Freud mentions his ideas about the Oedipus Rex moves the “modern audience no less than it did the contemporary greek one, the explanation can only be that its effect does not lie in the contrast between destiny and human will, but is to be looked for in the particular nature of the material on which that contrast is exemplified”(Page 790). Freud explains the differences with Oediups Rex as if the child’s “wish” is “phantasy” were it brings it to be an open realization as it is in “a dream”. AS for  Hamlet shows a “type of man whose power” has a “direct action” and its “paraplysed by an excessive development of his intellect.”Freud lays out his new task of interpretation on dreams as “the task, that is, of investigating the relations between the manifest context of dreams and the latent dream-thoughts, and of tracing out the processes by which the latter have been changed into the former.” (page 793).  where Freud wants to make dreams understandable and it’s a dream of two versions in the same “subject-matter” and into “different languages”.Freud describes language as “a new class of psychical material between the manifest conet of the dream and the conclusions of our enquiry:” where its name as “their latent content,or as we say ) the dream thought” and “dream manifest” its by “mean of our procedure. Freud wants to make dreams and once you understand them it’s one “subject matter in two languages.”Displacement is a “Psychical intenties occurs in the process of dream-formation, and it is as a result of these” that are different “between the text of the dream-content and that of the dream-thoughts comes about.”The grammar of dreams is language condensation displacement which is the mean of red. The Connections of dreams that you get to become flashbacks. Freud sees it as the ego language where it represents logical connections as a “simultaneity in time.”And dreams carry a “method of reproduction” and it is connected to “dream-thoughts”. The grammar of dreams are not logical and are not meant to press on one or the other where you need to choose on them. The interpretation of dreams is that “Then the commoner method of representation would be to introduce the dependent clause as an introductory dream and to add” “principal clause” as the “main dream” . Where sometimes your dreams sometimes it’s “more extensive part of the dream always corresponds to the principal clause”. 

In “The Mirror Stage as Formative” by Jacques Lacan, a young child looking at themself in the mirror for the first time is the main image that sets off and forms the basis of his argument. This event is major to a child’s development, and allows the child to turn themself into an object that can be viewed by the child from outside themselves. By seeing themself as an outside being, the child experiences self-alienation through the mirror image. The child can either grow to hate or love this image, and it will have a major impact on the development on their character and sense of self. We are all affected by the mirror image, according to Lacan. The mirror image is a phenomena that follows us throughout the rest of our development and our lives.

What the child sees in the mirror, however, is not real. It is only a quick representation – a snap shot, if you will – of who they are. It is not a full representation of their person, but rather an idealized version. It does not show all aspects of who they are; it only shows their appearance, which is what we place a lot of emphasis on, especially in our modern world. It does not show their health (especially at an internal level), their relationships, their aspirations, their goals, their everyday thoughts and feelings, their day-to-day routine, how they view themselves, their failures, etc. Everything on your outer appearance, or what is seen in the mirror, can seem normal and put-together, while everything on your inner appearance, or what is not seen in the mirror, can be in complete chaos, and vice versa. Therefore, what the child, and what we see in the mirror are fictional. As much as we want to believe that what we see is real, we are only seeing a small particle of our entire being. We may never reach this idealized version of ourselves that we see in the mirror. This can also be applied to social media use in our modern world, as we craft our online personas, which are our “mirror images”. We want these personas to be who we truly are, even if they do not show the ugly and unidealized parts of ourselves. This ideal can never be fully realistically achieved as much as we try. As human beings, we cannot rely solely on the mirror image on our journey to self-realization.

Freud makes a bold claim in the beginning of “Fetishism”. He claims that “the fetish is a substitute for the woman’s penis (817)…” He goes into this interesting discussion about how the male has repressed the fact that women don’t have penises; he then discusses the castration complex in which the male is threatened by this idea of castration which the woman has obviously had to go through; the man’s narcissism and masculinity have greatly increased when it comes to this organ as a result. Freud further mentions that this fetish of the female genitals also saves the fetishist from being homosexual.

In their early lives, men “scotomize” or create mental blind spots when it comes to what organ women have in their bottom regions; they refuse to believe, in a sense, that there’s a lack of a penis. However, Freud then makes the point that “scotomization seems to me particularly unsuitable, for it suggests that the perception is entirely wiped out, so that the result is the same as when a visual impression falls on the blind spot in the retina (817).” There’s a blind spot for this simple fact that women lack penises or have been “castrated”, but Freud prefers to call it “repression.” He then states, “Furthermore, an aversion, which is never absent in any fetishist, to the real female genitals remains a stigma indelebile of the repression that has taken place. We can now see what the fetish achieves and what it is that maintains it. It remains a token of triumph over the threat of castration and a protection against it (817).” He writes that this repression has caused a stigma regarding the female genitals that can’t be removed and the fetish that has been born as a result of this is seen as triumph and protection over the threat of castration. Women’s genitals essentially are a representation of castration, which is why men are so narcissistic when it comes to their penis. Freud expands on this by claiming that the fetish prevents the fetishist from being homosexual, “It also saves the fetishist from becoming a homosexual, by endowing women with the characteristic which makes them tolerable as sexual objects […] Probably no male human being is spared the fright of castration at the sight of a female genital. Why some people become homosexual as a conse­quence of that impression, while others fend it off by creating a fetish, and the great majority surmount it, we are frankly not able to explain (817-8).” There’s no way to explain why some men take the route they do (becoming homosexual, fetishizing female genitals, etc.) when it comes to the female genital organs.

          In Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud proposes the idea that dreams give insight and aid in understanding our conscious mind. The idea is that our dreams are intense repressed thoughts or beliefs that are trying to come out or make themselves known in our dreams. Freud also possessed the idea that dreams have more than one meaning, “Each of these two versions had a meaning of its own and led in a different direction when the dream was interpreted” ( Page 798). The idea of waking up and writing down your dreams in a journal or notebook could be a means to understand/ interpret your dreams as our dreams don’t tend to be expressed with words as it is a common belief that dreams tend to be more on the artistic side with pictures being the default form of expression “A speech of this kind is often no more than an allusion to some event included among the dream-thoughts, and the meaning of the dream may be a totally different one” (Page 796).

          I found it interesting that Freud possesses the idea that our dreams shield us from our disturbing thoughts, “We shall be led to conclude that the multiple determination which decides what shall be included in a dream is not always a primary factor in dream construction but is often the secondary product of a psychical force which is still unknown to us” (Page, 794). This is very interesting to me as this belief me comes across as more of a nightmare, the polar opposite of a dream, as they tend to be darker in content and portrayal. I think that the correlation between Oedipus and one’s parents that Freud draws, that children have subconscious sexual desires revolving around their parents, to be a nightmare or something that our mind finds disturbing enough to censor.