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.