Freud for Beginners / The Uncanny - Leandra Bourdot

Freud has his place, certainly, as a poster child of the classes of the Victorian era privileged enough to indulge in the time's self-absorption in - simultaneously - pretense, vanity and repression. I find no validity in his over-arching theory that sexuality is the the prime motivating factor in human behavior beyond its application to Freud himself; it's a limited and reductive view of the mass of the remainder of humanity. Certainly, I don't think that it's an invalid or reprehensible drive for Freud himself, and it is definitely a lens through which the mind can be examined - but only one of many. In projecting this drive - which he concluded as the primary as based on his own mind - onto other people, he severely limited his scope for further exploration of the psyche.
Likewise, I find his theory of the id, ego, and super-ego to be similarly limited. It's not a bad compartmentalization of the human mind, but it is only that, and there are countless other lines along which divisions of the mind can be constructed. Once again, in limiting himself to the single view he hit upon, he precludes himself from exploring the array of other possibilities. In the field of dream interpretation, he once again hits on something interesting but can only take it so far, as dictated by his own limited parameters; and in general I tend to find Jung's views on dreams to be rather more lucid and open to further exploration and interpretation.
I found his writing on the Sand-man to be interesting with regards to the story itself, but somewhat abysmal as to his interpretation - the loss of eyes is as metaphoric for castration as castration is metaphoric for the loss of eyes, and these metaphors can be carried on exponentially. The story of the Sand-man itself, derived, I assume, from the ballet Coppelia, fascinates me (and strikes a particularly personal note, in that my own story does dwell on loss of eyes, though in a rather different light.) The tension created by the synthesis of the boy's recurring mythology with his everyday life, of "real" and unreal, of something other - which, in the case of the Sand-man story, are catalysts for an atmosphere of fear and loathing - is one which I find intriguing and compelling as an inspirational force.