Cocaine

My good friend Sean, who teaches at Bunker Hill Community College, introduced Freud by saying, "See you Monday. We'll be talking about Freud and why he did enough cocaine to kill a small horse." Now, as this statement would suggest, Freud was one crazy dude. However, his theories are quite interesting and humerous, which is more than I can say for some of the other theories we've studied. While people look at Freud's work with a certain skepticism, some of what he put forth is generally accepted. Yet, I do not understand how his theories are academically accepted. His notion of association is the concept that is most mindboggling to me. While I do believe that certain parts of dreams may be connected to your repressed feelings, giving critics the free reign to use this association in order to lend credit to their ideas is ludacris. You can use association to back up pretty much any claim you make, no matter how absurd it is. Using association is almost like playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. No matter what, you can always come up with a way to connect how the text is representative of what you say it is. Therefore, doing a Freudian psychoanalytic reading gives you free reign to posit whatever you wish.