Punk Freud

Today I gave the lecture on the Freud key text, 'Family Romances'.

I wandered and blathered for three hours about the relationships between ourselves and our parents; about the emotional separation of us from our parents and about how our perception of our parents changed as an essential part of emotional maturity.

I talked about childhood trauma and how as adults we see those traumas reenacted within children that we know - yet fail to remember ourselves as traumatised children. Of how we've suppressed those major traumas and rages within ourselves; rages so catastrophic at the time yet now somehow diffused when remembered as adults.

I noticed a random, smiling student who looked to me as if the penny had dropped; that he'd perhaps reached some sort of theoretical epiphany. Yes - this would be it - he would explain his reading of the text back to class who will have already enthusiastically grasped it. He would continue with his explanation of Sigmund the Great; getting it all wrong but having been carried away by the joy and hubris of that first ever discovery - expanding enthusiastically but incorrectly. I asked him what he thought of Freud...

He smiled. "Isn't it all about wanting to shag your mother?' he said.