Discourse, Figure

“The Dream-Work Does Not Think”

233 “The Dream-Work Does Not Think” Translated by Mary Lydon It should come as no surprise that the problematics of work versus discourse is the nub of chapter 6 of The Interpretation of Dreams. In the course of this chapter Freud examines the dream-work and enumerates the essential operations by which it proceeds.It is easy to show that each of these operations is conducted according to rules that are in direct opposition to those governing discourse. The dream is not the language of desire, but its work. Freud, however, makes the opposition even more dramatic (and in doing so lets us in on a figural presence in discourse), by claiming that the work of desire is the result of manhandling a text. Desire does not speak; it does violence to the order of utterance. This violence is primordial: the imaginary fulfillment of desire consists in this transgression, which repeats, in the dream workshop, what occurred and continues to occur in the manufacture of the so-called primal phantasm. The figure is hand in glove with desire on at least two counts. At the margin of discourse it is the density within which what I am talking about retires from view; at the heart of discourse it is its “form.” Freud himself says as much when he introduces the term Phantasie, which is at once the “façade” of the dream and a form forged in its depths.1 It is a matter of a “seeing” which has taken refuge among words, cast out on their boundaries , irreducible to “saying.” We will dwell a little on secondary revision because the Fliegende Blätter inscriptions, in spite of their dismaying aesthetic impoverishment, provide an excellent opportunity for formulating the relationship between image and text. Considerations of beauty aside, art begins here. 234 “the dream-work does not think” I At the end of chapter 6 of The Interpretation of Dreams, which deals with the dream-work, Freud recalls the question with which he began: “whether the mind employs the whole of its faculties without reserve in constructing dreams, or only a functionally restricted fragment of them.”2 His response is that the question must be rejected: it is badly put,“inadequate to the circumstances .” On the basis of the terms in which it is stated, the answer would have to be in the affirmative in both cases: the mind contributes both totally and partially to the production of the dream.What Freud calls the Traumgedanke , the dream-thoughts, what the dream thinks, what it says clearly, its latent pronouncement [énoncé],must be attributed in toto to waking thought. It is “perfectly proper thought” (vollig korrekt) which belongs to the same genus as conscious thought. Even if it retains some puzzling aspects, these have no “special relation to dreams and do not call for treatment among the problems of dreams.”3 What the dream says at bottom is fully intelligible. Its motivating discourse is an intelligent one, subject to the same rules as waking discourse. No doubt that is why Freud believes that an interpretation (something quite different from pure invention on the interpreter’s part) is possible, because such an interpretation does not have to recover a meaning [sens], but a signification just as explicit as that which pertains to “normal” discourse. It is for this very reason, however, that the essence of the dream is not to be found in the dream-thoughts. Freud makes this clear in a note added in 1925: Many analysts have become guilty of falling into another confusion which they cling to with equal obstinacy. They seek to find the essence of dreams in their latent content and in so doing they overlook the distinction between the latent dream-thoughts and the dream-work. At bottom, dreams are nothing more than a particular form of thinking, made possible by the conditions of the state of sleep. It is the dreamwork which creates that form, and it alone is the essence of dreaming (das Wesentliche am Traum)—the explanation of its peculiar nature.4 235 “the dream-work does not think” This work, however, does not belong to the category of waking thought: “it diverges further from our picture of waking thought than has been supposed even by the most determined depreciator of psychical functioning during the formation of dreams.”5 It is a transformation. The dream-work is “completely different . . . qualitatively...