Freud: The Interpretation of Memes (2026)

 

Review of The Interpretation of Memes, by Sigm. Freud
American Journal of Psychoanalysis

Dr. Freud’s new volume, The Interpretation of Memes, will surprise readers who know him chiefly through his earlier and already controversial studies of dreams, slips, symptoms, and the subterranean life of wishes. In this latest work, he extends his method to that most fugitive and modern of psychic productions: the meme. One had thought the joke postcard, the caricature, and the café anecdote sufficient trivialities for science. Dr. Freud, with characteristic boldness, has decided otherwise.

His central contention is that the meme, however foolish its outward appearance, is not mentally cheap. It is a compact formation, economically constructed, in which displacement, condensation, symbolic substitution, and disguised wish-fulfillment perform their acrobatics at great speed and with remarkable thrift. The dream required a night; the meme requires only a caption.

The reader will encounter many memorable analyses. A photograph of a cat paired with the words “I can has…” is treated not as nonsense but as a compromise formation between infantile desire and social permission. The endlessly recurring train entering the tunnel is handled with the restraint one expects from Dr. Freud, though the reader may feel that the tunnel, like certain cigars, is allowed only the briefest hope of innocence. Particularly ingenious is his chapter on repeated images of distracted boyfriends, pointing, in Dr. Freud’s account, not merely to indecision but to the ego’s humiliating inability to keep faith with its announced attachments.

As in The Interpretation of Dreams, the style is at once methodical, argumentative, and oddly comic, especially when Dr. Freud patiently dissects absurd specimens that lesser minds would dismiss with a laugh. He remains a scholar of suspicion, unwilling to grant even the crudest visual jest its alibi of mere amusement. The meme, he insists, is not unserious because it is ridiculous; it is ridiculous because it has approached something serious too closely.

This book will not, one suspects, persuade everyone. Some will object that Dr. Freud has over-endowed the human mind, finding Oedipus in every reaction image and repression in every poorly cropped photograph. Yet one closes the volume with the uncomfortable conviction that he is right at least often enough to spoil the reader’s future innocence. After this, no one will glance at a meme without wondering what, precisely, has been smuggled past the censor.