1 Most people dream at night. When they wake up in the morning, they say to themselves,
'What a strange dream I had! I wonder what made me dream that.' Sometimes dreams are
frightening. Sometimes, in dreams, wishes come true. We can fly through the air or float
from mountain tops. At other times we are troubled by dreams in which everything is
confused. In dreams we act very strangely. We do things which we would never do when we
are awake. Why are dreams so strange? Where do they come from?
2 People have been trying to answer this since the beginning of time. But no one has produced
a more satisfying answer than a man called Sigmund Freud. One's dream-world seems strange
and unfamiliar, he said, because dreams come from a part of one's mind which one can
neither recognize nor control. He named this the 'unconscious mind.' The unconscious mind
is like a deep well, full of memories and feelings. They have been stored there from the
moment of our birth. Our conscious mind has forgotten them. We do not suspect that they
are there until some unhappy or unusual experience causes us to remember. Then suddenly
we see a face we had forgotten long ago. We feel the same jealous fear and bitter
disappointments we felt when we were little children. This discovery of Freud's is very
important if we wish to understand why people act as they do, for the unconscious forces
inside us are at least as powerful as the conscious forces we know about. Why do we choose
one friend rather than another? Why does one story not affect us at all? Perhaps we know
why. If we don't, the reasons may lie deep in our unconscious minds.
3 In Freud's day, it seemed that no one knew very much about the mind. If a person went mad,
or 'out of his mind,' there was not much that could be done about it. People didn't
understand at all what was happening to him. Had he been possessed by a devil or evil spirit?
Was God punishing him for wrongdoing? Often such people were shut away from the
company of ordinary people as if they had committed some terrible crime. This is still true
today in many places. Doctors prefer to experiment on those parts of a man which they can
see and examine. If you cut a man's head open, you can see his brain but you can't see his
thoughts or ideas or dreams. In Freud's day, few doctors were interested in these subjects.
Freud wanted to know what makes us think and feel as we do; that is, he wanted to know
how our minds work. He went to Paris to study with a famous French doctor, Charcot,
whose special field of study was diseases of the mind and nerves. He learned a lot from him.
\'(Ihen he returned to Vienna in 1886, he began to work as a doctor for nerve diseases. Most
of the patients who came to see him were over-excited and anxious, sick in mind rather than
in body. Medicine did not help them. Freud was full of sympathy, but he could do little to
make them better.
4 Then one day, a friend, Dr. Josef Breuer, came to see him. He told Freud about a girl he was
looking after, who seemed to get better when she was allowed to talk about herself. Dr.
Breuer allowed her to talk at great length, and she told him everything that came into her
mind, whether it seemed important or not. Each time she talked to him, she remembered
more about her life as a little child. Freud was excited when he heard this. He began to try to
cure his patients in the same way. He asked about the events of their early childhood; he
urged them to talk about their own experiences and rela tionships while he himself said very
little. Often, as he listened, his patients relieved occasions from their past lives. The doctor
did not make any attempt to stop them. He let them speak as they wished, while he himself
remained calm and quietly accepted whatever they told him. One young woman who came to
him couldn't drink anything although she was very thirsty. She would hold a glass of water to
her lips and then push it away. Something prevented her from drinking. Freud discovered the
reason for this. One day, as they were talking, the girl remembered having seen a dog drink
from her nurse's glass. She hadn't told the nurse, whom she disliked, and had forgotten the
whole experience, but suddenly this childhood memory returned to her mind. When she had
described it to Dr. Freud, the girl was able to drink again. Freud called this treatment the
'talking cure.' Later, it was called psychoanalysis. When patients talked freely about the things
that were troubling them, they often felt better and learned to control their fears.
5 Whatever Freud learned he reported to other doctors, and many of them were greatly upset
by his discoveries. Even Dr. Breuer's courage was not enough for him to continue with his
experiments, and Freud stopped his experiments. It was hard to believe that people could
become blind, or lose the power of speech, because of what had happened to them when
they were children. The human mind was turning out to be a dark and fearful place.
6 Freud was attacked from all sides for the things he said and wrote. He made many enemies,
but he also found firm friends. Many people believed that he had at last found a way to
unlock the secrets of the human mind and to help people who were very miserable. He had
found the answer to many of life's great questions. He became famous all over the world and
taught others to use the 'talking cure.' His influence on modem art, literature, and science
cannot be measured. People who wrote books and plays, people who painted pictures, people
who worked in schools, hospitals, and prisons all learned something from the great man who
discovered a way into the unconscious mind.
7 Not all of Freud's ideas are a,cepted today, but others have followed where he led and have
helped us to understand ourselves better. Because of him, and them, there is more hope than
there has ever been before for people who were once just called 'crazy.'
A. What do the following refer to?
1. them (para. 2)
2. him (para. 3)
3. he (para. 4)
4. it (para. 4)
B. Mark the following statements True (T) or False (F).
T F 1. In Freud's time, mad people were isolated from other people.
T F 2. In the 'talking cure,' patients were allowed to speak freely about the things that
were bothering them with little interference from the doctor.
T F 3. Many doctors, including Dr. Breuer, were not pleased with Freud's discoveries,
which made him stop his experiments.
T F 4. Freud's influence was not limited to his own field of study.
C. Mark the best choice.
1. Freud thought our dreams came from ____________________ _
a) unhappy or unusual experiences which happened before we were born
b) the conscious forces we know about
c) a part of our mind where memories have been stored since birth
d) the unconscious mind that we can easily recognize
2. Freud was concerned with the mind because he ______________ _
a) was interested in the method of tre"tment called psychoanalysis at the time
b) wanted to find out how the mind works
c) thought the human mind was a dark and fearful place
d) believed he could treat the patients who were sick in body in that way
3 .. Freud began to cure his patients by talking to them after ____________ _
a) his friend Dr. Breuer told him about his method of treatment
b) a young woman who couldn't drink anything came to him as a patient
c) he returned to Vienna from Paris in 1886
d) he worked with a French doctor, Charcot
D. Answer the following questions.
1. Why wasn't Freud successful in curing his patients in Vienna?
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