"Instance of the Letter" and "Subversion of the Subject"

“Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious” summary: Lacan diagrams the linguistically structured relations of transference and desire that obtain between the divided subject, the Other, and the subject's unconscious.

“The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud” summary: Lacan articulates the linguistic structure of the unconscious based on the literality of the letter.

Passage for close-reading:

“Freud himself compared his discovery to the so-called Copernican revolution, emphasizing that what was at stake was once again the place man assigns himself at the center of a universe. Is the place that I occupy as subject of the signifier concentric or eccentric in relation to the place I occupy as subject of the signified? That is the question” (430).

In the first sentence of this passage, Lacan ventriloquizes Freud in thinking of the latter's discovery of the interpretability of dreams as revolution akin to the Copernican one, specifically along the register of space. The reflexive pronoun modifying the subject of the sentence suggests that this position requires bolstering, as does the ironically minimizing “so-called.” Both these moves serve to grant power to the named thinker who precedes Lacan, although the nominal valuation granted by the proper adjective, the worldview that bears Copernicus's name is undermined by the disavowal of the hypenated adverb. The reflexive pronoun at the beginning serves rather to support Freud's eminence, in that even the great Freud himself, perhaps in an accession of humility, was aware of the world-altering potential of his own theories.

The use of the word “discovery” to describe Freud's thought, rather than perhaps “theory” or “practice” relates it to the supposedly harder science of the astronomy that Copernicus practiced, while granting primacy to the latter theory, as once again refining and replacing the position of man in his own worldview, much like Copernicus himself overturned the earlier Ptolemaic structuring systems. Yet the sarcastic tone granted by “so-called” can be partly accounted for by the fact that elsewhere in the seminar, Lacan reminds readers that Copernicus did not specifically and purposefully rearrange man's philosophy by subverting the inside-outside dialectic of a earth-centered solar system through an unadulterated zeal for mathematical accuracy. Rather, he retained the center-periphery model with a new central locus in the sun, simultaneously maintaining the centrality of certain sanctioned religious doctrines through a complex mathematical process of epicycles and spheres, effectively retaining the physically superfluous shell while upending its relation to the center.

In the second clause of the sentence, away from the imputations of the so-called, the words “revolution,” “place” and “center” further speak to this science of space and placement. Specifically, the word “revolution,” although used in a historical sense as repudiation of accepted thought or practice, retains its physical connotations by virtue of its close proximity to Copernicus’s name and thoughts of his epicycles. In conjunction with revolution's implied stately motion, regular, predictable and exact, “place” and “center” serve as stationary endpoints, two foci of an ellipse which includes Copernicus' doubtful revolution at one end, and the more promising psychoanalytic one, of which Freud himself recognized the transformative power, at the other.

The mathematical precision of this place is both undermined and expanded upon with the second reflexive of the sentence: “the place man assigns himself at the center of a universe.” This place, despite its seeming solidarity as a synonym for point or focus within the Copernican metaphor, is destabilized by Freud's demand that man place it for himself, situate it anew in light of Freud's revolution. Similarly, the unassuming article of “center of a universe” unsettles the mathematical and linguistic precepts on which an understanding of the universe is built, beginning with its singularity. If man's place in the center of the universe was in flux under Copernicus's revolution, with Freud's man's place within a universe, indefinite and amorphous, is at stake: a universe that, despite its mathematical structure, is always already capable of slippages between and among places.

The second half of the passage is composed of two sentences, the latter apparently a passive assertion of the other's value. The first, by its syntax, marks a shift from Lacan asserting the primacy of Freud's thought for both revealing the structure of the unconscious and unsettling the relation between this and conscious life and language. Returning to the notion of place, Lacan queries what shape this position possesses. As a question, the sentence seems to function as a pedagogical tool, but it is one that goes both ways. The speaker “I”, who is not the subject of the sentence but the object of a restrictive adverbial clause, can be seen to be clarifying their own position within this new Freudian science of position, a desire to solidify his own understanding of relationality in line with the quoted master. Yet this desire for knowledge is already a desire that cannot be fulfilled completely, because the place sought is, although structured, always already shifting, self-determined, and contingent.

Furthermore, by raising the question, the speaker asserts that these questions about the position of the subject in relation to the chain of signifiers, while undecidable, is the question to raise specifically due to this fundamental undecidability. After raising the question, Lacan neglects to begin to answer it, rather frustrating remarking that the question is the one to be pursued, like a teacher applauding a student's perspicacious remark while denying that same student the satisfaction of their curious desires. Furthermore, the form of the assertion, “That is the question” echoes Hamlet's most famous soliloquy which in turn, in its ambiguity between being and thinking, echoes Descartes cogito, which Lacan deconstructs and metaphorizes further down on this same page. Here, the slippage of signifiers is exemplified in the small, seemingly nerveless assertion of a question's prominence. Although Lacan frustrates our desire to settle the place of the subject as concentric or eccentric, the periphery and center structure remain intact, although fluid. The unconscious is structured like a language, the letters of which interact like those in mathematical equations as much as those in poetry. Whether that relation is concentric or eccentric is, perhaps, another question.

Reading Lacan

Reading Lacan summary: Gallop psychoanalytically close-reads seminars from Lacan's Ecrits, symptomatically accounting for the effects of her own transference occasioned by a feminist reading of these fragments situated between writing and speech.

Passage for close-reading: “The infant is thrown forward from 'insufficiency' to 'anticipation.' The image of the body in bits and pieces is fabricated retroactively from the mirror stage. It is only the anticipated 'orthopedic' form of its totality that can define—retroactively—the body as insufficient. Thus the impetus of the drama turns out to be so radically accelerated that the second term precedes the first—a precipitousness comparable to the speed of light” (86).

Here, Gallop is herself engaged in a close-reading of a passage from Lacan's seminar on the mirror stage. The quotation marks around “insufficiency,” “anticipation,” and “orthopedic” thereby serve the practical purpose of grounding her close-reading in specific evidence from the passage in question. Yet other words in Gallop's reading, notably “bits and pieces” and “drama” are not quoted although taken directly from Lacan's passage. This quotation mingled with transferential co-optation functions in opposition to the structure of the dashes. Each of the pairs of dashes sets off an appositive phrase, the first one an adverb modifying the verb defines, the second a dependent noun phrase. The first would be grammatically and semantically accurate if it were to precede the verb, but setting it off in dashes gives an insouciant, casual tone, as demonstrated in larger scale during the Prefastory section. If part of her project is to make apparent the ways her argument is structured as spoken from a subject who purposely leaves uncovered her inefficiencies to put pressure against patriarchal lingual practices, then the dashes open a space for allowing personal voice to structure argument, as opposed to the more formal and didactic adverb placement before the verb. The dashes before the final noun phrase serve the same purpose of the circuitous, personally invested writing pattern, and also makes the phrase stand out so that the end of the sentence becomes the most valuable and weighted segment, both thematically and rhythmically, especially with the prosody of the “speed of light” an elegant and fantastic image serving to both pull away from and universalize the image of the child gazing at themselves in the mirror.

Although the path of reader and response through this segment, from Gallop to Lacan to Freud eventually reaches back to Sophocles, here the plot and content of the play seems to slide under the form. Specifically, the mirror stage as Lacan writes it engages with the Greek play's temporal directionality, fated telos, and the presence of a protagonist whose fateful struggle is narrated or clarified (or sometimes obscured) by the everyman Chorus. The temporality of this childhood moment is then both unified and dispersed, in relation to the temporality of Greek plays. The actual moment of discovery, the mirror stage itself, is so instantaneous as to be retrogressive.

The light-speed rush of this drama's temporality is embedded in miniature in the word “precipitousness,”which denotes a sense of rush or unneccessary speed, but is related etymologically to “precipice” from the classical Latin praecipitium, to fall or jump from a great height. In the potential horror embedded in the vertical crash of the Latin, the word includes a suggestion of the Sublime, in the fear and awe that would be instantiated either when one approaches the edge of a yawning precipice, or, figuratively, in the child who embarks on his fabrication of the self towards the orthopedic totality if the mirror stage. The verticality and stationary nature of a precipice (which one approaches rather than the reverse, but which is terrifying in its very immobility, permanence, and perennial promise of potential demise) is opposed to the horizontality and set pace of light traveling. The complexity of the figure of light traveling ties together the extremes of verticality and horizontality along the register of compacted, explosive time, embedding both possibilities together within the vertical layering of the word's connotative etymology.

The figurative images in this passage serve this dualistic purpose of both uniting Gallop's voice with Lacan's, and pulling her argument away from his into the wider implications of her close-reading. In the first of these, the image of the body in bits and pieces seems to contradict the verb “fabricated.” Fabricated here is the language of quilting as well as text, purposefully related to Lacan's image of the button-tie that eventually fixes the sliding of signified under signifier without anchoring it to anything external, in the same way a quilting stitch fixes the filling of a quilt. Likewise, a text can also be fabricated, perhaps as fragments of writings held together, as in a biography reconstructed from letter fragments, or Lacan's own Ecrits reconstructed from seminars. Yet the verb also has connotations of falsity: a fabricated text might be a plagiarized one, or one that forces evidence to signify outcomes to which it isn't fixed.

In the second figuration, which Gallop shares with Lacan, the phrase “orthopedic form of its totality,” can refer to structural straightening, to a repair job, done from the outside in, on a body that is at least functionally in bits and pieces. The “ped” suffix embodies a homonymical split between the meanings “child” and “foot,” derived respectively from the Latin -paedo and -ped or -pedo. In this way, the adjective inextricably contains both referents, connecting along the notion that children learning to engage and command their bodies, as they learn to walk, wear orthopedic shoes. The use of the word “orthopedic,” then suggests that the child, perhaps because of their complex relationship to time (say more) requires the outside shaping influence of orthopedic devices to maintain the totality of their bodies, which is always already an anticipation and a nostalgia.

The suffix of the word “orthopedic” also contains a polysemy, in this case between grammatical and geometrical or architectural senses, meaning correct or right in the first sense, and straight, upright, or perpendicular in the second. By using a word that contains two divided roots to describe a pre-linguistic stage in child development embeds the notion of writing as both primary to and imbricated within speech. In this way, the orthopedic nature of the mirror stage's construction of an anticipatable self serve as a form of writing, constructing the text of the proper, correct self into which the child must project themselves in a sort of dramatic transference of identity. The child gazing at herself in the mirror, then, fits into her own narrative drama as an observer identifying with an external character, while also occupying the place of the protagonist, and thereby conflating the temporalities of writing and reading.

Lacan's My Teaching and Bruce Fink's Lacan to the Letter

My Teaching summary: In a trio of colloquia delivered to separate audiences of asylum inmates, psychiatric interns, and medical faculty, Lacan both summarizes and enacts his thinking on the ways language constitutes the Imaginary-Symbolic-Real interface.

Lacan to the Letter summary, “Lacanian Technique:” Fink closely reads a seminar wherein Lacan takes neo-Freudian psychoanalysts to task for what he sees as slavish adherence to an imaginary, rather than symbolic, mode of analyzing

Passage for close reading: “Freud describes a dream as a certain knot, an associative network of analysed verbal forms that intersect as such, not because of what they signify, but thanks to a sort of homonymy....It is when you have found the word that concentrates around it the greatest number of threads in the mycellum that you know it is the hidden centre of gravity of the desire in question. That, in a word, is the point I was talking about just now, the nodal point where discourse forms a hole.” (28)

I chose this passage largely for the density of its metaphors. Within a discourse that is largely colloquial, the syntax of the three lectures often involves many short, seemingly simple sentences full of pronouns and articles that reach backwards and forwards, sometimes for pages, in search of an antecedent. This fluid interconnectivity is part of why this passage is so long: sifting out a truly independent clause was difficult to do without arbitrarily chopping off a chain of meaning. This passage stood out to me particularly for the recursive shifts in tone played out through the figurative language, where specialized terminology and rhetorical devices from the fields of linguistics and physics clash against one another, seemingly unresolved.

Lacan begins explicitly within Freud's thought, summarizing the latter's notion of dreams as “a certain knot.” Here, the adjective can be read in two ways: certain in the sense of positive or absolute, and certain in the sense of particular. Closely following this adjective phrase is another wherein the words “network” and “knot” reflect off each other as both metaphor and synecdoche: the dream as a “certain knot” is immediately clarified by the seemingly more direct, and more clinical term, “associative network,” signifying that the dream is a knot is a network, but also that the dream is a network made up of many subsidiary knots, or connections. By beginning with the implications within the word “certain,” which can denote specificity or universality, in contrast with the precision and singularity of “an associative network,” Lacan's text enacts homonymy prior to the word's appearance in the sentence.

The prepositional phrase modifying the “associative network” reinforces this recursive temporality, but shifts the metaphors into the discourse of mathematics to do so. In this phrase, “analysed” is a verbal in the past tense: these forms, as Lacan describes them, have always already been analyzed. The adjective here seems to encode a past progressive sense, in that the verbal forms are progressively analyzed as one moves outward along the radials of the associative network. The action of these forms, “that [they] intersect as such,” is also taken from the language of mathematics. The forms intersect, however, as specifically verbal forms, undergoing a kind of union that is unique to verbal rather than mathematical forms. This verbal intersection differs from the mathematical definition in that these forms intersect not on the basis of what they signify, in the way that numbers signify quantity and proportion, but “thanks to a sort of homonymy,” which has already been foreshadowed.

The word “thanks” here serves as a small, impacted instance of personification, an implied outside actor granting gratitude to the homonymy without whose actions the intersection would not be possible. While an alternate formulation like “due to” or “through” would signify teleological, mathematical necessity, “thanks” enacts the “weaker logic” Lacan discusses which is harder to make stick, but ultimately just as rigorous as the formal, unavoidable structure of “strong logic.” The logic of this homonymy functions through a relay of sameness, by unearthing the differences and hence the relations underneath the cover of sameness. By thanking homonymy for its efforts, the sentence asserts that the similarity in names is not an accidental detritus that must be brushed aside for meaning to take place, but the heart of the relationship, the node of the ability to relate, to make associations of meaning. Lest this sound too positivist, the sentence reminds that similitude also conflates, erases: makes a hole through which, in the creation of which, language and meaning can be born.

In the second sentence, the language makes a sharp turn towards the scientific as it outlines the dimension of this hole. The subject of this sentence is “you”, but this subject is buried within the second clause of an inverted declarative structure. In this way, the reader's—your—importance as the seeker of words is sidelined by the sentence beginning with the indefinite “it is.” “You” is granted primacy as the one who found the concentrated concept, but this importance is secondary, in time and grammatical structure, to the agency of the word that “concentrates around it the greatest number of threads.” If “concentrates” is the language of chemistry, “threads in the mycellum” is the language of botany, where the mycellum is a fungus, organized structurally as a web, or a mass, as opposed to the plant which is organized venally, with successive and directed branching patterns. While a plant has direction and (generally) upwards growth, a fungus has associations which pile up upon one another accretively and potentially contradictorily.

This network of associations, this seminal word one has found, both denotes and conceals the presence of a “hidden centre of gravity.” Gravity implies necessity, the unavoidability (but also weakness) of the force pulling lighter bodies towards heavier ones: one can't help but fall into the center of gravity once it has been found. The construction “center of gravity” as opposed to force of gravity also localizes the mechanism and as such suggests a gravity well, a place where the mechanics and mathematics collapse into themselves and where matter follows suit, creating, at the heart of the seemingly concrete metaphor of the mycellum a negative point where matter is drawn towards its inverse. The fact that this centre is hidden suggests that one could stumble upon it, could fall unwittingly into the well. The mycelium seems stable, dense, interwoven, but this very interplay creates and conceals a schism by means of the relationships among words.

The prepositional phrase: “of the desire in question” states the specific mathematical formula that the union of three or more words will both create and denote this centre of gravity of the desire, yet desire has not been mentioned in the passage as yet. By seemingly already existing so pervasively that an antecedent to “the desire in question” is not needed, desire becomes the backdrop of gravity in the way that space/time serves as the backdrop of and medium for gravity in the astrophysical sense. In this way, the center of gravity allows one to read the desire by bending it, modifying it, disrupting its shape. The homonymy of words curves around the edges of this sentence, reflecting meaning at oblique enough angles to make the desire readable in absentia.

In the third sentence, the word “point”is remarkable in a similar vein. There is no clear referent to “the” that allows one to elucidate which point he was talking about just now, or when “just now” refers to. The word “point” homonymically could refer to an element in a discourse, to an idea or a claim, or to a mathematical point, a spot which both locates and vanishes, in that a point has no dimensions? His clarification that the point he was talking about (which comes temporally later in the sentence) is a nodal point supports that mathematical argument and also echoes Freud's language, making this point occupy two registers and two discourses at once (Freud's and Lacan's) but also neither, since each point would have no dimensions, would be no-place. This homonymy serves to mesh together Lacan's thoughts with Freud's on the astonishing quality of words, but does so by conflating the rhetorical “point” as an element of discourse into the geometrical “point” as a vanishing point, as a mathematical certainty undermined by a mathematical ambiguity. This is the nodal point where discourse forms a hole, where the mathematics turns non-Euclidean and the meaning falls out the hole, the gravity-well, in the bottom of the basket, where the curvature of the basket itself and the power of gravity are necessary forces to reading the desires and the truths embedded in language.

Fragment of an Analysis of Hysteria [Dora]

Introduction Summary: Using a playful and idiomatic style, Adam Phillips reflects on the ways Freud's clinical practice interacts with his linguistic and semantic practices, citing psychoanalysis as the reading cure to a perhaps even greater extent than the talking cure.

Wolfman Summary: Freud recounts the temporally complex and recurrent case history of a young man who largely resists, with patient indifference, his psychoanalytic treatment for symptoms of venereal disease, which rests on childish manifestations of anxiety, wolf- and other animal-phobias, urinal and bowel incontinence, and violent behavior, which themselves rested on the elucidation of his viewing his parents having intercourse, his own sexual initiation at the hands of his sister, and a sexual love of his father.

Screen Memory Summary: Freud, through the treatment history of a man who recalled an exaggeratedly vivid childhood memory of dandelions gathering, fighting, and eating country bread, establishes a theory of the screen memory as a partially genuine memory selected for the ability of some its parts, which will be remembered most vividly, to represent to the adult memory dearly-held fantasies, thanks to the relationship obtaining between the content of the memory and other, suppressed content.

Lapses Summary: Freud establishes a theory for the importance of psychoanalyzing the little mistakes of life: misspeaking, mishearing, misremembering, misplacing objects, and the like, for the very significant desires and impulses which can underlie these very faint, seemingly quotidian traces.

Fetishism Summary: Freud hypothesizes that a fetish is established, in men, as a desire for a substitute for the mother's penis, which the fetishist does not want to believe his mother lacks, out of an anxiety for castration, and so transfers his sexual attention to a successor as a means of avoiding this horror.

Family Romances Summary: Freud reflects upon the ways in which the characters of the parents are cast down, raised up, and fought against within the narrative constructs of the neurotic adolescent.

Notes on the Mystic Writing Pad Summary: Freud compares his conceptual model of the human memory system to the “magic notepad”: a novelty writing device consisting of a waxed board overlaid by a sheet of thin waxed paper and a layer of thicker cellulose, on which composite surface one writes with a stylus, and thereby allowing both an always-ready receptive surface, and traces of the recorded material that will last as long as desired.

Dora Summary: Freud relates the truncated treatment of a young girl exhibiting hysterical coughing and aphonia, which through analysis is discovered to rest upon her physical attraction to her married neighbor Herr K., as well as her romantic affection for his wife, Frau K., and the father that she hopes will be able to rescue her from this uncomfortable triangle but ultimately fails to do so.

Passage for close-reading: “Each one of us goes a bit too far, either here or there, in transgressing the boundaries that we have drawn up in our own sexual lives. The perversions are neither bestialities nor degeneracies in the dramatic sense of that word. They are the development of germs that are all contained within the undifferentiated sexual predisposition of the child, the suppression of which, or their application to higher, asexual goals, their sublimation, is destined to supply the forces behind a large number of our cultural achievements.” Fragment of an Analysis of Hysteria [Dora](39)

With Dora, much of the intrinsic interest of the text, for me, lay in the details of her particular case history, illness, and partial recovery. The difficulty in choosing a passage for close-reading, then, arose from the desire to pick passages that could reasonably serve as microcosms of the larger aims of the texts, and as such were not so specific to Dora's case as to require lengthy contextualization, while still focusing on the accessible, situational, and narrative aspects of the case which originally attracted my attention. I decided on this passage in favor of its more theoretical and generalizable structure, which I feel allows it to serve as miniature of the larger work, while the personal pronouns prevent a dry or distant sense that might have minimized the personal narrative feel of the case history.

This sentence is located immediately after a passage concerning the importance of one's ability to discuss the “transgressions of the sexual function” (39) reasonably and without indignation, citing as evidence that even the “perversion most repellent to us,” (39) specifically male homosexuality, was of primary use value to the ancient Greek republic, which is characterized as a culture of obvious and universally accepted superiority to our own. Within this classically approved society, the very acts that the detractors of Freud’s book might denounce as perversions serve salutary social functions. The sentence I have at hand then goes about to demonstrate how and to what end these perversions function, while also erasing the cultural and historical distance that obtains between early 20^th century Vienna and ancient Greece, thereby universalizing the role of these very perversions.

The subject of this sentence is a compound noun phrase, “each one of us” which functions as a singularity amid a universality. This construction, semantically akin to “everyone,” incorporates all readers of the book into those who can be said to “go a bit too far.” The word “one” indicates specificity: not only could anyone fit this categorization, but I specifically do, as does each individual. Separating this “one” from its more common usage as the often exaggeratedly metaphoric, “everyone” serves to underline the individual volition buried under the universal theme. The final pronoun of the phrase, “us” serves to include the writer of the sentence as equally subject to the transgression as each of his readers. If the sentence I chose to analyze in the last post has a scholarly, professorial tone that seems to situate the speaker on a podium above his speakers where he can both instruct them and ironically judge them, this sentence, in part through the sociable, universalizing power of the “us” establishes a more casual, neighborly, almost quotidian tone. This tone is furthered through the inexact, conversational nature of terms like “bit” and “either here or there” which serve as terms of measurement and qualification but do so in only the loosest sense, giving the reader a greater sphere for imagining the scope of this transgression, while simultaneously asserting, unavoidably, on its existence.

If each one of us “goes a bit too far” in exceeding our own sexual boundaries, then everyone in effect becomes, at least potentially, Dora. Specifically, every reader is subject to identifying through their transgressions. The use of the word transgressing in this sentence has criminal overtones, which, for example “exceeding” would not possess. These overtones serve to encapsulate while disproving the view of homosexuality which Freud is refuting in the sentence above, but this criminality, this transgression of external rules, appropriately, is undermined by the phrase “drawn up.” This construction implies a degree of arbitrariness, and furthermore a personal of arbitrariness constructed by the very reader who consciously believes these sexual boundaries to be lawfully impermeable barriers.

In the next sentence, the perversions that are formed when one transgresses these personal boundaries are given pride of place as the subject of the sentence. The expected negative connotations of “perversions” are balanced against the immediately following stronger negativities of “bestialities” and “degeneracies,” both of which, by being weighted after the adverb “neither” seem to deserve the connotations this structure gives them. “Perversions,” safely before this negativizing adverb, are made to seem milder, more medical as opposed to criminal, and overall normal and expected. The negation of similitude between perversions and degeneracies is particularly meaningful. Degeneracy refers to a slippery downward slope, or an irreversible dissolution, while perversion, especially taken in company with its linguistic relatives “subversion” and “inversion,” embeds within it notions of perspective and orientation, and particularly a shift in orientation which is the practical opposite of degeneracy's single, unequivocal trajectory.

In the final clause of the sentence, the word “dramatic” seems to be used in a disparaging sense against those with overheated imaginations, thereby furthering this establishment of the perversion as a notion of perspective. In its most expected usage, within the confines of a theater, “dramatic” can refer to a production of emotions caused by a constructed experience. This then relates back to the self-constructed nature of sexual boundaries, suggesting that each of us is also, unless carefully attending to our own perspectives, likely to construct an imagined situation of unnecessary drama wherein we view perversions as bestialities or degeneracies, when really they are nothing but modifications of perspective or position.

If the first sentence announces the universality of perversions, and the second what they are not, the third completes the microcosm by delineating what, exactly a perversion is. Specifically, the “development of a germ” with its suggestions both of a wheat germ and the germ of an idea, the perversion is here granted a quasi-botanical structure. This structure, like the development of a plant or an embryo (another kind of germ) implies a directed and proper course of growth, which can be interrupted or prevented and as such mold the germ as it develops out of being one, into an unnatural and unhealthful shape. Freud hereby suggests that the self-drawn boundaries made around appropriate sexual behaviors, if taken too seriously, can do this work of closing off healthy avenues or shutting down the appropriate growth, leading to adults who maintain, past the allotted time, the sexual lives of children.

Freud's Interpretation of Dreams

Freud's Interpretation of Dreams begins from the assumption that dreams are, in fact, meaningful and decipherable, and from there works to demonstrate ways in which the dream-thoughts, or unconscious impulses of the dreamer, undergo the four processes of dream-work, condensation, displacement, representation, and secondary revision, in order to present the dream-content which can then be traced backwards through a series of free associations in psychoanalytic therapy to uncover the dream-thoughts in conscious life.

“There is no need to be astonished at the part played by words in dream-formation. Words, since they are the nodal points of numerous ideas, may be regarded as predestined to ambiguity, and the neuroses (e.g. in framing obsessions and phobias), no less than dreams, make unashamed use of the advantages and disadvantages thus offered by words for purposes of condensation and disguise.” (340-41).

I chose this passage because, throughout the work, I was engaged, with varying degrees of success, in tracing out how precisely the dream-work goes about constructing the images of a dream from the hazier raw materials of the dream-thoughts, the very thoughts that must be excavated, often laboriously, through the process of psychoanalysis. The “Considerations of Representability” section thereby provided me with a partial answer, in exploring how the abstractions of dream-thoughts are transformed into concrete pictorial representations through the usage of words. I was therefore particularly interested in the way these sentences characterize words and the place of words within dreaming.

The passage as a whole, and particularly the first sentence, begins with a structured, almost dry scholarly tone, which serves to announce authority over the reader in the form of an admonition on their emotional control. Specifically, the construction, “There is no need to be astonished,” suggests that uninformed readers/patients were likely to be astonished, and by implication likely to let their imagination run away with them. The impersonal subject “there” makes of this view a universal one, so that the role of words in dreaming becomes a constant. Furthermore, the simple present tense in the first clause “there is no need” balanced against the past construction of the participial phrase “played by words” suggests that this comforting normalcy of verbal dreaming is seemingly ever-present, existing in the present but also reaching back subtly but unmistakably into the past. Furthermore, the sentence, as almost all imperatives, has an implied subject, but unlike most could easily include that subject overtly, in structures such as “There is no need FOR ONE to be astonished.” By failing to do so, the implied subject retains greater potential diversity, since it could refer to a specific, personal “you”, or the general, impersonal, “one.” The space for the subject that is not filled requires the reader to insert themselves into this space, whether or not they feel they are one of the astonished who would benefit from the negative construction of this admonition, thereby making every reader a potential patient and beneficiary of this sentence's dash of reason.

In the second sentence, the scholastic tone continues. In particular, the word “words” as the subject of the sentence, with the main verb “regarded” which lacks a direct object, gives the sentence a professorial feel, as that of a single orator addressing a class of undifferentiated students with the proper way for them to regard the destiny of words. This sense of informing a group of interlocutors, styled as students, serves as a continuation of the paragraph above, where a more accessible tone delivers an example likening dream-work to the construction of poetry, particularly of rhymed and structured poetry like the sonnet. Furthering the rational, scholastic sense of the passage, the word “nodal” has connotations of both linguistic association and geometrical structure, where, in this instance, the words themselves are the points of the geometrical figure from which arguments and proofs can be made. This secondary, mathematical form of scholasticism is furthered at the end of the paragraph of which this sentence is the core, in which the four cardinal doubts of dream-interpretation are laid out in the form of a list of postulates. Each postulate has a parallel construction and in fact begins with the same adverb, “whether,” suggesting that the sentence would be just as clear, if not more so, in sentence form. The fact of the separation of the clauses into list form serves to enact on the level of syntax the kind of attention to structure and to the relations, both spatial and semantic, between parts and whole, which Freud asserts dreams produce, and which the professorial voice of the second sentence at the top of this page, reminds its class of indeterminate students to note well.

In this way, the reader or patient seems to take a object position, while the second sentence is structured so as to give both neuroses and dreams active agency: they are the subject of the verbs “framing” and “use.” Words are also, within this sentence, given agency, although a subordinate one. This agency of words allows a dream to “tell” the dreamer and analyst a great deal through its own language of verbal wit. Incidentally, this language, in modified form, also happens to be our waking language. The mystifying part, and the part that would incite in the uncouth reader a sense of astonishment, is not the words used, but the way they are used and the relationships they embody, which might be quite different from the normally accepted denotative values. In this sense, words, “offer” advantages and disadvantages to dreams and neuroses, and by so doing offer themselves up for use in representation.

In this phrase, the balance between the terms “advantage” and “disadvantage”contributes to the rationalist tone, but is also underlaid with elements of advertising, suggesting that the words have to advertise themselves to be selected by the dreams and neuroses. Furthermore, although the subject of the chapter, and the work, has ostensibly been interpreting dreams, this sentence sets dreams and neuroses as parallel actors. The equality is stressed by the phrase “no less than,” suggesting that readers who had been astonished by words' primacy in dreams might now, erroneously, expect dreams to be the primary user of words' advantages and disadvantages, while in this construction neuroses are promoted as an equally primal user of language.