Lifton's Little Legacy of Freudianism Regarding Dreams and Sex

In the reading we watched Lifton give at the Harvard Bookstore last week, he described his book as a "memoir of his professional life." To this end, I appreciated the work Lifton did to position himself in the times and traditions and prevailing ideas of whatever environment he found himself working in. He talked about being trained by mostly Freudian psychoanalysts but disagreeing with their dogma. He talked about maintaining respect for Freud and that it made sense that Freud's work was so interested in sex because the early twentieth century was a time of such sexual reinvention in Europe.

Throughout the memoir, I found that Lifton repeatedly conveyed his feelings about his research via dream interpretations--which is a practice that I assume he would've experienced in relation to the psychoanalytical shades of his training. This thread of dream interpretations amused me as a reader and I respected Lifton's ability to act on feelings he was able to extract from his dreams--it seemed like didn't think reading dreams literally was what dreams were for, but he was able to recognize what emotions were weighing on him importantly enough to manifest in dreams and he was able to work on those. His attention to dreams put me at attention for other ways that the environment (either of psychoanalysis or any other) would act on him, and specifically it put me on the lookout for the role of sex in dealing with atrocities or the study of atrocities.

This might have been a fruitless thing to look for because it was a "memoir of his professional life" and because Lifton seemed to have such a great, respectful relationship with his recently deceased wife BJ that he wouldn't be inclined to share the impact his professional life may have had on their romantic lives. I imagine I would have to read Lifton's original works to see if he ever asked about the role of sex after atrocities in his interviews. Lifton's work, similar to Freud's, coincided with a period of sexual awareness, so it was interesting to see how rarely sex appeared in this book--though, of course, this was also a period of "totalism" and extreme destruction, and if that's what his work was focused on, then maybe there wasn't room for an account of other factors.

When talking about his dreams during his Nazi doctor research, Lifton brings up sex explicitly:

I had a series of erotic dreams involving beautiful young women, though noting later that "the scene remains controlled," suggesting restraint even in the dream. Then and later, when relaxing with friends or even giving a public talk, I would sometimes bemoan the grim subjects of my research and would say such things as "My next study will be about love, sexual pleasure, and human goodness," or about "the varieties of human orgasm." Underneath that little "joke" about changing my subject to something more pleasant was a hunger for erotic, life-affirming images to counterbalance my immersion in cruelty, dying, and killing (p 268).

This passage served to interest me further in whether the survivors/victims/perpetrators he interviewed felt the same need to balance out their extreme images of cruelty, dying, and killing.