The Oedipus Murders by Casey Dorman

Author:Casey Dorman [Dorman, Casey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781684333318
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Published: 2019-09-04T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 28

Susan Lin poured hot water from the electric pot on her kitchen counter into a cup in which she’d place a bag with green tea. She carried the steaming cup of tea and its saucer to her small living room and placed it on the coffee table in front of her flowered couch. Then she picked up the copy of The Interpretation of Dreams she’d checked out from the Irvine Public Library that afternoon. She plumped a throw pillow behind her back and put her feet up on the coffee table, careful to not disturb the cup of steeping tea. She enjoyed her nights of solitude in her condominium, one of nearly one hundred similar residences in the three-year-old Irvine complex. The apartment had been her first big purchase after graduating with her Ph.D. and getting her first job as a forensic psychologist. She didn’t think of it as her life-long home. It was a one-bedroom and too small for the husband and two children that she hoped to have someday. But it was comfortable, and it was home, and it was hers.

She’d read about Freud’s theories in graduate school, but she’d never read Freud in the translated original. Her doctoral program had been based upon a combination of neuroscience and advanced psychometric theory. She had delved deeply into how the brain worked and learned how to use the most recent and sophisticated neuroimaging techniques to study what was happening and where it was happening in the brain when individuals engaged in cognitive tasks. And she had learned how to use the most advanced personality and attitudinal measures to compare an individual to his peers in every area from political sentiments to control of his aggressive impulses. Classical Freudian theory had only been mentioned as an example of unscientific, subjectively validated psychology, something from the ancient past.

She set down the book and reached over and removed the tea bag from her cup and laid it on the edge of the saucer. Then she took a sip of the tea—still too hot to drink—and picked up the book. She skipped the long introduction and the several prefaces to earlier editions and instead turned to the book’s beginning. It was a history of the work on dreams up to the point of the publication of the book, which was in 1900. She read just enough to be amazed by the author’s confidence and lack of ambiguity in claiming the validity of his method. Phrases claiming “proof” or that “there can be no doubt as to the truth of this assertion,” proliferated. Sigmund Freud was persuasive, although his exhortative language would be shunned by any modern-day scientific journal or publisher.

It would take forever to wade through the book, the writing of which was dense and arcane, filled with concepts and constructions from a previous era, more like reading a Dickens novel, or, given its subject matter, a story by the Marquis de Sade, than a scientific treatise.

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