'DreamCast'

This group project set me up with communicative and academic skills that I believe will be essential in my future as an employer and as a citizen of the world. Considering I found myself proud of the finished work, this project has also boosted my confidence. While working on the project, I also learned immensely about Psychoanalysis, Freud, and Jung, which spiked my curiosity and led me to research further into this matter.

My communication skills, I believe, improved daily. I have been told all my life how much easier it is to learn another language when in contact with it so I was expecting to be much more confident in my communicative skills by now. However, the future had other plans. After all, my first year in the United Kingdom has been co-happening with a worldwide pandemic and I have not had the chance to get to know people and to interact with them and therefore I have not been able to enhance my English as I was hoping to have done so far.

My fear, when coming into this project, was that I would not be able to comprehend my colleagues and get my point across to them. Fortunately, my peers were very understanding and did not mind repeating themselves when needed. Looking back now, I realise I do not need to be afraid to speak and this group project helped me realise that, since it obligated me to speak and to work alongside my peers.

The app WhatsApp was also crucial to stay connected with my peers and to have our meetings. Through the app, we were able to create a group where we could text with everyone at the same time, schedule the meetings, ask, and answer brief queries. WhatsApp also allowed us to make group video calls, so it became our main form of contact.

This project was a challenge schedule wise. My group had a month to work on it but since the three of us are employed, we had a challenging time finding mutual available hours to work on the project. In addition to that, we all got along well and spend a lot of time chatting which, I believe, is also a consequence of the pandemic we are living in and the lack of social interaction we have been experiencing due to it.

Not being able to get together, we also faced some technical difficulties. Overall, it is harder to communicate as it is much more difficult to not talk over other people in an online setting. The Internet was also a problem since some of us were always being cut off. This was especially challenging when it came the time of recording the podcast itself. To solve this problem, we had to record what was supposed to be a conversation with big breaks between our lines and edit everything afterwards.

Another unexpected challenge was the fact that everyone was too passionate about the topic chosen. The brief asked for a five-minute-long presentation. After much editing of the script, we believed the presentation would respect the requirements. Unfortunately, our initial recording had nearly nine minutes. This was a consequence of all our enthusiasm, and we had to edit and cut off a lot more content than we were hoping for to meet the required lenght.

During this group project, I was forced to deal with one of my worst traits, which is to control everything and make sure everything is like I want it to be. I had to learn how to manage this urge and trust my peers that they would do an excellent job. This trait of mine is why I do not like to work with others but in this case, I loved the final product that we all put together, and I felt proud of myself for facing it as a challenge that I, successfully, was able to accomplish, and I now look forward to work with my peers again.

As stated before, due to the pandemic we are living through, the group could not get together to work on the project. As so, when writing the script, everyone was writing it in their own document, and we started noticing some incoherence's. Some things differed from document to document. Therefore, my group felt the need to have a shared document where everyone could write at the same time and be looking at the same thing, as a share screen where everyone could work on. That is when we found SharePoint and that was a very helfpul tool that I discovered and have been using since then.

The group started this project by choosing the theory we all wanted to work with and that would not interfere with the theory someone else had chosen to work with in their individual assignments, since it was mandatory for everyone to work with two distinct categories. The same was done when choosing the literary text that we would be using.

I studied Freud and Jung psychologies, what they consisted of, and especially, their differences so I would be prepared for our group meeting and could also be able to participate and pitch in ideas for the project.

I suggested the podcast idea and after that, we all started building the script together. I contributed to the writing of the script just like everyone else by adding potential lines and editing my peers' proposals. When we decided that we would be needing quotes from the text, we divided the necessary content by everyone so each one of us could have the same amount of work when looking for the necessary quotes in the book.

Just after my group agreed that we were all happy with the script, we cooperated to find the best way we could record the podcast. I recorded Cara’s voice, which was the person who followed Jungian ideas. Since we had three characters and there were three of us, each one recorded the voices of one character.

The theory my group chose was Psychoanalysis which was a theory that I enjoyed learning about in lectures for its sexual approach, and that is something I find very curious and interesting.

To make the podcast interesting, real, and short, we took a less complex approach of Psychoanalysis. The way we decided to do that was by focusing on the unconscious. I learned a lot about Freud’s and Jung’s approaches to this theory. Mainly about Jung, whom I did not know previously, and about their similarities and disagreements. Specifically, that unlike Freud, Jung acknowledges a collective unconscious which goes beyond our personal unconscious.

Its application to Frankenstein led me to a second analysis of the text, what made me look at it along much more depth with all the story that was behind Victor’s character. Dream analysis made our project, I think, very educational since it made me look at Victor’s character and at Frankenstein from Freud and Jung’s perspective and without my own criticisms.

Freud was noticeable confident on his believes. My group tried to convey his personality in the podcast by making his character diagnose Victor with sexual trauma from the start, by demonstrating that he believed that all that matters is what dreams represent and indicate about the unconscious mind and by always skipping into predictions, speculating. Jung, on the other hand, have always shown he wants to listen to everything and have a look at the big picture before jumping into conclusions and that is what we tried to demonstrate in the podcast with the character that was representing him, Cara.

To sum up everything that has been stated so far, my team was able to work successfully together and present a podcast that, I believe, was informative, interesting and that everyone enjoyed, by applying a new format to a well-known literary text with the “participation” of two of the biggest psychoanalysts in history. I deeply enjoyed working with my team and I am proud of what we managed to create.

I take with me new skills and knowledge that were possibly for me to get thanks to this project. I have also achieved further insight of psychoanalysis by learning unfamiliar terms and concepts in this field. I was confronted with ideas that differ from mine and I gained the capacity to look at something with someone else’s perspective.

This reflective commentary was submitted on April 30th 2021 by Lara Soares for the module 'Approaches to Literature for BA English' as part of my degree English and Creative Writing BA.