Jesse Hilson’s Reviews > The Interpretation of Dreams > Status Update

This weirdly might be one of the best books I’ve read. It’s mixed, the bad parts are laughable but the good parts feel perceptive and brilliant enough to put it over the top.

Some of it is coming together a little better. I confess I’m skimming only very slightly—the book-skimmer’s police, who bring charges against those who don’t really read books, have very little against me, not even a misdemeanor. Freud’s examples are often absurd but he’s on to something

Freud’s dream interpretations, especially when based upon punning and word games, seem far-fetched. I’m more impressed with what I can make out of his comments mapping out the mechanisms and automatisms of the unconscious than when he provides examples. Which would seem to invert science.

Moving through this. It’s “very interestink” (said in a German psychoanalyst’s accent). Some of Freud’s explanations are really reaching and too reliant upon far fetched wordplay. In other sections it’s very precise, impressively so since he’s talking about the murky inner recesses.

Dense, tricky. Freud’s methods of arguing for certain dream interpretations seem sometimes rather specious. On more than one occasion it comes across as a stubborn point of intellectual pride, how he masters his patients with explanations.