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The nature and importance of dreams as expounded by Freud is described. Dreams convey the truth about oneself which could not be more misleading, and the nature of dreams is such that one cannot explain them, rather only describe their dreams. One can interpret only the story of the dream, not the dream itself and so they become emblematic.

The critic Lionel Trilling was largely concerned with the sacrifices writers must make and the courage they need to create great works, and with his inability to do so. Trilling celebrated Sigmund Freud with several studies, perhaps to compensate for his failure as a novelist.

This article discusses the manner in which biography is portrayed as a joke in Saul Bellow's 'Ravelstein.' Topics include allegory, metaphysics, homosexuality, and evasiveness.

Charles Darwin departed from the British view of nature as something idyllic and harmless when he travelled to South America and witnessed the overwhelming diversity of nature. Darwin's theory of evolution upset the traditional view that nature is unchanging. He used worms as a metaphor of the slow-moving but constant, organized and significant activity of nature.

A person develops many defenses for protection from fear of an object and the knowledge of that object. Freud links fear to the loss of autonomy and the development of dependence. Since fear is linked to an object or incidence, defense mechanisms often serve to minimize the knowledge of fear by minimizing associations with the feared object. The purpose of psychoanalysis is to give anxiety an object so that it can be removed. While fear has an object,anxiety is expectation of something but not based on a particular object.

A psychoanalytic case suggests that the relationship to contingency is a significant aspect of psychological development that has been overlooked in psychoanalytic theory. For example, Freud in 'The Psychopathology of Everyday Life' showed how accidents represent unconscious intentions pointing toward recovery of the past. However, Proust depicts an accidental return of the past that does not appear to be unconsciously motivated. Proust's view suggests an acknowledgment of contingency which relates to one's earliest emotional experiences.

A phobia according to Freudian psychoanalysis represents an effort to deal with hatred or badness by projecting it onto an external object, which then becomes feared. The feared object assumes a fixed meaning, and the phobic relation to the object resembles possession. A phobic situation can be avoided but a phobic object can turn up unexpectedly, suggesting that the choice of phobia represents different relations to hatred. The views of William James are also considered, and two cases are discussed to illustrate the meaning of phobias.

A study considering the idea of an authentic history, and what an authentic history of the notion of authenticity is presented using three different versions of authenticity.

The essay compares and contrasts scientific writing to storytelling, using the works of Sigmund Freud as an illustration. Literature as art and as communication and its appropriateness within the scientific method are examined.