The Dream of the Royal Road: Psychoanalysis and the Post

Dreams are the bearers of repressed wishes—this is the thesis that arrived in 1900 with the publication of Sigmund Freud's Interpreta-tion of Dreams: dreams provide hallucinatory gratification of wishes associated with the first stages of life, which are disguised, under the watch of psychic censorship, through what Freud calls dream-work, primarily through condensation and displacement.

There is a widely held assumption that Freud's method for analyzing the distortions of repressed wishes can be applied to any number of textual objects, that one can, as Marjorie Garber puts it, "read culture as if it were structured like a dream" (9). Or, as Claudia Lapping puts it, "symbolic associations between elements in diverse discursive artefacts can be interpreted in a similar way to the patient's associations to the elements of a dream" (43). According to this assumption, to which Freud appears to lend Interpretation, one can use it as a methodological resource to read almost anything.

It has been an enabling assumption not least for scholars of postcoloniality, who have read colonial discourse as if it were structured like a dream. For Stuart Hall, for instance, racism, no longer brazen, often highly censored, functions "rather more like Freud's dream-work than like anything else" (15). Or, as Robert Young argues from a different angle, Interpretation offers "a possible way of reading the invisible, the subaltern, those whose forms of public representation distort their fundamental being" (2014, 375).

Compelling as these and other postcolonial interventions have been, this kind of application of psychoanalysis no longer seems to me quite that straightforward, and not only on account of the differences between dreams and others kinds of wish fulfillment to which Freud draws attention. Certainly not when it comes to reading letters psychoanalytically—letters but also, potentially, the colonial archive in general, insofar as it is composed, at least in large part, of documents sent through the post.

Freud first outlines his thesis of wish fulfillment through an analysis of one of his own dreams, the specimen dream. He had, he explains, been treating a young woman, Irma—a pseudonym Freud gives her—for hysteria, though the treatment had broken off for the summer vacation. The treatment, Freud notes, had relieved some of her anxiety but had not eradicated her symptoms. A colleague of Freud's and friend of Irma's family, Otto in Freud's account—another pseudonym—had paid him a visit the previous day, and Freud had questioned him about her state. "Better, but not quite well," was Otto's response, in which, Freud states, he "detected a reproof" (1900, 131). Anxious about the failure of the treatment, Freud wrote out Irma's case history, intending to send it to Dr. M., a senior in Freud's medical circle—Josef Breuer—from whom Freud sought justification for his treatment of Irma. After which, still occupied with the case, he fell asleep and dreamed the following:

A large hall—numerous guests, whom we were receiving [empfangen].—Among them was Irma. I at once took her on one side, as though to answer her letter [ihren Brief zubeantworten] and to reproach her for not having accepted my "solution [Lösung]" yet. I said to her: "If you still get pains, it's really only your fault." She replied: "If you only knew what pains I've got now in my throat and stomach and abdomen—it's choking me"—I was alarmed and looked at her. She looked pale and puffy. I thought to myself that after all I must be missing some organic trouble. I took her to the window and looked down her throat, and she showed signs of recalcitrance, like women with artificial dentures. I thought to myself that there was really no need for her to do that.—She then opened her mouth properly and on the right I found a big white patch; at another place I saw extensive whitish grey scabs upon some remarkable curly structures which were evidently modelled on the turbinal bones of the nose.—I at once called in Dr M., and...