The American Dream.

‘The Interpretations of Murder’ is a great fictional page-turner based on the documented evidence of Freud and Jung’s visit to America in 1906. The growth of psychoanalysis since then is now history as is the establishment of the American dream. In this TED talk http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_loftus_the_fiction_of_memory.html Ms Loftus looks at false memory and concludes they are easily implanted both purposely and carelessly. It appears we do not have a memory as such but a state of current processing that favours certain thoughts that we give credibility to as memory, a subject in its own right. But here it’s Freud and his creation of the American dream. An unintended consequence for sure but he opened up the Pandora’s box of the unconscious, the true source of our motivations. In America there grew up an industry of plundering our unconscious either for profit or therapy. As such we became conscious of our unconscious or at least we became conscious of other people’s unconscious. This is the seed of the dream, the capacity to doublethink as George Orwell put it. Today we know we buy a car on power and speed, the lust behind glamour or the constituents of good box office and happily play the game as if to not do so would show us up as naive. And, and this is where false memory comes into it, all these ‘wholesome desires’ for the next iPad or epic film are seeded by the very advertising that we ‘know’ knows us better than our own pathetic attempts to know ourselves. We have capitulated to the dream, become mesmerised by a fabrication that both economically and cognitively has won power over us. No one is thinking anymore lest we show ourselves as simpletons. On the plane yesterday I read in the glossy travel mag of the brilliant new eateries in Hackney whilst eating a hot bacon baguette worthy of zero stars. It appeared to make sense to me that the grotty place where I used to live is now a hip centre of gastronomy and the purveyor of the grotty bacon baguette had credence to direct me towards good food. We are not inured to the quackery of glossy words and pictures; we accept them as part of our dreamscape. Somewhere secretly we hope the false memories they’ve implanted are reality whilst knowing they aren’t. So thanks Freud, thanks a lot.