In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Vestiges, Dream Images, and Immaculate Sexuality
  • Céline Masson (bio)

The Fabric of the Image and the Remains of Memory

The aim of the Freudian method of interpreting dreams is to unveil or discover the archaic—the primal, the ancient, the primitive, what is hidden under the new. And it is by focusing on the details that this method is able to decipher the contents of a dream and give meaning to the psychic constructions it comprises. These details are the traces that must be identified and interpreted in order to construct the meaning of the dream and the movement of the past experience attached to it. Finding a lost memory means constructing it and this is done from the elements the patient brings into the session; these are always deformed fragments, remains of the past. These imprints of the past, preserved in the form of traces, emerge in the time of the psychoanalytic cure. As Freud writes, dreaming is another way of remembering, another way of modifying the traces by organizing them into dream images. The dream images are vestiges extracted from the ground and brought into the light, images of the day illuminated by the light of the night. They are constituted around a lost language, a language from elsewhere, carrying traces, remains, signs seen and heard, which time has inscribed, engraved in memory. These images convey the accents of lost languages, the murmuring of an imagined and distant past.

Freud’s Ur designates the primal, which is what we obtain from the psychoanalytic clinic. The Freudian Ur emerges on the side of the infantile and it is constructed in the transference of the analytic situation: the Ur searches for the primitive, for the touch and the intimate dimension of the body. The primitive represents the dimension of unelaborated drives, combining [End Page 51] force (la poussée) with repression, but also a specific temporality of the psyche, connecting the current with the out-of-date, the most extreme past with the closest present. The primitive is the work of the traces and a mode of the presentation of the vestiges, it is the archaeological field of the psyche, where these vestiges are modified by their contact with history. The primitive psychic—which is what is most deeply buried in the ground, what is most intimate and at the same time most foreign, and what should have remained hidden in the strata underneath the layers more recently shaped by Eros—presents itself in the dream images. The latter are therefore composed of precisely these psychic remains, which, in their indestructability, are capable of survival.

What then are these images? A surplus of experience of the traces that allows us to perceive the signs of a past reality (vestiges) and its absence from the image; an exhumation of the image of a dead person, of an ancestor transformed into dream images in order to render him present. Transference dreams are the openings of the image toward departed figures, who have become, precisely, figures. The dream is haunted by the memory of the dead, bringing them thus to the fore. The tragic child is hidden in the psychic background, buried in the unconscious pulsionnel.1 The disseminated rests of the Oedipus remain alive and compose our night’s dreams.

Patients tell us their dreams, transforming the images seen by the dream into words, thus making them into images heard. What is seen and what will be transmitted through this reminiscing speech are the depths of time. The transfer of dream thoughts touches on history. The voice of the images is drawn towards the forms fading in the distance and brings these fragments of absence back to us. According to Freud in “The Theme of the Three Caskets” (1913a, pp. 294–295), Shakespeare represented the image’s voice in Lear’s daughter Cordelia. The time of the dream activates ancient languages and the ghosts of the past. The trying experience of transference, like that of the foreign, gives us a glimpse of the demonic and of the figures at work.

Since Freud’s time, much has been written about the continuum between the dream and artistic work. Faire-oeuvre [End Page...

pdf

Share