Freud Goes On

Dr. Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis,  was born in Germany in 1856, practiced in Vienna (Austria), Paris (France)with . Charcot, London (U.K.),  and  back in Vienna.
In 1938 he fled to London to escape the Nazi anti-Jewish persecutions.
He died there of throat cancer on

 Sept. 23, 1939, while the German Nazis were completing their invasion of Poland, and started World War II on Sept,1st 1939.

I was in Italy, where a Jewish friend gave me a condensed version of Freud's book "Traumdeutung" (Interpretation of Dreams), which fascinated me in spite of my skepticism, but I had read it superficially.  In fact, I had almost forgotten it when I heard of Freud's death.

Only several yeas later, when I had the chance of reading the original
"Traumdeutung" and other books by Freud,  I understood that my friend was not exaggerating by calling Freud "one of the greatest geniuses of the century".
I will never forget the convincing revelation of the concepts of ego, superego, id, subconscious, complexes, etc.

After that nightmarish war, I married in Germany in 1951, then moved with my family to Venezuela in 1952 and finally to U.S.A.1n Jan.30, 1955.

Meanwhile, I had opportunities to increase my knowledge of psychoanalysis, and using it to solve (helped by psychiatrists) personal, family and even  business related problems with remarkably positive results.

Probably the most impressive treatments  of two problems through analysis of my dreams and subconscious are the following:

(1)

1964.In a frequently recurring dream, I was walking in a subterranean tunnel that seamed to be part of an ancient street buried (in my dream) under the ashes erupted from the  vulcan  Vesuvio of almost 2000 years ago under the house where I was born in what used to be the ancient Capua (really, the Vesuvio eruption had not reached that far,,,) presumably under my ancestral home (not vefy unusual in Southern Italy), I felt an eerie fear, blended with a mysterious guilt when passing by a slab of marble mounted on the right and only wall of the street . For no reason I could fathom, I knew that the corpse of an elderly gentleman was buried behind the slab. Some people were with me, but I didn't know, nor was I interested in knowing them.

I had this exactly same dream, as it were a replay, for many times, like a recurring nightmare, until I skeptically decided to ask a psychoanalyst whether he could explain it. He said he was willing to try, but not to guarantee success.

He started with the standard method of digging into my past, from my childhood on. To make it short, he proceeded  in such a way as to make me volunteer that I felt like having killed my father, who had died of emphysema and kidney infection in 1961.

Conclusion: I subconsciously felt guilty of his death, for not having flown back to Europe to help him survive..(I loved him somuch...).
REsult: after that revelation, I never had my nightmarish dream again.

(2)

Year 2005:  Self analysis and remedy.

A recurring embarrassing dream: for many months, I had a silly but irritating dream: I was naked from e navel down in a crowded plaza and trying to cover my body with just a short t-shirt or other undersize clothing. The numerous passing people were seeing, but keptg gpong by as if they had not seen me.

One day I thought that my super-ego  or the subconscious were telling me I should not go to bed without pajamas pants (what do ou expect form a dream?).

I went back to wearing my complete pajamas and..., voila: no more embarrassing dreams...
Silly, but coherent...

With merely these two pieces of evidence, I have enough to remain solidly on Freud's side.

If the above is not enough, here is what Freud himself wrote:

"It is a mistake to believe that a science consists in nothing but conclusively proved propositions, and it is unjust to demand "that it should.
It is a demand only made by those who feel a craving for authority in some form and a need to replace the "religious catechism by something else, even if it be a scientific one. Science in its catechism has but few apodictic precepts; "it consists mainly of statements which it has developed to varying degrees of probability. The capacity to be content with "these approximations to certainty and the ability to carry on constructive work despite the lack of final confirmation are "actually a mark of the scientific habit of mind. -- Sigmund Freud"

Einstein himself would agree, because his Theory of Relativity was accepted and adopted well before it was proven many years later.

On the other hand, It is known that Freud was inspired also by the Russian Dostoyevsky's elaborations of fictitious psychological  problems and their consequences  in his fiction writings. I think it must have been from his novels like "The Brothers Karamazov" and/or "Crime and Punishment".
Those and other writings are still recognized as pioneering masterpieces of psychological analysis, although they were composed as mere fictional episodes in novels.