: . Freud oas Investigatory Tool 33 PART II: STUDIES 6 Getting Lost in Someone Else’s Story: “Creative Writers and Daydreaming” (1908) 39 7 Why We Laugh at Something Funny: Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905) 43 8 The Experience of the “Uncanny”: “The ‘Uncanny’” (1919) 61 vvi Contents 9 The Paradox of Surprise in the Face of Certainty: “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis” (1936) 71 10 What Makes Choice Difficult When It Is: A Freud-Inspired Excursion 89 11 Mourning and Mental Health: “On Transience” (1916), “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917) 101 References 107 Index 113 About the Author 119Foreword This book grew out of my experience as a developmental psy- chologist reading Freud. After I began teaching developmental psychology to undergraduates in the 1980s, I recalled the urg- ings of a college professor of mine to read chapter 7 of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams for the extraordinary psychology of mind it contains. Read it I did and found myself entranced, from the chapter’s opening, which describes the luminous and heart-wrenching dream that illustrates Freud’s theory of dreams as wish-fulfillments, to the broad theory of mind that occupies the later pages. In the dream, a devoted father who has just lost his beloved child drifts to sleep in the next room to find himself dreaming the child has arisen, alive, and jostled his arm, saying, “Father, don’t you see, I’m burning?” The father awakes to fire emanat- ing from the child’s room, where one of the candles lighting the room has fallen on the arm of the dead body and burned it. The father hastens to the room and extinguishes the fire. Transformative for me
