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oisin175's review against another edition
3.0
Interesting and informative, but long winded at times.
a_serpent_with_corners's review against another edition
challenging
informative
slow-paced
The man loves an anecdote. The first half of the book is peppered with little stories about such things as:
- Sending a man on a sea voyage to try to treat his psychosomatic intestinal problem
- Writing a paper about cocaine
- Spitting on an old lady's stairs and making her housekeeper hate him
- Having a boil on his scrotum the size of an apple
- Accidentally poisoning a patient
- His colleague overdosing cocaine
- And many more
Given how successful psychoanalysis has been in literary studies, it was interesting to see how much emphasis is placed here on wordplay and double-meanings, given that dreams are usually so imagistic and resistant to description with language. There does seem to be a conflation of the dream itself and the language used to describe it. Similarly, he talks about the incredible 'condensation' of meaning in dreams when it seems that what we're actually seeing is the expansive imagination and interpretative power of the analyst (or 'reader').
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