Coming Soon...

I have shot my first video blog, on Orwellianism today. It is just being edited at the moment but I hope to have it up here by Monday afternoon/evening. Thanks for waiting :)

A Little Bit More Freud...

I touched on Freud in an earlier blogpost but I would like to talk about a different topic, okay it's still about sex but find me something Freudian that wasn't loosely related to sex :P

Freud once declared that, "Dreams are a royal highway to the unconcious mind". But what does this mean? Does this mean that, the time I dreamt I had a baby, that on some level in my unconcious mind I do actually want to have a child? Or that time I had a dream that my friend died that I actually want her dead? I really hope not.

The thing is, Freud believed that in every person there was a mental battle going on between their concious and unconcious mind, or their Ego and Id. There is a animal sematic drive in every one of us which Freud said was being supressed by civilisation. For example, if a very attractive woman walked past a young man, in his unconcious mind he may have desires to behave inappropraitely- i.e. rape her! But his concious mind knows that this is unacceptable in society so his Ego would not allow it. Between the two extremes comes a compromise called the super-ego. A person's super-ego will think rationally about a situation before acting. I understand this is alot to take on so I found a video which explains these ideas in a very simple way which you can view here.

Steinbeck, Grapes Of Wrath

Grapes Of Wrath was published in 1939 by John Steinbeck following his experience living with migrants during the great depression. Written as a piece of Journalism, it was soon greatly criticised for the "unreal" picture Steinbeck was apparently painting. The book was banned and burned as people saw it as a book of lies, it was thought to be communist proganda. It is still quite a controversial book and even today there are arguments as to whether the book is indeed acceptable as a form of Journalism.

Although the characters and the events are ficticious, the book was written for effect to give a voice to the voiceless. The characters were architypes and the events were written to reflect reality. Steinbeck had been touched by the plight of the migrants and had therefore wanted to do something about it in the form of a novel. Grapes Of Wrath has been desbribed as a type of campaign Journalism due to it's nature. The soul purpose of the novel was to open the eyes of the ignorant as to the conditions the poor had to endure during these hard times. However, research done showed that conditions were not quite as bad as Steinbeck illustrated but the sheer fact that this research was carried out shows the impact the book made on society.