Boy Meets World. Boy Meets Freud.

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The video posted above is a lighthearted and quirky television show from the 90’s harboring all the aspects of Sigmund Freud’s “Interpretation of Dreams.” Tragedy strikes a tight knit group of friends when life long sweethearts, Cory and Topanga, decide to go their separate ways. Cory’s best friend, Shawn, does not support their break up and does not take his friends’ separation very well. The disentanglement of Cory’s relationship effects Shawn so much that he starts to act out in class (more than usual) and earns everyone involved detention. He falls asleep in detention and dreams that there is a killer on the loose, murdering everyone but Cory, Topanga, and himself. He unmasks the killer only to discover that he was the murderer all along. As Shawn wakes up he realizes that he has been blaming himself for his friends’ misfortune and accepts that he is not responsible for it.

Sigmund Freud argued that human beings do not have access to their unconscious. It is a part of the self that will remain hidden in the dark corners of our minds as it intervenes in our everyday lives (Freud 809). His psychoanalytical study of dreams will help us breakdown this episode of Boy Meets World, produced almost a century after “The Interpretation of Dreams” was published. I cannot prove that the shows writers took note of Freud’s work as they composed this script but I can suggest that they possibly stumbled upon it at some point in their lives, as the episode truly displays a Freudian sense of thought.

Freud argues that a dream has two basic parts that interpreters’ usually confuse. It is important that this confusion does not arise, as it will guide the interpreter to error (Freud 818). Each dream consists of a manifest content (dream-content) and a latent content (dream-thoughts). The characters, objects, and setting Shawn sees in his dream are the manifest content or what is visible. He sees many of his friends die but does not know the reason for the cause of these brutal deaths. The latent content (dream -thoughts) of the dream allows us to figure out what is not so obvious. It urges us to find the meaning behind the murders and discover the killer’s identity. Freud suggests that, “the dream-thoughts and the dream content are presented to us like two versions of the same subject-matter in two different languages,” (Freud 819).

Freud also stresses the importance of viewing a dream as a rebus puzzle (Freud 819). We can find meaning behind the murders if we look at the dream piece by piece and analyze who is murdered and who is not. This will also help us understand why Shawn was the murderer and what might be emerging from his unconscious. He unconsciously blamed himself for his friends’ separation and did not know why he was acting out until his dream clarified things for him. The reason for his conscious misbehavior was because he felt helpless and guilty.

Dream condensation and dream displacement are also two factors of a dream that should not be ignored. While comparing dream content and dream-thoughts, it is proven that dream condensation has occurred at some point (Freud 819). The dream content can be very brief and meager, as dream-thoughts can be very long and in depth. (Freud 819). In Shawn’s case he may have compressed some of the dream content seen above and was not able to remember the dream in its entirety. There may be certain events in the dream that he does not remember or has compressed two events into one, swaying his interpretation of the dream.

Dream displacement urges the differences between dream content and dream thought (Freud 820). Shawn disguises his guilt and sense of responsibility in the form of a killer. His dream could have easily consisted of himself and Cory having a conversation about why he feels responsible for Cory’s heartache. Instead displacement comes into action as his guilt is expressed in a more brutal way.

Works Cited:

Freud. Sigmund. “From The Interpretation of Dreams.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed, Vincent B. Leitch. 2nd ed. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.:New York, 2001. 814-824. Print.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7LQkVaP_gY