Observation 10.17
The lecture on this date was over psychoanalysis, discussing the ID, EGO, and SUPEREGO. ID is the sex, aggression, and death drive. SUPEREGO is the monitoring system of the conscious. EGO is the conscious self, which is made up of both the ID and SUPEREGO. Apparently, when people black out, the ID takes over, which is something I was unaware of. Humans and their obsession with mortality was discussed, as well as Freud's four stages of human behavior. According to Freud, the ego was "narcissistic." Ego-centric=the world is defined by the parameters the mind creates. Bowlby and his stages of attachment were also discussed, along with Erikson's stages or psychosocial development a human undergoes in order to become properly socialized. Freud believes we work out out anxieties through dream work, which I thought was quite interesting. There are two types of content in a dream: the manifest, which is what actually "happened", and the latent, which is the "real" meaning. Freud also believes there are certain ways repression works and filters information. Here are some terms of this:
Condensation: an image in the dream may have many meanings, many clusters of ideas in a single symbol. Therefore, the analyst will unpack those clusters in associations. That sounds new to me.
Displacement: when you know something is a placeholder for something else. The mind cannot deal with the actual thing, so it puts that content in a seemingly random image. Been there, done that.
Secondary Revision: the part of the dream your brain doesn't push away to make sense of. Apparently, my brain doesn't do this very much.
Lucid Dreaming: Controlling the Dream. I hardly ever do this, but when I do, it's quite rewarding.
Oh, and we also started talking about out third and final essay layout. Speaking of, I need to start that.