1 discussion; symbols

as everyone knows, freud decided the meaning of classes of symbols. so anything long = a penis. round or receptive things=vagina. any powerful thing=father. any VENGEFUL figure = mother. And he did this by himself. no checks. i can't remember a single text where he ever asks the bloody pt what that symbol might indicate.
right. so obviously thats wrong for a start. 1. you do not ascribe single meanings to entire classes of ideas. 2. you always ask the pt. if the pt doesn't know and reverts to evasion or similar fantasy THEN you help out by directed attention to the resemblance admitted by the pt! surely all this is obvious? well you find me a single practitioner in the world who anywhere states this, never mind does it! 3. look at the admittedly shorthanded list i've given above. you see at once those are 'wishes' whose? well what about freuds? a powerful father? freuds father was a very strong character, backed up by both german and jewish tradition. freud was always very controlling and quite limited in some ways...because its really important to him to BE the powerful father. agreed? so the oedipal boy wants to be his father, both to enjoy power and to seduce or rape the mother? so here is freuds own subcs wish for all to see. now you see why freuds idea of the VENGEFUL mother? the castration idea is implicit...but then freud denies its the mother who may castrate; in all his writings he goes on about the fathers retaliation? yes? but in most pts deeper memories its the females in the nursery, carers etc who 'jokingly' or otherwise say such frightening things to the little boy. why? because of their penis envy, of course. in fact that fear is builtin to the boys psyche by himself! if you have a precious thing, and you notice subcs that girls don't...you will fear they might take it away. and in fact at a tender age its boys who find girls scary because that fear occurs to them even if attended by deeply loved and loving carers. its a package deal, so to speak. in fact freuds own mother was absolutely revolting in her favouritism and consequent pressure on freud to 'succeed'...that in itself may be the bedrock of half freuds fixed opinions of female talion; which he may describe as castration but in practise we find is always withdrawal/deprivation. so something is skewed right here. freuds mother in fact is a blueprint of maternal smothering of the worst kind; its mothers withdrawal of this 'love' which is so scary...and that is why you get freuds repeated 'vengeful' mother. so now you see why we simply got to start over. YES lots of men have these wishes/fears/experiences....but i ask you which ones go with whom? these glib assertions that this means that and so and so on have never actually been even tested! and no you can't trust the analyses of the bloody psychoanalysts whether selfadministered or attended by other psychoanalysts because they all are highly pressured to 'discover' the exact same things that freud tells them. its that or never get the job! never be accepted as a 'real' psychoanalyst! be known forever more as an unresolved oedipal.....aaargh! so the science is just as constipated now as it was a century ago.
so lets start over. in general you ask the pt what they feel or know a symbol means. you ask the to connect symbols/meanings to their distressing condition. if they evade you press the issue. if a pt knows what something means TO HIM; then that IS what it means.
eg female, aged 79, widow, dreams of snakes under her bed? standard diagnosis, she's afraid of being raped by whoever; which is a 'wish'....can you not pity her and these idiots? she's 79. on probing we find she goes on to worms. her bed is cold. 1 question later, we find she's afraid of death which at her age is quite likely very frightening and not exactly her hearts desire at all! see the difference? connect the bloody dots ONLY if the pt repeatedly goes off into anxiety, evasion, denial...and even then you listen. all i'm saying is stop neglecting today in cowardly obedience to a man who's been dead a century.
if you really want to classify symbols then do it generically. classes of ideas that are FOUND consistently with this or that syndrome, this or that condition. and start from where we are at; which is basically we know fuck all. we have to begin again. where we find reasonable correlations then we know that much. but even then we should always allow for individual differences. eg little boys aren't clones. some are afraid of castration. others afraid of their future position as 'leaders' or fathers or something. we absolutely have to get away from the old dictating what these things are or mean and bloody well find out; as if freud had never been. this is not contempt; i think he was brilliant, brave...but he was a man of his age and because of understandable limitations psychoanalysis is also limited and indeed nearly useless. and it needn't be.