Psychoanalyzing Freud

• The Roles of Control Mastery Theory in a New Model of REM Dreaming by Vic Comello, 5/8/97
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How would that title be for a book? Provocative enough? When I thought of my Web site, I planned three levels: the first two being devoted to dream analysis and the lowest level containing psychobiographical background information on Freud. I don't know, with all the interest I've found here, maybe I had things backwards and should maybe aim a bit higher.

You are correct on all counts. Freud is being hoist with his own petard by his biographers who are more familiar with his early id language and who fail to recognize that he later tended to think of such concepts as his "mythology."

The other problem is that the biographers are content to merely state the facts of Freud's life, so after a thousand pages of Freud did this, that, and this other, you put the book down and feel cheated because you still don't know the man.

Actually Freud changed his mind many times regarding his theories, and, as you indicate, it's fascinating to glimpse how Freud's own personal development contributed to those changes.

As for Control Mastery Theory showing Freud in a more favorable light, I'll give you one quick example. I have argued that Freud's relationship with his friend Wilhelm Fliess finds Freud struggling to free himself of his subservience to authority figures, which Fliess was to Freud despite the fact that Fliess was younger. Freud was trying to be friends on an even footing, which Fliess wouldn't have. In psychoanalyst Alexander Grinstein's analysis (On Sigmund Freud's Dreams), Freud and Fliess are involved in an "aim-inhibited homosexual relationship."

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