The text below is the result of a ten-minute focused freewrite. I recorded it as I wrote. Click here to open a new browser window and replay this recording. If you get bored and want to fast forward, just use your mouse to grab the slider on the control panel and move it ahead by the desired amount. Of course, this also works if you want to see a particular segment again. Slide back, then hit the play button.
Want to find out a bit more about the benefits of freewriting? See my blog
Here is the unedited text resulting from the freewrite:
Freewriting about freud in that most Freudian of ways, the free association. Freus says that we are mostly our unconscious; some of us think that the unconscious is like a dark cave where all the scary stuff lives, like the devil who says have another doughnut and never mind the muffin top that stops your jeans fitting. It’s an ego, an id and a superego, and the last one is supposed to be like a vicar at a tea party where people are flinging ice cream and jelly. Freud was a docotor of the nerves and was trying to introduce some kind of science into the idea of psychological treatments. He thought we were shaped by forces we can’t see all below the surface like a boig old ice berg. I sort of agree. The unconscious isn’t only where the scary things live. It’s also where genius is, the genius that takes something and works quietly away at it before presenting us with an answer when we least expect it. It helps us dream of wonderful things like flying and when our fingers hurt from typing we still dream and we become more than the outline of our bodies. We get big and melt with the world and the spaced out there become us. What else might Freud have said? A lot of what he said was based on the study of very dysfunctional people living in an uptight society at quite a weird time in history. Many of them were women and some of them were men who didn’t meet the existing ideal of manliness. And then I think when my nose runs how strange it is that we’re not aware of so much of ourselves it brings strangeness to us and we can see ourselves as different creatures in a new world of water and fluid and weirdness. I don’t know if it’s right to cure our neuroses, maybe we should leave them alone and love then like little furry pets. Are we really divided into parts like what Frued said or is there only one whole, and the bits we scorn and don’t love become separeete little islands all alone to protect themselves. We seem to think that to be diverse or different we must be sectioned of and boundaried but who knows if this is real or just a strange imagining. Another person didn’t like freud was it Sartre? He just thought that sometimes we hid things from ourselves and acted in bad faith. I think it was Sartre. I dunno. Wgat are we to make of personality? Does it exist? Is it an illusion? We section things off like a big block of tissue in a microtome, embedded in wax and sliced thin for the scientific study but maybe when you see something sliced thin you think that’s its natural state but it isn’t only you lack imagination to see it as a whole without all these bits. We get it from biology. I think we stretch the biological model to fart, put it where we want it and where it really doesn’t actually belong.
My next action is to pick out sections of the freewrite for further research. The highlighted sections above are merely what appeals to me at the moment. I'll discuss it further on the blog.