Libido?

At reference 1, Freud writes of the time it takes to withdraw libido from a lost object. What follows seems vaguely analogous.

Last night I had a dream about a data item called 'housing' or perhaps 'housing status', a data item supposed to describe the housing situation of the subject. The sort of thing that crops up in computer records about people, although it was not clear in the dream what was going on in this particular case.

I was trying to run a meeting to try and sort out, once and for all, how we were going to code this item. One of the problems was mission creep; we kept trying to capture more and more subtle features of the subject's housing situation. One solution was delegation, to appoint one of our number as the owner of this data item and to let him or her get on with. With only token interference from above. Then what about change control?

Eventually I wake up, not having sorted things out and it took me what seemed like quite a long time to move from being in a dream to being awake. The data item continued to matter for some time. Although taking a peek at our national statistics at reference 2, the result of which is snapped above, it is presently hard to see why.

I associate to the two or three occasions that I can remember when I was going on about something or other in conversation, really got the bull by the horns, when my interlocutor told me to shut it, or at the very least to change the subject. Two or three occasions when the brain found it really hard to stop and change course.

It was as if lots of fuel pipes had been run from the ego into the subject in question and it took time to go round and turn them all off. Or continuing with fuel theme, one is in a 100,000 ton oil tanker, steaming due south. It takes quite a while to swing it round to a westerly heading.

So the question for this morning: is there any real connection with the process Freud is talking of, which one might also gloss in terms of lots of fuel pipes?

PS: the Network Rail Journey Planner seems to be getting ready for the forthcoming strike, and is returning messages about bad requests rather than train times. Not cleared by restarting Edge and I am reduced to using one of the competitor services that Bing/Edge seem so keen that I should try. The second time that such a thing has happened recently. Presumably these competitors pay more to get themselves clicked.

References

Reference 1: Mourning and melancholia – Freud – 1917.

Reference 2: https://www.ons.gov.uk/. Office for National Statistics.