On THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS:

1. If there’s one thing you knew about Freud going in, it was the idea of the “Oedipus Complex.” What struck you about the way Freud uses a literary text, Sophocles’s tragedy Oedipus the King, to make generalizations about the structure of the psyche? How does he explain the sustained power of Sophocles’s work? What’s the substance of the comparison between Oediupus and his much later counterpart, Shakespeare’s Hamlet?

2. As anyone who has ever dreamed knows, our dreams come to us in a fragmented, scattered, often nonsensical form. What does Freud do to demystify this “manifest content” that we cling to so tenuously upon waking? What are some of the elements of the “grammar” or “rhetoric” of dreams that Freud gives us?

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On “Fetishism”

1. What do fetishes mean, according to Freud, and what do they do for the subjects who desire them? What is the “meaning and purpose” of every fetish, as Freud puts it, and how does he explain the amplitude, the sheer force, of the desire fetishists feel for their objects?

2. Like Marx, Freud puzzles over the “queer” way certain things seem to possess values that are irrational or untraceable for certain subjects. Unlike Marx, Freud struggles to fix this value in a stable way, try as he might. What are some of the problems Freud encounters in trying to explain fetishism? What strikes you as some of the limitations or problems in his conclusions? To circle back to the beginning, what is the problem with having a fetish in the first place, for Freud?

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On “The Mirror Stage…”

1. We think of mirrors as a primitive technology for giving us back to ourselves, so to speak. At the risk of circularity, mirrors mirror, allowing us to admire ourselves. What does Lacan do to shatter this simplistic idea? What happens when a 6-18 month-old stands in front of a mirror? What is the relationship between the real, living body and its “specular” image?

2. We think of mirrors as passive things, as a means of showing what’s there. But Lacan emphasizes the way mirrors work to produce something that wasn’t there before. How does this work, in his argument? Bonus points if your answer contains the phrase “pigeon gonads.”