The Freud Synthor

Sugata Mitra

About this app

This is a Synthor made from Sigmund Freud's book, "The interpretation of dreams", one of the most influential books of all time. This book (German: Die Traumdeutung) is an 1899 book by Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, in which the author introduces his theory of the unconscious with respect to dream interpretation.

A Synthor can present ideas or ‘thoughts’ of an author in response to statements, questions or comments from persons interacting with it. We will call such a system a “Synthetic Thought Generator”, abbreviated to SYNTHOR.

A book is a collection of sentences that need to be read in sequence. This, indeed, is the main reason why people who are short of time, or with a deficit of attention, cannot read books, even if they want to. The company of a person who has read a book can partially compensate for someone who has not read the book. Reading a few lines at random from a book cannot be a replacement for the company of someone who has read the entire book. Similarly, looking up keywords from the index of a book will not provide a similar replacement. Synthor behaves like a person who has read the book.

This Synthor can be moody, forgetful and disjointed - it all depends on you....

Our source text is: https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Freud/Dreams/dreams.pdf

Developed by Sugata Mitra at the Tataha Kim Laboratory. "Synthor" is copyright of Sugata Mitra since 2020.