For decades, the joke about psychiatrists interpreting every dream object as a phallus has persisted. This supposedly reflects Sigmund Freud’s views. However, a new edition of Freud's seminal work, 'The Interpretation of Dreams,' revised by a modern scholar, is challenging these misconceptions.&nbsp;

The man behind this revised understanding of Freud's work is Mark Solms, a South African psychoanalyst and neuropsychologist.

His revised edition, a comprehensive 24-volume collection, was commissioned by the British Psychoanalytic Society and marks the 50th anniversary of the last segment of Freud's works. It will be unveiled at the Freud Museum in London on 19 September, ahead of a special conference at University College London.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/science/chimpanzees-hold-conversations-just-like-humans-new-study-finds-744753">Chimpanzees hold 'conversations' just like humans, new study finds</a>

<h2>Freud's understanding of sexuality</h2>

Mark Solms, as per The Guardian, clarified that Freud's understanding of sexuality was far broader than commonly perceived.&nbsp;

"Freud had a very broad understanding of sexuality," Solms explains.&nbsp;

"For him, any activity that was pleasure-seeking in its own right—anything that one does for the purposes of pleasure alone, as opposed to practical purposes—was 'sexual'."

Thus, simple pleasures like a baby sucking a dummy, a child kicking a football, or swinging on a swing, were described by Freud as "sexual," purely because they provided enjoyment. This broad definition led to significant misunderstandings of Freud's theories, and "Late in his life, Freud acknowledged as much," he added.

The new edition by Solms rectifies several translation errors from James Strachey’s standard English translation of the 1950s and 60s.&nbsp;

Solms, fluent in German and raised in Namibia where an older form of the language is still spoken, has corrected these mistakes and contextualised the word "sexual."&nbsp;

"I've been correcting some errors: Strachey was elderly, and his sight was poor," said Solms. He has also updated some outdated technical terms and included essays, lectures, and other writings not present in Strachey's version.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/science/breathing-polluted-air-as-kid-your-lungs-might-be-paying-the-price-years-later-study-744448">Breathing polluted air as kid? Your lungs might be paying the price years later: Study</a>

<h2>The birth of surrealism</h2>

Freud's theories on sexual urges, the meaning of dreams, and the quest for emotional freedom, which inspired the surrealist art movement a century ago, were also misinterpreted. Surrealists like Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, and Giorgio de Chirico were influenced by Freud's work, although they misunderstood him as a radical.&nbsp;

In reality, "None of them understood that Freud was a rather conservative gentleman and shared none of their revolutionary social inclinations," said Solms.

(With inputs from agencies)

For decades, the joke about psychiatrists interpreting every dream object as a phallus has persisted. This supposedly reflects Sigmund Freud’s views. However, a new edition of Freud's seminal work, 'The Interpretation of Dreams,' revised by a modern scholar, is challenging these misconceptions.

For decades, the joke about psychiatrists interpreting every dream object as a phallus has persisted. This supposedly reflects Sigmund Freud’s views. However, a new edition of Freud's seminal work, 'The Interpretation of Dreams,' revised by a modern scholar, is challenging these misconceptions. The man behind this revised understanding of Freud's work is Mark Solms, a South African psychoanalyst and neuropsychologist. His revised edition, a comprehensive 24-volume collection, was commissioned by the British Psychoanalytic Society and marks the 50th anniversary of the last segment of Freud's works. It will be unveiled at the Freud Museum in London on 19 September, ahead of a special conference at University College London. Also read | Chimpanzees hold 'conversations' just like humans, new study finds Freud's understanding of sexuality Mark Solms, as per The Guardian, clarified that Freud's understanding of sexuality was far broader than commonly perceived. "Freud had a very broad understanding of sexuality," Solms explains. "For him, any activity that was pleasure-seeking in its own right—anything that one does for the purposes of pleasure alone, as opposed to practical purposes—was 'sexual'." Thus, simple pleasures like a baby sucking a dummy, a child kicking a football, or swinging on a swing, were described by Freud as "sexual," purely because they provided enjoyment. This broad definition led to significant misunderstandings of Freud's theories, and "Late in his life, Freud acknowledged as much," he added. The new edition by Solms rectifies several translation errors from James Strachey’s standard English translation of the 1950s and 60s. Solms, fluent in German and raised in Namibia where an older form of the language is still spoken, has corrected these mistakes and contextualised the word "sexual." "I've been correcting some errors: Strachey was elderly, and his sight was poor," said Solms. He has also updated some outdated technical terms and included essays, lectures, and other writings not present in Strachey's version. Also read | Breathing polluted air as kid? Your lungs might be paying the price years later: Study The birth of surrealism Freud's theories on sexual urges, the meaning of dreams, and the quest for emotional freedom, which inspired the surrealist art movement a century ago, were also misinterpreted. Surrealists like Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, and Giorgio de Chirico were influenced by Freud's work, although they misunderstood him as a radical. In reality, "None of them understood that Freud was a rather conservative gentleman and shared none of their revolutionary social inclinations," said Solms. (With inputs from agencies)

'Let's talk about sex baby': Freud wasn't just about the phallus, reveals new analysis of his work

Sigmund Freud is the founder of psychoanalysis not many know that he was also a compulsive collector and one of his passions was Chinese culture, Freud's London house is set to showcase his art collection, here's a report.

From Jade screen to Garden deities, exhibition explores Freud's China fancy

A portrait of British painter and printmaker David Hockney by his friend and contemporary Lucian Freud sold Tuesday at auction in London for nearly £15 million.

The high price for portrait -- £14,905,200 ($20,700,000, 17,400,00 euros) -- was driven by competing bids by five collectors as the work made its debut at auction.

It last appeared in public during a 2012 exhibition of Freud's work at the National Portrait Gallery in London, the international auctioneer Sotheby's said in a statement.

The stark painting of Hockney, rendered in Freud's distinctive and expressive style, was the product of more than 100 hours of sittings between the pair in 2002.

Hockney, 83, and Freud, who died in 2011 at the age of 88, first met in 1962 and ascended to the top of the international art world during their long careers.&nbsp;

Both have been feted as two of the greatest artistic talents of the last century.

The younger painter said sitting for the portrait, during which time the duo chatted, sipped tea and talked about their work was a "very memorable and enjoyable experience".

"I thought his portrait very good indeed –- all the hours I sat were layered into it; he had always added, rarely taken anything away. It really shows," he added.

The portrait by Freud, who was considered the greatest living British painter at the time of his death was completed in the months ahead of his critically acclaimed retrospective at the Tate Britain gallery.

It was included in a series of portraits of sitters and subjects including Queen Elizabeth II and the British supermodel Kate Moss.

A portrait of British painter and printmaker David Hockney by his friend and contemporary Lucian Freud sold Tuesday at auction in London for nearly £15 million. The high price for portrait -- £14,905,200 ($20,700,000, 17,400,00 euros) -- was driven by competing bids by five collectors as the work made its debut at auction.

A portrait of British painter and printmaker David Hockney by his friend and contemporary Lucian Freud sold Tuesday at auction in London for nearly £15 million. The high price for portrait -- £14,905,200 ($20,700,000, 17,400,00 euros) -- was driven by competing bids by five collectors as the work made its debut at auction. It last appeared in public during a 2012 exhibition of Freud's work at the National Portrait Gallery in London, the international auctioneer Sotheby's said in a statement. The stark painting of Hockney, rendered in Freud's distinctive and expressive style, was the product of more than 100 hours of sittings between the pair in 2002. Hockney, 83, and Freud, who died in 2011 at the age of 88, first met in 1962 and ascended to the top of the international art world during their long careers. Both have been feted as two of the greatest artistic talents of the last century. The younger painter said sitting for the portrait, during which time the duo chatted, sipped tea and talked about their work was a "very memorable and enjoyable experience". "I thought his portrait very good indeed –- all the hours I sat were layered into it; he had always added, rarely taken anything away. It really shows," he added. The portrait by Freud, who was considered the greatest living British painter at the time of his death was completed in the months ahead of his critically acclaimed retrospective at the Tate Britain gallery. It was included in a series of portraits of sitters and subjects including Queen Elizabeth II and the British supermodel Kate Moss.

Freud portrait of David Hockney sells for $20 million

The swarm of insects — sometimes gnats, sometimes wasps or flying ants — arrived early in this year of nightmares. With summer came equally unsettling dreams: of being caught in a crowd, naked and mask-less; of meeting men in white lab coats who declared, “We dispose of the elders.”

Autumn has brought still other haunted-house dramas, particularly for women caring for a vulnerable relative or trying to manage virtual home-schooling.

“I am home-schooling my 10-year-old,” one mother told researchers in a recent study of pandemic dreams. “I dreamed that the school contacted me to say it had been decided that his whole class would come to my home and I was supposed to teach all of them for however long the school remained closed.”

Deirdre Barrett, a psychologist at Harvard Medical School and author of “Pandemic Dreams,” has administered dream surveys to thousands of people in the last year, including the one with the home-schooling mother. “At least qualitatively, you see some shifts in content of dreams from the beginning of the pandemic into the later months,” Barrett said. “It’s an indication of what is worrying people most at various points during the year.”

Barrett is editor-in-chief of the journal Dreaming, which in its September issue posted four new reports on how the sleeping brain has incorporated the threat of COVID-19. The findings reinforce current thinking about the way that waking anxiety plays out during REM sleep: in images or metaphors representing the most urgent worries, whether these involve catching the coronavirus (those clouds of insects) or violating mask-wearing protocols.

Taken together, the papers also hint at an answer to a larger question: What is the purpose of dreaming, if any?

The answers that science has on offer can seem mutually exclusive, or near so. Freud understood dreams as wish fulfillment; Finnish psychologist Antti Revonsuo saw them as simulations of pending threats. In recent years, brain scientists have argued that REM sleep — the period of sleep during which most dreaming occurs — bolsters creative thinking, learning and emotional health, providing a kind of unconscious psychotherapy.

Then again, there is some evidence that dreaming serves little or no psychological purpose — that it is no more than a “tuning of the mind in preparation for awareness,” as J. Allan Hobson, a Harvard psychiatrist, has said.

The four new studies are rooted in a more straightforward idea called the continuity hypothesis. This framework holds that the content of dreams simply reflects what people thought, felt and did during the day — the good and the bad, the hopeful and the frightening. In one study, Cassidy MacKay and Teresa DeCicco of Trent University in Canada compared dream journals kept by students in the first two weeks of the spread of the coronavirus in North America with the journals of students logged before anyone had heard of COVID-19.

The researchers categorized each image, using a standardized measure, into types such as body parts, animals, food and medical objects. The differences in the early pandemic logs jumped out.

“People were clearly thinking about coronavirus-related events, like waiting in grocery lines, and had heads in their dreams, the body part associated with catching and spreading the virus,” DeCicco said.

People with persistent waking anxieties also tended to play out scenarios involving future work, relationships and life generally in their heads over the course of a day. Previous research has correlated this pattern to scene-shifting in dreams: the frequent changing of the setting, from indoors to outdoors, city to country, mountains to coast. MacKay and DeCicco found that dreamers during the first phase of the pandemic recorded far more such shifts in their REM mini-dramas.

“These are classic anxiety dreams,” DeCicco said.

In another of the studies, Barrett recruited nearly 3,000 people online to track, describe and write about their dreams. She assessed the content of those essays, using a language-analysis algorithm that maps words onto categories like “anger,” “sadness,” “body,” “health” and “death.” These dreams, too, had all the hallmarks of heightened waking anxiety, but emotions like anger and sadness were much more prevalent among women than men.

“I wasn’t expecting this, but the findings suggest to me this idea that men are mainly experiencing fear of getting sick and dying, health fears,” Barrett said. “Women have been weathering more secondary effects; they tend to be the ones nursing sick family members, more often than males, for instance.”

Not all the dreams, in either study, were infused with darkness and fear, and many were pleasant, involving reunions with friends or family, or featuring the containment and elimination of the virus. They included wishes and threats, healthy measures and mistakes, and adjustments to news of the spread: learning and emotional processing. There were also periodic injections of hope.

In short, the studies suggest that dreaming does not serve just one purpose but many.

For everyday dreamers during the pandemic, it may be enough to know that COVID-19 nightmares, like any others, tend to be emotionally over-the-top. “It was scary in the dream, but you wake up and it’s funny,” Barrett said. “The crisis is smaller than you thought.”

The whole class of schoolchildren isn’t invading your house. The hazmat suits aren’t standing outside the door. We may get through this after all.

 
&nbsp;

The swarm of insects — sometimes gnats, sometimes wasps or flying ants — arrived early in this year of nightmares. With summer came equally unsettling dreams: of being caught in a crowd, naked and mask-less; of meeting men in white lab coats who declared, “We dispose of the elders.

The swarm of insects — sometimes gnats, sometimes wasps or flying ants — arrived early in this year of nightmares. With summer came equally unsettling dreams: of being caught in a crowd, naked and mask-less; of meeting men in white lab coats who declared, “We dispose of the elders.” Autumn has brought still other haunted-house dramas, particularly for women caring for a vulnerable relative or trying to manage virtual home-schooling. “I am home-schooling my 10-year-old,” one mother told researchers in a recent study of pandemic dreams. “I dreamed that the school contacted me to say it had been decided that his whole class would come to my home and I was supposed to teach all of them for however long the school remained closed.” Deirdre Barrett, a psychologist at Harvard Medical School and author of “Pandemic Dreams,” has administered dream surveys to thousands of people in the last year, including the one with the home-schooling mother. “At least qualitatively, you see some shifts in content of dreams from the beginning of the pandemic into the later months,” Barrett said. “It’s an indication of what is worrying people most at various points during the year.” Barrett is editor-in-chief of the journal Dreaming, which in its September issue posted four new reports on how the sleeping brain has incorporated the threat of COVID-19. The findings reinforce current thinking about the way that waking anxiety plays out during REM sleep: in images or metaphors representing the most urgent worries, whether these involve catching the coronavirus (those clouds of insects) or violating mask-wearing protocols. Taken together, the papers also hint at an answer to a larger question: What is the purpose of dreaming, if any? The answers that science has on offer can seem mutually exclusive, or near so. Freud understood dreams as wish fulfillment; Finnish psychologist Antti Revonsuo saw them as simulations of pending threats. In recent years, brain scientists have argued that REM sleep — the period of sleep during which most dreaming occurs — bolsters creative thinking, learning and emotional health, providing a kind of unconscious psychotherapy. Then again, there is some evidence that dreaming serves little or no psychological purpose — that it is no more than a “tuning of the mind in preparation for awareness,” as J. Allan Hobson, a Harvard psychiatrist, has said. The four new studies are rooted in a more straightforward idea called the continuity hypothesis. This framework holds that the content of dreams simply reflects what people thought, felt and did during the day — the good and the bad, the hopeful and the frightening. In one study, Cassidy MacKay and Teresa DeCicco of Trent University in Canada compared dream journals kept by students in the first two weeks of the spread of the coronavirus in North America with the journals of students logged before anyone had heard of COVID-19. The researchers categorized each image, using a standardized measure, into types such as body parts, animals, food and medical objects. The differences in the early pandemic logs jumped out. “People were clearly thinking about coronavirus-related events, like waiting in grocery lines, and had heads in their dreams, the body part associated with catching and spreading the virus,” DeCicco said. People with persistent waking anxieties also tended to play out scenarios involving future work, relationships and life generally in their heads over the course of a day. Previous research has correlated this pattern to scene-shifting in dreams: the frequent changing of the setting, from indoors to outdoors, city to country, mountains to coast. MacKay and DeCicco found that dreamers during the first phase of the pandemic recorded far more such shifts in their REM mini-dramas. “These are classic anxiety dreams,” DeCicco said. In another of the studies, Barrett recruited nearly 3,000 people online to track, describe and write about their dreams. She assessed the content of those essays, using a language-analysis algorithm that maps words onto categories like “anger,” “sadness,” “body,” “health” and “death.” These dreams, too, had all the hallmarks of heightened waking anxiety, but emotions like anger and sadness were much more prevalent among women than men. “I wasn’t expecting this, but the findings suggest to me this idea that men are mainly experiencing fear of getting sick and dying, health fears,” Barrett said. “Women have been weathering more secondary effects; they tend to be the ones nursing sick family members, more often than males, for instance.” Not all the dreams, in either study, were infused with darkness and fear, and many were pleasant, involving reunions with friends or family, or featuring the containment and elimination of the virus. They included wishes and threats, healthy measures and mistakes, and adjustments to news of the spread: learning and emotional processing. There were also periodic injections of hope. In short, the studies suggest that dreaming does not serve just one purpose but many. For everyday dreamers during the pandemic, it may be enough to know that COVID-19 nightmares, like any others, tend to be emotionally over-the-top. “It was scary in the dream, but you wake up and it’s funny,” Barrett said. “The crisis is smaller than you thought.” The whole class of schoolchildren isn’t invading your house. The hazmat suits aren’t standing outside the door. We may get through this after all.

What we dream when we dream about COVID-19

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