Behind The Masquerade-Freudian Interpretations Of Anna's Dreams In Lessing's The Golden Notebook

Doris Lessing's masterpiece The Golden Notebook, with its generous scope, rich meaning and sharp point of view, has ever since its publication been controversial and highly concerned by attentive criticism. Commentators have found lots of descriptions of dreams in this great novel. Their main concerns are around the obvious forms of dreams while here the present has discovered a new lane to the understanding of Anna's dreams from the Freudian approach.To adopt Freudian dream theories in The Interpretation of Dreams to interpret some main bizarre dreams of Anna Wulf in Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook allows the audience to have a different glimpse of the heroine's mental life and obtain a better comprehension of the character as well as the theme of the novel despite its grandiose scope.According to Freud, there are three innovations in the investigation of dreams:the first being of manifest and latent content and its specific pattern of being lived simultaneously in the present and the remote past; the second the contention that the manifest content is a distortion of the latent content, resulting from the repression by the censor; and the third innovation the application of free association as a method for the analysis of dreams. Essentially, dreams serve as the wish-fulfillment; any forms of distortions and the material and sources in dreams are related factors. The dream-work, including the work of condensation, the work of displacement and means of representation, embraces that the dream content fulfills a conscious wish which needs to be interpreted.By this framework, one can understand that the dreams of Anna is not something of a mess and undecodeable, but of clear suggestions or significances. Through the mirror of Freudian dream interpretation, one gets to see that Anna's three typically bizzare dreams, namely, the piano dream, the dwarf dream and the crocodile dream, are suggestive in forms of distortions under the intricate dream-work. Via such approaches one comes to understand Lessing's artistic and poetic representation of dreams as a tool to convey her true meaning and value of self and existence. Thanks to the Freudian facilities, a manifest world of meanings is vividly and effectively revealed and reinterpreted.