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One: The Dream as Writing: Freud’s Theory
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o n e The Dream as Writing: Freud’s Theory The Problem of the Experience of the Dream Some dreams, like the dreams of prophets, may be dreamt to be told to others, but only the dreamer can perceive his or her dream. This defining characteristic of the experience of a dream has been cited both to dismiss dreams as meaningless and to grant them special authority. Freud’s first thesis in the Interpretation of Dreams is that dreams are meaningful and capable of being interpreted. But he argues that they are not meaningful considered as perceptual experiences. Rather, Freud finds that the meaning of a dream can be approached only if the dream is treated as what the dreamer can tell of it to another person and not as the perceptual experience that precedes and often seems to flee telling. For the purposes of interpretation, ‘‘Whatever the dreamer tells us must count as his dream, without regard to what he may have forgotten or altered in recalling it.’’1 According to Freud, the first barrier to the interpretation of a dream is the dreamer’s attachment to the perceptual experience as such. Freud thus ‘‘asks the dreamer . . . to free himself from the impression of the manifest dream, to divert his attention from the dream as a whole onto 23 24 The Dream as Writing: Freud’s Theory the separate portions of its content and to report . . . in succession everything that occurs to him in relation to each of these portions—what associations present themselves to him if he focuses on each of them separately.’’2 No dream can be interpreted psychoanalytically without following out the dreamer’s associations on the elements of the dream, and Freud is only irritated when André Breton and others mail well-woven dreams to him for interpretation without pulling them apart and offering associations on their strands. Freudian loosening of attachment to the enthralling perceptual experience of the dream lowers the dreamer’s anxiety about whether what he or she is telling is faithful and true to what he or she has seen in the dream. Fidelity to the perceptual experience as such often dictates a mournful tone in the telling of a dream. A rich and profound experience has left a bittersweet taste on the tip of the dreamer’s tongue. The experience is represented in words as lying beyond words. Freud is sensitive to this pathos on which so much of the beauty of dream-tales depends. But the pathos points, in his account, to anxiety about the meaning of dreams. It functions as a barrier to interpretation, and this barrier has to be lowered. This is a risky operation, however, as psychoanalysis loses its edge if it dissolves the barrier completely. The interpretation of dreams becomes a cozy and circular science when, in emphasizing the told at the expense of the seen, it gets chatty and forgets entirely the feeling that something really was seen—when it forgets entirely the feeling that one is alone with one’s dream. Freud manages to retain a bracing sense of the experience of the dream by radically reframing it. According to Freud’s theory, what had seemed to be a perceptual experience of images of things can be shown, on interpretation , to have been an experience of writing. Freud’s discovery of the meaning of dreams begins in the discovery that there is language there— that what seem to be images of things are in fact images of words, characters of a kind of pictographic writing. Seen as images of things, the dream dazzles but doesn’t yield its sense. Its sense lies in the words it represents. Once the attachment to the dream as a perceptual experience is loosened, another, subtler sense of the experience emerges. The dream turns out to have been an experience of language, which cannot be understood as an object of perception. To find, upon waking, the words that the dream [44.220.59.236] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 14:15 GMT) The Dream as Writing: Freud’s Theory 25 delivers is to begin to remember an experience that we cannot fail to miss so long as we’re having it. Nothing is easier to forget than this necessarily missed experience, and it is easy to miss Freud’s attachment to it in all of his severe talk of the need to sever attachments to the dream as a perceptual experience. In his zeal to lower anxiety...