SaeRom Sung
Professor Rowan Tepper
Coli 221Z Summer
6/26/11
Freud Response
The most well-known psychologist, Sigmund Freud, uses the case study genre to present his theory of reading and interpreting the complex language of the unconscious through the book, ‘Three case Histories’. Freud gives three cases for the readers; the Rat Man, the Wolf Man, and the wife of god case. First case, the Rat Man, has obsessions, which seems to be from his child memory. The second case, the Wolf Man, is about a Russian person who had a dream about white wolves when he was a kid. Third case is about Dr. Schreber, who suffered from mental disease, thinking god is going to change him to a woman.
I want to concentrate on the Rat Man and the Wolf Man case. As the Rat man’s case history begins with detailed accounts of the first seven sessions in the Rat Man’s treatment. Freud introduces analytic sections of the patient’s obsessional ideas such as the cause of Rat Man’s illness, the father complex, and solution to the illness. The Wolf Man case is more a common case we can experience in our lives or lives around us. The fear that he faced in his dream affected his whole life. Both cases’ patients have some bad memories from their childhoods. Because of their memories, they tend to be obsessional in certain things. Eventually, these illnesses took and controlled their lives. Fictional ideas can be very dangerous for certain people. As I mentioned earlier, these ideas can be easily in around our lives. For example, today’s media has been a big influence of today’s people. It seems like television shows and movies are trying to get more viewers by exposing sexual and violent contents. People that mature enough to know that these contents are just fictional will be fine because they will not confuse the reality and fictional contents from the media. However, for the kids, they have a higher chance to mix up the reality and fictional ideas. Unfortunately, the mix-up might take and control the kids’ lives.
I think the lesson is very obvious in the book. We cannot let the fictional ideas take over our lives. To do so, as the grown-ups, we have to have responsibility to protect the immature people from being exposed fictional ideas until they are old enough to understand. Another lesson is that it is important for any people to release their stress to prevent the fictional ideas to take over the lives. The life is short, and we cannot let the fictional ideas to take the advantage of our lives.
I thought you had an interesting argument that we have to constantly distinguish between what if fact and fiction, which can be harmful to younger kids. I agree that the media does a good job crafting language in shows that are aired into such believable realities that for young children it becomes a story they seriously believe. I agree we have to protect younger kids too because they really don't understand the message trying to be portrayed beneath the fictional story.
ReplyDeleteI liked the part in your post where you said the wolf man is a more common case that we too can experience by having a bad thought affect us. I think it's important to realize that we as "normal" people found ourselves relating to the patients at some points during the reading.
ReplyDelete