There is so much to consider in these texts that at moments that it seems foolish to read more than a single author, and even a single passage from a single author. Nevertheless we read quite a few authors in this seminar, in the hope that, having scouted out different approaches, you can come back to one that is particularly appropriate for your preoccupations. Whatever the justification for our blitz reading (a colleague calls it “hit and run reading”), the feeling that we are missing the point persists. (The full text is here: Interpretation of Dreams.)
Freud’s text gives a name to the problem and fuels my misgivings. The problem is condensation; theoretical texts are dreams that require all the interpretative effort at unpacking that Freud illustrates in his interpretation of dreams. As Freud unpacks a dream, he only further condenses the theory he presents. Is that why he spends so much time on condensation? There is something more than meets the eye in condensation. But first let us wander through Freud’s packing room — where he unpacks dreams and packs up theory.
Borders crossed
As Freud untangles the weave of a dream he has a slight twinge that he might be focused on weaving in his own thoughts:
“The first reader and critic of this book…protested that ‘the dreamers seems to be too ingenious and amusing.’ This is quite true so long as it refers only to the dreamer; it would only be an objection if it were to be extended to the dream-interpreter. … Dreams become ingenious and amusing because the direct and easiest pathway to the expression of their thoughts is barred.” (footnote 13).
The objection is that the interpreter traces out paths of interpretation that are beyond the dreamer’s ordinary thoughts, latent or otherwise. It looks like the interpreter (Freud) is helping the dreamer a bit too much, or that, just as confusingly, there is no clear line between the interpreters and the dreamer’s minds.
Along with common philological references, Freud is constantly making references to literature. The latent content seems to inevitably resonate with a text that is generally known, as if the dreamer were weaving that common literary language into the latent ideas of his text and then the interpreter, because he is familiar with those references, is able to pull them out again.
In “A lovely dream”, the dreamer is on stage and off — audience and actor. That seems to be the case with Freud, who accompanies the dreamer in his dream. Freud’s interpretation condenses several texts, literary and otherwise, just as a single word tends to condense all the texts it belongs too. The reader has some difficulty distinguishing what Freud presents as latent content provided by the dreamer, what is a pedagogical tool for presenting the theory, or an illustration of the interpretation that is confirmed by a literary texts. Sappho is is found, though inverted, in the dreamer’s play. What is latent is teased out in the conversation with Freud, where Freud’s life and experience are woven into the life of the dreamer.
This too is a displacement: from patient to analyst.
The “scrutin de liste” –the voting for more than one candidate at a time– is part of Freud’s method: one thing does not exclude the other, and everything and everyone is on the list.
Symbols
Freud finds two other transformations (not in our text) in dream creation: plastic representation and symbolization. The former is about transforming all signs of the latent content into visible objects. There are several ways this can be accomplished. One is through a rebus, where the sounding out of the names of the manifest objects of a dream says the name of an object or an idea in the latent content. Another is through a metaphorical link:
It is evident that this process is not simple. In order to get an idea of its difficulties you must pretend that you have undertaken the task of replacing a political editorial in a newspaper by a series of illustrations, that you have suffered an atavistic return from the use of the alphabet to ideographic writing. Whatever persons or concrete events occur in this article you will be able to replace easily by pictures, perhaps to your advantage, but you will meet with difficulties in the representation of all abstract words and all parts of speech denoting thought relationships, such as particles, conjunctions, etc. With the abstract words you could use all sorts of artifices. You will, for instance, try to change the text of the article into different words which may sound unusual, but whose components will be more concrete and more adapted to representation. You will then recall that most abstract words were concrete before their meaning paled, and will therefore go back to the original concrete significance of these words as often as possible, and so you will be glad to learn that you can represent the “possession” of an object by the actual physical straddling of it. The dream work does the same thing. Under such circumstances you can hardly demand accuracy of representation. You will also have to allow the dream-work to replace an element that is as hard to depict as for instance, broken faith, by another kind of rupture, a broken leg. In this way you will be able to smooth away to some extent the crudity of imagery when the latter is endeavoring to replace word expression.
- A General Introduction to Psychoanalyisis, chapter XI
The dream transformations are part of normal writing. For example, condensation is found in portmanteau words. Plastic representation and condensation exist as well in metaphors: “Richard is a lion” compounds a lion and a man, and at the same time gives a plastic representation of courage in the shape of a lion. This is a good metaphor for courage not because lions are courageous (there is nothing that makes them any more courageous than any other beast), but because they make us afraid. Again, inversion of meaning is part of dreams and literary tropes as well.
The most difficult transformation to appreciate is perhaps symbolization (see summary here). Symbols raise some tricky terminological difficulties (for Saussure, a symbol is a motivated sign, for others a symbol is an arbitrary sign), and it isn’t certain what a symbol is for Freud. Sometimes I think it is metonymy: the crown represents royalty; the beaver represents Canada. These are cases where a part represents the whole, but it isn’t an arbitrary part; it is a metaphorical part. Should we define symbols as the figure where metonymies and metaphors come together? What is the relation between symptoms, signs and symbols?
This seems crucial because obsessions and neuroses are symbolic in nature, and can be cured by a symbolic tool — the talking cure.
Condensation and wit
No conclusions here, but let me add a famous piece of the subsequent book by Freud that explores wit. Wit, psychosis, dreams and literature: they seem to all be peculiar expressions of language.
Now wherein lies the “technique” of this wit? What has occurred to the thought, in our own conception, that it became changed into wit and caused us to laugh heartily? The comparison of our conception with the text of the poet teaches us that two processes took place. In the first place there occurred an important abbreviation. In order to express fully the thought contained in the witticism we had to append to the words “Rothschild treated me just as an equal, on a familiar basis,” an additional sentence which in its briefest form reads: i.e., so far as a millionaire can do this. Even then we feel the necessity of an additional explanatory sentence. 2 The poet expresses it in terser terms as follows: “Rothschild treated me just like an equal, quite famillionaire.” The entire restriction, which the second sentence imposes on the first thus verifying the familiar treatment, has been lost in the jest. But it has not been so entirely lost as not to leave a substitute from which it can be reconstructed. A second change has also taken place. The word “familiar” in the witless expression of the thought has been transformed into “famillionaire”in the text of the wit, and there is no doubt that the witty character and ludicrous effect of the joke depends directly upon this word-formation. The newly formed word is identical in its first part with the word “familiar” of the first sentence, and its terminal syllables correspond to the word “millionaire” of the second sentence. In this manner it puts us in a position to conjecture the second sentence which was omitted in the text of the wit. It may be described as a composite of two constituents “familiar” and “millionaire,” and one is tempted to depict its origin from the two words graphically.
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The process, then, which has carried the thought into the witticism can be represented in the following manner, which, although at first rather fantastic, nevertheless furnishes exactly the actual existing result: “Rothschild treated me quite familiarly, i.e., as well as a millionaire can do that sort of thing.”
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Now imagine that a compressing force is acting upon these sentences and assume that for some reason or other the second sentence is of lesser resistance. It is accordingly forced toward the vanishing point, but its important component, the word “millionaire,” which strives against the compressing power, is pushed, as it were, into the first sentence and becomes fused with the very similar element, the word “familiar” of this sentence. It is just this possibility, provided by chance to save the essential part of the second sentence, which favors the disappearance of the other less important components. The jest then takes shape in this manner: “Rothschild treated me in a very famillionaire [(=mili) (=aire)] way.”
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Apart from such a compressing force, which is really unknown to us, we may describe the origin of the wit-formation, that is, the technique of the wit in this case, as a condensation with substitutive formation. In our example the substitutive formation consists in the formation of a mixed word. This fused word “famillionaire,” incomprehensible in itself but instantly understood in its context and recognized as senseful, is now the carrier of the mirth-provoking stimulus of the jest, whose mechanism, to be sure, is in no way clearer to us through the discovery of the technique. To what extent can a linguistic process of condensation with substitutive formation produce pleasure through a fused word and force us to laugh? We make note of the fact that this is a different problem, the treatment of which we can postpone until we shall find access to it later. For the present we shall continue to busy ourselves with the technique of wit.
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