Member-only story
Dreams of The Uncle With The Yellow Beard
How Sigmund Freud’s interpretation of dreams changed my life.
Dreams are a disguised fulfillment of a suppressed wish.
Those words from Freud’s magnum opus spoke powerfully to me the very first time that I read them and they still do today.
As a child who was a prolific bed-wetter, I often dreamt of breaking away from playing hard with my friends to urinate, only to wake up soaking the bed. As I grew older and began to recognize the pattern of my dreams, did I learn to overcome this problem by waking up right in the middle of my unconscious state to head to the lavatory, thereby averting disaster.
Why do I tell this story?
To shed light on the degree to which my subconscious was shaped by the profound anxieties of my childhood; of my father’s health, our economic circumstances, the profound precariousness of our daily lives and my father’s eventual demise in 1991.
And in a way, Freud’s dreams were largely shaped by his anxieties, coming up in the world in Vienna.
Anyone who has read the interpretation of dreams will appreciate the section in which he writes about his uncle with the yellow beard.
A snippet of which, is captured below:
On the morning after my friend’s…