June 11, 2019 - Brother Nathanael
04:02
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| Time | Text |
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| It's the royal road to the unconscious, wrote Sigmund Freud to his Jewish friend and confidant, Wilhelm Fleiss. | |
| The interpretation of dreams, Freud added, is the King's Highway, along which everyone can travel to discover the truth of unconscious processes for themselves. | |
| Now, I had a dream the other night, around midnight, in which a scene during a house hearing was the overarching theme. | |
| Since our founding in 1913, ADL's mission has been to stop the defamation of the Jewish people. | |
| Very deep within my psyche is my identity as a Jew. | |
| Yet, in my waking life, I identify as a polemicist undergoing horrific censorship. | |
| The dream, although at first somewhat murky, began to surface as a disputatious polemic indeed. | |
| ADL is one of the foremost non-governmental authorities on domestic terrorism, extremism, hate groups, and hate crimes. | |
| For many decades, we have been tracking white supremacists and other extremists. | |
| And we have been developing strategies to address these threats. | |
| We do have to be careful about whether, in taking stuff off of the web where we can find it, we push things underground where neither law enforcement nor civil society can prevent and de-radicalize. | |
| A silent horror attended, like a threatening cloud, then swiftly the dream switched to a totally unrelated scene. | |
| It was a restaurant scene, and my eyes were fixated on a plate of spaghetti and meatballs, once awake. | |
| I recall that Freud, a confessed neurotic like many of his patients, peers, and admirers, once had a dream where he found himself in a red-light district from which he was in a panic to escape. | |
| Yet finds himself back in the same red-light district again and again, despite his determination to flee. | |
| When interpreting his dream, Freud noted that a dreamer's relation to his wishes is quite peculiar. | |
| The dreamer repudiates his wishes and censors them, he said, so that their fulfillment gives him no pleasure. | |
| Quote, There must be internal prohibitions in the mind itself, Freud added. | |
| These internal prohibitions Freud calls censorship and likens these prohibitions to a public censor who bans political newspapers and works of art. | |
| Thus, for Freud, one aim of psychoanalysis was to discover a path that leads the conflict between censorship and wish to harmonious resolution. | |
| Now, in my own dream, I censored myself, for although I crave the spaghetti and meatballs, I pushed it away since I'm a committed vegan. | |
| Consciously, I resolved the inner conflict, for although the wish for a meal would be appetizing, eating a vegan meal would ultimately be more satisfying. | |
| And having put on the new man in Christ, any choice I make that's not displeasing to God brings inner peace. | |
| In his interpretation of dreams, Freud wrote, The dreamer fighting against his own wishes is to be compared with the summation of two separate, though in some way, intimately connected persons. | |
| Thus, for Freud and his admirers, the truth of unconscious processes and the resolution of hidden conflict cannot be discovered unless the censored wish is consciously unlocked and fully brought to light. |
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