Danny Lobell and Wes Alwan were joined for a discussion of Freud and dreams by PEL citizens Bjorn Dahlby, Ken Presting, Chase Fiorenza, Michael deCamp, Terra Leigh Bell, and Sam Baguley. Our discussion focused less on dreams than on Freud and everything else we happened to want to talk about, from psychedelic drugs to the female lioness' "ambivalence" about mating (my fault, apologies in advance). At the very least, I provided Danny with a trove of new stand-up material.
Citizens can download this recording as audio (edited a bit to be more listenable from the raw video above) from the Free Stuff page. (Click on "Not School & Aftershow Discussions.")
The next Aftershow will be on Sophocles' Antigone (episode 117, to be posted over the next two Mondays), which we recently performed with Lucy Lawless and Paul Provenza. The Aftershow will take place on Sunday, 6/28 at 3pm Eastern, noon Pacific via Google Hangout. If you're a PEL Citizen, you can sign up to be a part of it here. Otherwise, look for an announcement on Twitter or our Facebook page with a link to watch the show live (or after the fact) on YouTube.
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- Wes Alwan
I thoroughly enjoyed this episode and aftershow. You guys mentioned Anna Freud. She was a lesbian and had a long time partner. I haven’t read first hand what Freud’s thoughts on lesbianism were but so far it seems that he felt it was a deficiency within the father-daughter relationship. He also analyzed Anna. This was to later be described (or so I hear) by her later analyst as an incestuous relationship. Given his understanding of things like transference and the obvious conflicts of interest involved with having your daughter be your analysand, I’m just kind of stumped as to how to fold this into how I read Freud. I understand that it’s ad-hominem to ascribe what I may describe as character flaws to the validity of the theories that a person comes up with but I’m really struggling with this one? I can understand being incorrect about lesbianism. I cannot reconcile how he could make the decision to analyze his daughter. Is it just me? On the one hand I want to say that his theory should be so well laid out and supported that one could find out he was an axe murderer and not doubt it; however, the nature of this particular field and it’s lack of empiricism – it’s artistic more than scientific quality – it’s soooo subjective quality makes me say, wait, WHAT?
I’ve always struggled with psycho-analysis in the sense that I sometimes feel as though you’re going to get a completely different analysis depending on who you see.
Hopefully I will continue to read and learn and it will become more apparent that this is much more objective than I give it credit for. I say all of this as a person who loves psycho-analysis and believes in the general notion that most of what we do is unconscious. I simply struggle with the way in which we access that unconscious thought or even if we can.
I should add that there is no concrete evidence of Anna being a lesbian or having a long time partner. It doesn’t change my point but In fact highlights the struggle with what could be uncovered in a therapeutic analytic relationship, and why it should be NOT your dad.