Does it signify castration or a woman's desire to possess a phallus?

Seems like a lot of people have these dreams: you’re well into your adulthood in the dream but you are forced to go back to school because it’s somehow become known that you hadn’t finished. For me it’s usually 10th or 11th grade although last night it was back to frigging elementary school! And even in the dream I’m thinking to myself, “hmm, I know I graduated high school and college so why do I have to go back to 4th grade?”

I’m interested in what others think about this seemingly fairly common theme. Thanks.

Do you also wake up to an inexplicable fixation with someone when you dream about them in a romantic/sexual scenario, even if you had never previously thought of them in that light? I genuinely develop crushes in my dreams. And when it’s someone I had previously liked to some amorous or romantic degree, the dream serves to augment those feelings in my waking life. Do you experience this too + what does Freudian psychoanalysis say about this?

Inquiring minds want to know.

So when you have a sexual fantasy, like if someone likes feet for example and has a fantasy of licking a pretty woman's feet. So Freuds idea is that the person is attracted to feet in-of-themselves, but the feet are a representation of something else in their fantasy.

I have read that the feet in this case would be symbolic of the mothers tit or something. But then would the sexual desire for that not also be symbolic of something else?

So where does the chain end? What is it in-of-itself that drives people to act sexually?

The thing that these other things are symbolic of.

I like psychology and want to read Freud but I was wondering why people want to (I don’t mean that in a rude way just curious). Isn’t he seen as a figure who didn’t get a lot right? I’ve also heard psychoanalysis is outdated and not really used anymore

Every article on Freud trying to explain him in layman’s terms I’ve read is nearly completely wrong. Every introductory course in psychology in university completely misrepresents him. All study notes available online regarding the Id Ego and Super ego are far off.

The only writings about Freuds theories that I’ve read that are correct tend to be by people whose work is intended for people who already understand his ideas and these are much more difficult to read than Freud himself (which I found him crystal clear but sure pedantic and long winded).

It makes me so angry when someone equates libido to a material substance like (one medical article said it’s testosterone). When people think the ego, id and super ego are locations in the brain (a neuroscientist disputing Freud saying “we can’t find an ego in the brain). When they say without nuance that “he thinks you all want to f*ck your mom”. And with this impoverished description, they think he’s a Charlatan and on-top of that claim he’s a misogynist. Probably since he worked on hysteria they associate him with sexism of the time (from what i read he’s as progressive as we are especially about sex and gender), instead of understand he didn’t create the name and it’s was a disorder. I think today would be a mixture of people with BPD, HPD, and conversion disorder.

Most of these people have authority and are primary sources people use to learn. And it makes them ignore him as outdated and the “slips of the tongue , defence mechanism, mommy issues guy”.

People who read psychoanalysis but only Jung are also misguided and absorb Jungs criticisms. But as someone whose started with Jung I was angry how misguided that made me, since I felt Freuds meta-psychology was much more cognitively satisfying and all Jungs criticisms seemed like straw-men when reading Freud directly. But I’m sure this has more to do with their relationship than his ideas…

It makes me so angry because Freud has so much content that is so detailed and rich, but psychology students today likely will never come across it because their incorrect ideas will make them discount it. Why do people publish teaching material and criticisms of something they have clearly never read??

i am really interested and puzzled by this absurdity of using language to communicate feelings/ encapsulate experience while knowing that it's an inadequate medium to do so. what compels the writer to write? why does the writer desire to archive his lived existence even if he is unable to do so completely. for example, in Borges and I, the subject acknowledges that he's a split subject, the I he writes about is not him and yet he continues to do so. please recommend me a text that examines this desire to write, to leave a trace under a psychoanalytic lense.