:  the dreamer has a rich range of symbols ready to use, and these symbols have a kind of universality—they’re used by people all over; the work of the dream—the dream work—is like other activities (think of films and lyric poems);  the sexual nature of symbols needs further study.

I’m starting here to emphasize especially the second remark: the dream work is like other kinds of thinking.  We’ll come back to this later. It is a Freudian finding that we can all use, whether or not we’re Freudians.

Now we return to the start, p. 223.  Freud has just spoken of parapraxis.  Please look this word up and be able to use it.  The transition from parapraxis (literally: activity against) to dream hinges on the fact that both activities  provide "substitutes."  He then remarks that we discover the meaning of our dreams through the free association  basic to psychoanalysis.  This free association uncovers substitutive structures that we use unconsciously.  Freud patiently lays out the ground rules for studying these structures.   Often meaning will lie in the most trivial or disturbing data (226 left, at bottom).

The disciplined study of dreams is necessary because we resist the truth that dreams communicate.  (224 right)  Freud lists examples, including some French puns (225-226:  pas means "step" then "channel").  This resistance leads us to represent and replace latent dream-elements  with manifest ones.  (227)  By reading dreams closely Freud is capable of finding desires that his patients did not want to face.

Now (228) Freud turns to  the "censorship" of dreams, the "dream work" he mentioned in concluding at 239.  One example is the mumble by which a patient covered over erotic utterances (228).  The censorship uses "omission, modification, fresh grouping"—the modern terms are condensation and displacement.

Let’s see how these work.
 

Omission:  the clearest example is the "murmur" with which the 50 year old patient spoke of erotic activity.  The word on all of our lips is simply not uttered. But we know it is there.

Modification:  the "survey" mentioned at the top of 227 (left column) is replaced in the dream by the image of a mountain.

Displacement or fresh grouping:  going to the theater displaces the latent activity of getting married (228).

I’d add: condensation, where we use one event or image to sum up a number of events or thoughts.

On pages 234-239 Freud catalogues some examples of symbolism.  Note his comment on 235 (right, bottom): "You must not picture the use or the translation of these symbols as something quite simple":  symbols get their full meaning in the context of particular dreams, and don’t always mean the same thing.  So I will not test you on the items on pp. 234-239, though I want you to have a rough idea of them.

This short chapter gives us an overview of Freud at work.  Unflinchingly addressing sensitive topics (our sexual desires, hatred of spouses, resentment of loved ones), he argues that therapy consists in unveiling our real but unconscious drives so that we can then deal with them.  The "so that" part is very important.  Equally important  is the patience and archaeological skill with which the analyst looks at truly perplexing dream-sequences and assists the patient in discovering what holds them together.

Next reading: Civilization and its Discontents, an except at pages 255-258.