November 4, 1899: Sigmund Freud publishes "The Interpretation of Dreams"

November 4, 1899: Dr. Sigmund Freud publishes Die Traumdeutung -- "The Interpretation of Dreams." It becomes his signature work, and marks him as "the father of psychoanalysis."

"Insight such as this falls to one's lot but once in a lifetime," he said, throwing all modesty to the wind.

Freud suggested that dreams are formed as the result of two mental processes. The first process involves unconscious forces that construct a wish that is expressed by the dream, and the second is the process of censorship that forcibly distorts the expression of the wish. In Freud's view, all dreams are forms of "wish fulfillment."

Freud advanced the idea that an analyst can differentiate between the manifest content and latent content of a dream. The manifest content refers to the remembered narrative that plays out in the dream itself. The latent content refers to the underlying meaning of the dream. During sleep, the unconscious condenses, displaces, and forms representations of the dream content, the latent content of which is often unrecognizable to the individual upon waking.

If there's two things that people think they know about Freud, it's "He thought everything was about sex," and "He blamed every psychological issue on a person's mother." Critics have argued that Freud's theory of dreams requires sexual interpretation. Freud, however, contested the former of these criticisms: "The assertion that all dreams require a sexual interpretation, against which critics rage so incessantly, occurs nowhere in my Interpretation of Dreams. It is not to be found in any of the numerous editions of this book and is in obvious contradiction to other views expressed in it."

And while he used cigars and tunnels as metaphors for sex, he also famously said, "Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar."

A 2019 episode of the YouTube series Epic Rap Battles of History featured "Nice" Peter Shukoff playing Freud, an atheist who seemed to be obsessed with sex; and Cara Francis, who wears aging makeup and plays "Rapping Grandma," playing Mother Teresa, a Catholic nun. Freud enjoyed writing about humor, and, as played by Peter, he found it funny that she not only was celibate, but was unattractive enough for him to say, "Jokes I could make about your appearance, abundant. Your chastity vow, redundant."

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November 4, 1899 was a Saturday. Baseball season was over. Professional hockey didn't exist. Basketball barely existed at all. But, among others, these college football games were played:

* Yale beat Army, 24-0 on The Plain at West Point, New York.

* Princeton beat Brown, 18-6 at Osborne Field in Princeton.

* Amherst beat MIT, 12-5 at Pratt Field in Amherst, Massachusetts.

* Lafayette beat arch-rival Lehigh, 17-0 at March Field in Easton, Pennsylvania.

* Bucknell beat Penn State, 5-0 it Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.

* Harvard beat Penn, 16-0 at the original Franklin Field in Philadelphia.

* Navy beat North Carolina, 12-0 at Worden Field in Annapolis, Maryland.

* Michigan beat Virginia, 38-0 at Regents Field in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

* Notre Dame beat Rush Medical, 17-0 at Cartier Field in South Bend, indiana.

* Indiana beat the University of Cincinnati, 35-0 at Jordan Field in Bloomington, Indiana.

* The University of Chicago beat Purdue, 44-0 at Marshall Field in Chicago.

* Northwestern beat Minnesota, 11-5 at Northrop Field in Minneapolis.

* And Iowa beat Nebraska, 30-0 at Antelope Field in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Also, Woolwich Arsenal lost 2-0 to Newton Heath, at Bank Street in Manchester. In 1902, Newton Heath was renamed Manchester United. In 1910, they moved from Bank Street, which was adjacent to an open sewer and thus unacceptable, to Old Trafford in Salford. In 1913, Woolwich Arsenal moved from Plumstead in Kent (now in Southeast London) to Highbury in North London. In 1914, they dropped the locality from their name, and became simply "Arsenal."

April 23, 1903: Ivan Pavlov Demonstrates "Conditioned Reflex"

April 23, 1903: Ivan Pavlov delivers a research paper titled The Experimental Psychology and Psychopathology of Animals. In it, he discusses what he calls "the conditional reflex," what came to be known as "conditioned reflex." It makes him a legend of psychology.

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was born on September 26, 1849 in Ryazan, in Central Russia. From his childhood days, Pavlov demonstrated intellectual curiosity along with what he referred to as "the instinct for research."

He attended the Ryazan church school before entering the local theological seminary. Inspired by the progressive ideas which Dmitry Pisarev, a Russian literary critic of the 1860s, and Ivan Sechenov, the father of Russian physiology, were spreading, Pavlov abandoned his religious career without graduating and devoted his life to science.

Pavlov developed his "conditional reflex" with his assistant Ivan Tolochinov, in 1901. Edwin B. Tiwmyer, of the University of Pennsylvania, published similar research in 1902, a year before Pavlov published his.

The concept was developed after observing the rates of salivation in dogs. Pavlov noticed that his dogs began to salivate in the presence of the technician who normally fed them, rather than simply salivating in the presence of the food. If a buzzer or metronome was sounded before the food was given, the dog would later come to associate the sound with the presentation of the food and salivate upon the presentation of the sound stimulus alone.

Tolochinov, whose own term for the phenomenon had been "reflex at a distance," communicated the results at the Congress of Natural Sciences in Helsinki, Finland in 1903. Later the same year, Pavlov more fully explained the findings, at the 14th International Medical Congress in Madrid, Spain, where he read a paper titled The Experimental Psychology and Psychopathology of Animals.

Pavlov's work became known in the West, particularly through the writings of John B. Watson and B.F. Skinner, and the idea of "conditioning", as an automatic form of learning, became a key concept in the developing specialism of comparative psychology, and the general approach to psychology that underlay it, behaviorism.

Pavlov's work with classical conditioning was of huge influence on how humans perceived themselves, their behavior and learning processes; his studies of classical conditioning continue to be central to modern behavior therapy.

Pavlov was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1904. After the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, his work was praised by Vladimir Lenin, and the Communist Party supported his work. The support was not mutual, and he seeing the purges of, among others, intellectuals, he wrote to Joseph Stalin, saying he was ashamed to be a Russian. Stalin took no action against him, and he received a grand funeral following his death on February 27, 1936, from pneumonia at the age of 86.

To this day, someone who wants something very badly is sometimes described as "salivating like Pavlov's dogs."

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April 23, 1903 was a Thursday. These baseball games were played:

* The New York Highlanders beat the Washington Senators, 7-2 at National Park in Washington. (Not to be confused with the Nationals Park that opened in 2008.) Willie Keeler went 1-for-5 for the Highlanders, who officially became the New York Yankees in 1913.

* The New York Giants lost to the Boston Beaneaters, 2-0 at the 1890-1911 version of the Polo Grounds. Charles "Togie" Pittinger pitched a 6-hit shutout. The Beaneaters went through some name changes until 1912, when they became the Boston Braves.

* The Brooklyn Superbas beat the Philadelphia Phillies, 4-2 at Washington Park in Brooklyn. The Superbas became the Dodgers in 1911.

* The Philadelphia Athletics beat the Boston Americans, 7-4 at Columbia Park in Philadelphia. The Americans became the Red Sox in 1908.

* The Pittsburgh Pirates beat the St. Louis Cardinals, 8-4 at Exposition Park in Pittsburgh. Honus Wagner went 1-for-4 with an RBI. Jimmy Sebring hit 2 home runs. 

* The Detroit Tigers beat the Cleveland Naps, 6-5 at at Bennett Park in Detroit. The Cleveland team was named for its manager and 2nd baseman, Napoleon "Nap" Lajoie, who went 2-for-4 on this day. They became the Cleveland Indians in 1915, and the Cleveland Guardians in 2022.

* The Chicago Cubs beat the Cincinnati Reds, 5-3 at the West Side Grounds in Chicago.

* And the Chicago White Sox, beat the St. Louis Browns, 4-3 in 10 innings at Sportsman's Park in St. Louis.