The

Dreams of
Interpretation
This page intentionally left blank
R The
Dreams of
Interpretation
!1
A Century down
the Royal Road

Catherine Liu, John Mowitt,

Thomas Pepper, and Jakki Spicer, Editors
R

University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis
London
Cultural Critique Books
An occasional series of publications in association with the journal Cultural Critique,
edited by Keya Ganguly, John Mowitt, and Jochen Schulte-Sasse.
www.upress.umn.edu/journals/culturalcritique

Chapter  is a slightly revised version of pages – in Patricia Gherovici, Hysteria in

the Barrio: Freud, Lacan, and the Puerto Rican Syndrome (New York: Other Press, );
reprinted with permission of Other Press. An earlier version of chapter  was published
as “On the Relatedness of Ethics to Masochism,” in Avital Ronell, Stupidity (Champaign:
University of Illinois Press, ); copyright  by Board of Trustees of the University of
Illinois; reprinted with permission of the University of Illinois Press. Chapter  was
previously published as Jonathan Kahana, “Cinema and the Ethics of Listening: Isaac
Julien’s ‘Frantz Fanon,’” Film Quarterly , no.  (): –; copyright  Regents of
the University of California; all rights reserved; reprinted by permission.

Copyright  by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The dreams of interpretation : a century down the royal road /

Catherine Liu . . . [et al.], editors.
p. ; cm. — (Cultural Critique Books)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn: ---- (hc : alk. paper)
isbn-: --- (hc : alk. paper)
isbn: ---- (pb : alk. paper)
isbn-: ---X (pb : alk. paper)
. Freud, Sigmund, –. Traumdeutung. . Dreams.
. Psychoanalysis. I. Liu, Catherine. II. Series.
[dnlm: . Freud, Sigmund, –. Traumdeutung.
. Dreams—ethics—Essays. . Dreams—psychology—Essays.
. Freudian Theory—Essays. . Psychoanalysis—Essays. wm ..d8
d ]
bf.d 
.´—dc


Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

                  
 We dedicate this book
to the memory of Mary Lydon, to whom
we wish to give the final word.
R
Contents
R
ix Editors’ Note
xi Acknowledgments

xiii Introduction: “What Are You Doing Tonight?”

Catherine Liu, John Mowitt, Thomas Pepper, and
Jakki Spicer

Relations with Neighbors: Ethics

 . The Ethics of the Dreamer Gérard Pommier

 . “In dreams begin responsibilities”:

Toward Dream Ethics Jean-Michel Rabaté

 . The Dream in the Wake of the Freudian Rupture

Willy Apollon

 . Freud’s Dream of America Patricia Gherovici

 . Literature and Pathology: Masochism Takes the

Upper Hand Avital Ronell

Family, Friends, and Other Relations

 . Sounds of Satan Laurence A. Rickels

 . Heteros Autos: Freud’s Fatherhood Silke-Maria

Weineck

 . “Non vixit”: Friends Survived Elke Siegel

 Other Desires

 . The Dream between Drive and Desire:

A Question of Representability Paul Verhaeghe

 . Is Lacan Borderline? Judith Feher-Gurewich

 . Dream Model and Mirroring Anxiety:

Sexuality and Theory Claire Nahon

Focuses on the Apparatus

 . Closing and Opening of the Dream:

Must Chapter VII Be Rewritten? Jean Laplanche

 . Dreaming and Cinematographic Consciousness

Laura Marcus

 . A Knock Made for the Eye: Image and

Awakening in Deleuze and Freud Yün Peng

Matters of Intensity

 . Insomnia Pablo Kovalovsky

 . Strange Intelligibility: Clarity and Vivacity in

Dream Language Rei Terada
 Interpretative Arts

 . The Marnie Color Raymond Bellour

 . “Other Languages”: Testimony, Transference,

and Translation in Documentary Film Jonathan
Kahana

 . Wondrous Objectivity: Art History, Freud, and

Detection Andrew McNamara

Thoughtful Articulations

 . Marx, Condensed and Displaced A. Kiarina

Kordela

 . The Substance of Psychic Life Karyn Ball

 . Young Mr. Freud; or, On the Becoming of an

Artist: Freud’s Various Paths to the Dream Book,
– Klaus Theweleit

 . Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made Of: Freud,

Life, and Literature Mary Lydon
A Disturbance of Memory at the Podium: To Mary
Lydon in Memoriam John Mowitt

 Contributors
 Index
 R
Editors’ Note
R

References to James Strachey et al., eds., The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, –), are given in
the text by SE, followed by the volume (in Roman numerals) and the page (in Arabic
numerals).
References to Sigmund Freud, Gesammelte Werke, edited by Marie Bonaparte
et al. (London: Imago, –), and to its Gesamtregister (volume XVIII) and Nach-
tragsband (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer,  and ), are given in the text by GW,
followed by the volume (in Roman numerals) and page (in Arabic numerals).

ix
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 R
Acknowledgments
R

For generous support of the conference from which this book stems, we extend our
warmest thanks to the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, the Walker Art Center,
Other Press, and Mohawk Paper Mills, Inc., as well as to the following University of
Minnesota colleagues, departments, and programs: Tom Trow and the College of
Liberal Arts Scholarly Events Fund; Jeanine Ferguson and the Office of Research and
Development of the College of Liberal Arts, and Steven Rosenstone, its dean; Daniel
Brewer and the Humanities Institute; Gerhard Weiss and the Center for Austrian
Studies; Jack Zipes and the Center for German and European Studies; the Institute for
Global Studies; Kate Porter, Richard Leppert, and the Department of Cultural Studies
and Comparative Literature; and the departments of English, French and Italian, and
Spanish and Portuguese.
Douglas Armato, director of the University of Minnesota Press, was the midwife
of this book, working overtime.
To all those who attended the conference and made contributions, we give our
warmest thanks. And to those whose contributions we are fortunate to have between
these covers, our thanks are augmented by our gratitude for your patience.
Finally, we thank George Hoagland and Thomas Stubblefield, both of whom
worked with great care in the preparation of this manuscript.

xi
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 R introduction
“What Are You
Doing Tonight?”
Catherine Liu, John Mowitt,
Thomas Pepper, and Jakki Spicer R

E
lephants and scholarly volumes with multiple editors are creatures of long
gestation. In the case of the elephant, birth remembers what is hoped was a
joyful moment of conception. In the case of this book, another joyful event
is marked, also a birthday celebration: most of the contributions here were
originally delivered at a conference, “The Dreams of Interpretation/The Interpretation
of Dreams,” held at the Weisman Art Museum on the Twin Cities campus of the
University of Minnesota in early October  to commemorate the centennial of
the date on the title page of Sigmund Freud’s Dream Book. At the conference (as was
the case with the bimillennial celebration, then in progress, of the birth of Christ,
which marks one of the first milestones of an ever more imperious globalization),
everyone present knew perfectly well that the party was a year off (this time late rather
than early). In fact Freud had published his book in , but had deliberately dated it
with the following year to make it the inaugural volume of the new century.
Indeed, it is hard—because such a painful anamnesis—to remember the time
before the millennial party of accurate date, marked as it is by other events of the
months and years following our conference on Freud, itself an event conceived from
the outset as an open, nondogmatic, international, and truly cosmopolitan encounter.
We hope the essays presented here shall be received both as a rich archival document
and as a theoretical intervention. The intellectual ferment of the conference belongs
to the integrity and originality of its participants, and we hope that a good portion of
the excitement of those few days in Minneapolis will be preserved here.
But by the work of afterwardsness, those of us who tried, with a different faith,
to bring this event about (we ourselves started work on our own project for a new

xiii
xiv F Introduction

Freudian century in July ) now see it as having come just before a different Fall.
And thus it is even more important to remember the hopes around the preparations
for a joyful event, which was not (to be) only a commemoration of Freud’s Dream
Book, but turned out, even more importantly, to be a congress at which different
aspects of psychoanalytic experience and theory—some of them marginalized and
occulted both in analytic practice, with its own institutional isolations, as well as in
the symptomatic and often stereotyped receptions of psychoanalysis within the acad-
emy—instead were freely spoken of and debated. When both clinicians and academi-
cians (as well as hybrids) began to accept our invitation to revisit an enriched Freudian
adventure, we realized there was so much important work being done in so many dif-
ferent ways, fields, and places that there could and should be a forum in which people
from all of these disciplines could come and work together.
Even more urgently we now know that Freud’s less bloody head-birth has never
been more necessary for the purpose of understanding, and with hope, working through
the uncanny horrors of the psychopathology of our current globalized daily life and
death, with its incessant skirmishes—and this despite so many proclamations of the
death of psychoanalysis at the pregame show of this new millenium. Such proclama-
tions, aiming as they do at a kind of magical wish fulfillment, are hardly accidental, nor
are they the products of conspiracy—that complementary, ever-available American
alternative. Rather what is at stake is the possibility of systemic and systematic causal
thinking for the purpose of trying to understand the phenomena of mass destruction
we are witnessing at what seems like an ever accelerated pace and with ever greater
intensity. That the mainstream American press was, at the time of the celebration
of the millenium, the venue for a vastly disproportionate number of obituaries of psy-
choanalysis is no accident.1 Likewise, it is no accident that these same organs served
gleefully (as the Paper of Record itself has acknowledged) as the emergency broad-
casting system for the cries of Terror! heard from the hallucinated voices being relayed
as though from everywhere, via the channels of projective identification—the mass-
destruction media—and telling of the risks lurking out there, on the dark continents
and archipelagos of the non-Christian world.2 The ideology involved in both sets of
proclamations—psychoanalysis’s death, Terror!—is sutured of the same phantasm, and
hangs together (returns to the same place) with an overwhelming structural necessity.
As the religions of Abraham fight it out in nationalisms and racisms competing
for the distinction of descending to apparently unsoundable atavistic depths, in which
the non(-Judeo-)Christian is evil and can be disposed of as naked life—Giorgio Agam-
ben: that which can be merely killed without being sacrificed—who can(not) fail to
see that it is Freud who warned us that it is not so easy to whitewash the Father, thus
to make him all Good? That we and our civilization suffer from the idealization of the
Father? Who else has tried to speak this unwelcome truth apparently still so difficult
for those who would like so much to believe in their own impunity with regard to the
Other and others? Each of the contributions brought together here attests, in its
 Introduction f xv

own manner, to the fact that psychoanalysis is essentially bound up with the problems
of maintaining an ethical relationship to the work of interpretation and other action.
This ethical stance is manifest in an attentiveness to alterity that would refrain from
what Lacan calls “Samaritanism.”
When, at the beginning of the end of the last (seventh, of course) chapter of
Freud’s book, the whole of which is so one-pointedly devoted to the prosecution of the
thesis that the dream is the fulfillment of a wish, the author erects the riddling, hiero-
glyphic stele of the Dream of the Burning Child, it is, from a historical moment so
deeply invested in whitening the Father, difficult not to read the wish of this Father’s
dream, in which his dead child comes (back) to him and says with reproach, “Father,
don’t you see that I’m burning?” as the Father’s very own wish that the child burn, as
the Father’s desire to kill his reproachful child.
And while Freud himself does not advance this interpretation thematically, in
any direct fashion, he has left the overdetermined traces there for us, his as yet undead
children, to gather—that is: read—even by way of the interpretation he gives of the
wish expressed in the dream at issue, namely, that the Father here wishes, once again,
to see his child alive, and burning with the Father’s desire.
Thus the assertion that the proclamations of terror and of the death of psy-
choanalysis are of the same piece has to do with what, in psychoanalysis, is called a
structural regression, and an angry one at that: for what can now be seen is that the
hallucinations of terror, and of a terror characterized by the unwelcome realization of
other monotheisms, of other claims to worship another one-and-only god, are rooted
in fantasies in which the need to believe in the All Good Father, and to have him at
one’s side, is so strong that it must reject any claim () that any other one-and-only
Good Father might exist; () that he might exist by the side of someone else and
somewhere else, far from me; and, () most important for us here, that there be any
claim to a critical practice that might reveal the price we pay in clinging to all of the
above, and that might work toward authentic liberations, ones leading to declarations
of independence imposed neither by occupying forces, nor by violent and coercive
conversions. Such emancipatory critique could be made on the grounds of having
alternative mechanisms with which to deal with such violent, paranoid, aggressive
projections by means other than religious, but rather mundane. This practice and
these means are called by the name Psychoanalysis.
And isn’t it even more of an insult to the captives and purveyors of the deadly
fantasies presiding over the new world order that analysis, as though it were answer-
ing Kierkegaard’s desperate attempt to speak to that single individual, not only takes
place person by person, case by case, but even dares to denounce the dangerous plea-
sures of mass identifications, and, on top of this, demands much hard and painful work
and—like the churches—tithing.
If, in the century in which Freud’s own life began, it was still necessary to secure
a stronghold in the divine, and Pascal’s Wager thus had to be transformed, honed into
xvi F Introduction

the sharpest superegoic injunction imaginable—“believe!”—as the only apparent means

to this end; if thus it was still apparently necessary to submit unconditionally to the
Father at every instant, to remain standing awake all night to assure one’s salvation—
if this is the way the post-Copernican theologians would have it,3 Freud, nonetheless,
and luckily for us, offers a new turn, something quite different, in the necessity of
thought and practice.
Taking the dream as the messenger of sleep, of the unconscious, Freud teaches:
Put two people into a new and highly structured situation (at a regular time, and in
a regular place, over a long period, since what they have to deal with knows no time,
and dealing with it takes some time therefore), and let one who has him- or herself
undergone a certain period of training in what thus has some roots in the Stoic, asce-
tic practice of listening Freud thus instaurated and made new (by having listened to
others and to the other in himself for a long time) listen patiently to the other, to
the one who comes so as to be heard, patiently, and then remark, at certain intervals,
what is being said. What will come out of the secret of this encounter will be truth,
overseen by the regulation of this new kind of relationship that Freud bequeathed to
us, which is psychoanalysis.
As its motor this practice has no transcendent leap—no “believe!”—but some-
thing we can see all around us, entirely immanent, and which, in its properly chan-
neled form, under the conditions already described, is called transference—really a
name for a bold new conception of love and all its ruses. Resituated in the analytic
chamber, transference, which exists everywhere in relations among subjects, but
which Freud isolated and named for the first time, can be used to help live—to love
and to work—better. And all of this works by virtue of its practice and its structure,
and not by any belief in or intervention of the transcendent.
If one does this—if people do this, they will profit from a hard-won discovery
of technique gleaned from years of experience and insight: the royal road to what is
being said is to go over what comes not when one is awake, but asleep. And it is
through this laborious process that one will come to the knowledge of one’s desires,
not only so as to live better oneself, but, if possible, to go unto the other and do more
good than harm through the cultivation of this practice, in which that which is time-
less touches upon, and is treated in, time. So grind your lenses well, so as to see into
the night. What is offered here is the continuation of an unending education into
human life and nothing miraculous. And like other parts of education, it should not be
a rite, something rote, but rather a right, a human right: the right to psychoanalysis.
A new, and fitting, human right: a fitting light for this night.
Happily, the contributions to this volume are heterogeneous in orientation, con-
cern, style, tone, and subject. Far from any supermarket or consumerist imaginary
desire for the inclusion of all positions, the lack of pretense to totality here manifests,
rather, the robustness of thought concerning psychoanalysis in many domains and
in and at their intersections. Rather than organizing the richness of these offerings
 Introduction f xvii

according to any prefab schema of intellectual identities—psychoanalysis and poli-

tics, psychoanalysis and literature, psychoanalysis and philosophy, psychoanalysis and
culture, psychoanalysis as practice, psychoanalysis and theory, psychoanalysis and
psychoanalysis, etc.—instead we have made every effort to allow open constellations
to emerge from the texts we present here. No doubt these essays could have been
ordered differently. Our hope is that the way we present them, which was not precon-
ceived prior to our rereading all the texts in view of the present publication, should
enable both contributors and readers to see established problems in new constella-
tions and to open new paths for further work.

Relations with Neighbors: Ethics

If we begin the presentation with a remarkable set of contributions focusing on the
ethical sphere, it has, perhaps, something to do with the fatigue—and untruth—of
limiting the imagination and interpretive power of psychoanalysis to the family drama
and to the atomized household, as well as with the urgency of thought about matters
of globalization, neoliberalism, imperialism, colonialism, and violence that emerge
(though not uniquely so, even within these covers) in these essays.
Gérard Pommier’s “The Ethics of the Dreamer” is a polemical intervention in
debates about ethics. Pommier proposes that ethics emerges from the unconscious,
not from the social sphere. It is our capacity to dream, and our capacity to recognize
that opaque space in the Other that corresponds to this capacity that allows us to
establish our relationship with our fellow beings. Violence or aggressivity constitutes
the traumatic encounter with the Other. Pommier argues that the place of violence
has to be taken into account if we are to arrive at a full theoretical articulation of
the difficulties of “being-together.” This reevaluation of “Mitsein” allows for a radical
reconsideration of basic elements of psychoanalytic theory, but also raises important
issues in current debates around conceptions of community and collectivity.
Jean-Michel Rabaté’s “In dreams begin responsibilities: Toward Dream Ethics” is an
exploration of the radical disruption in intersubjectivity engendered by a confrontation
with the unconscious. Dreaming is what we all share, yet dreams are almost impossible
to exchange or transact. This essay makes explicit the ethical questions raised by both
Jacques Lacan and Gérard Pommier with regard to “das Ding,” and also underlines what
is symptomatically omitted from Lacan’s account of the Freudian concept of radical
helplessness. In dreams, that helplessness and extreme egotism are activated by the lift-
ing of censorship. In his surprising conclusion, Rabaté reads Ayn Rand’s philosophy of
radical selfishness as a hysterical demand for a pure capitalism that actually reveals the
failure of the Master’s discourse. Rabaté suggests that a properly psychoanalytic ethics
would entail an overturning of Platonism, especially in the image of the “good” that is
supposed to govern our idealized relations with the unbearableness of the neighbor.
xviii F Introduction

Situating his wide-ranging essay within the concerns of clinical practice, Willy
Apollon coaxes his reading of The Interpretation of Dreams toward the provocative
formulation, “the dream is interpretation,” thus capturing in one stroke the broad the-
oretical and practical concerns of the texts assembled here. Arguing that the dream,
as understood by Freud, though accessible to philosophy, religion, and neuroscience
in fact designates an object that radically eludes the paradigms that prevail within
these fields, in “The Dream in the Wake of the Freudian Rupture,” Apollon tries to
render palpable the clinical challenge posed by the dream. Implicitly recognizing the
rhetorical link forged by Freud between transference and the dream-work, Apollon
uses the former to think the specific space occupied by the radical hermeneutical
object of the dream. In doing so, he offers us a new way to think about the utopian
character of clinical practice, now situated in a world in which the human itself hangs
in the balance.
Patricia Gherovici’s “Freud’s Dream of America” is powerfully original in its
approach to two distinct theoretical operations: first in its reinterpretation of one of
Freud’s dreams in the context of the Spanish-American War, and second in forging a
relationship between The Interpretation of Dreams and symptomatic traces of Freud’s
highly mediated encounter with the imperial ambitions of the United States. In so
doing, Gherovici prompts us to reconsider the relationship between the individual and
the social, and political conditions that overdetermine subjectivity’s fantasies. Ghero-
vici amplifies the background noise of Spanish-Austrian affinities marking Freud’s
“Breakfast Ship Dream.” Here Freud’s dream appears resituated in the context of the
confused coverage in the Austrian newspapers of the explosion and sinking of the USS
Maine in the harbor of La Habana in . Gherovici’s rigorous reading of both
Freud’s writing and Freud’s self-analysis draws upon a Lacanian theorization of “knot”
and “thing” that allows for a revitalization of interpretation along the lines of linguis-
tic materializations.
Avital Ronell’s “Literature and Pathology: Masochism Takes the Upper Hand”
centers its discussion of ethics in the encounter between Freud’s own text and that of
the novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose life and works provide Freud and Ronell with
an intricate network within which to situate not only the relations between the think-
ing of ethics in its relation to that of masochism in Freud’s own theorizations, but
also with an original and sustained meditation on the relations between these and the
fraught matters of literary indebtedness and intertextuality as these manifest them-
selves in Dostoevsky’s appropriations of Gogol and Flaubert. Unbound by the pieties
of the psychodynamics of a national canon and its purportedly linear unfurling of
anxieties of influence, Ronell, through her comparative account, also de-aestheticizes
the discussion of literature by showing how characters and their authors function in
an elaborate economy of symptoms, nosographic and nosological pictures, family
romances, and aesthetic ideals, and thus she sets the stage for a sophisticated theo-
rization of the relations of life and art.
 Introduction f xix

Family, Friends, and Other Relations

In Laurence Rickels’s “Sounds of Satan,” the Demonic in Freudian psychoanalysis is
analyzed as having something to do with the Father in his various guises. But more
specifically, it turns out that in the dream-work the presence of the Devil is often asso-
ciated with both philosophy and music. Rickels points out that the Devil’s indestruc-
tibility lines up neatly with the ego’s sense of its own immortality, and that the freedom
of the Devil’s “conscience-free” condition resembles the sociopathy of dream repre-
sentations. Taking us through readings of Faust, Don Juan, and Arthur C. Clarke’s sci-
ence fiction to the autobiography of Aleister Crowley, Rickels demonstrates that the
Devil works overtime—within psychoanalysis as a representation of the paternal func-
tion, and in resistance to psychoanalysis as that which lies on the borderline between
neurosis and psychosis. In short, the Devil is evoked as an insurance policy against
both death and lack.
Silke-Maria Weineck’s “Heteros Autos: Freud’s Fatherhood” is merciless in its
unwillingness to cede to the apparently overwhelming desire, not only within psycho-
analysis but in its reception and in culture and cultural studies at large, to tell the story
of the father-son relationship solely from the point of view of the son. Moving beyond
unreflective and prepackaged clichés according to which the son is always cast into
the starring role of the Oedipal drama, Weineck not only reexamines the implications
of her reconsiderations for the classical theory of tragedy, inasmuch as Aristotle, in
his Poetics, is one of Sophocles’ first readers, but, more important for her work here,
of how Aristotle’s own considerations of the family drama extend into both his Nicho-
machean Ethics and into his lesser-read Eudemian Ethics.
Elke Siegel’s “‘Non Vixit’: Friends Survived” is a detailed revisiting of the Freud-
Fliess relationship. Siegel’s analysis is based on the question of this tortured friend-
ship, which served in many ways as the midwife to Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams.
The symptomatic interest following upon the publication of Jeffrey Masson’s edition
of the complete Freud-Fliess correspondence, as well as Masson’s later broadside, The
Assault on Truth, has further spurred theorists, historians, and clinicians of psycho-
analysis to contemplate the relationship between Freud and Fliess, as it is played out
in their letters, as Siegel does, with greater rigor and neutrality. Siegel offers a constel-
lation of concepts by which we can understand Freud’s “friend”: encrypted in this fig-
ure is the radical Other, the Brother, the Cousin, as well as the specter or “revenant.”

Other Desires
Paul Verhaeghe’s “The Dream between Drive and Desire: A Question of Represent-
ability” argues, based on the author’s clinical experience, that we can no longer take
literally or uncritically the statement that all dreams are deformed or distorted expres-
sions of “wish fulfillment.” The conditions of repression have changed, and Verhaeghe
xx F Introduction

challenges us to rethink the dream in relationship to drive, desire, and representation.

According to Verhaeghe, the dream-work must be interpreted with the Other in mind,
that is with the fantasy of the Other’s desire as a linchpin on which the transferential
relation depends. Our dream life is a product of a demand for representation: in fact,
Verhaeghe argues, desire and representation are synonymous. Interpretation is a pro-
cess by which the drive’s demand is rearticulated or analyzed. Verhaeghe emphasizes
the nonphenomenal character of the unconscious and of fantasy in relationship to the
idea of the network of signifiers as advanced by Jacques Lacan in the light of Saus-
surean linguistics. The easing of repression and/or the strengthening of the ego are not
the therapeutic ends of analysis.
Through her clinical experience, Judith Feher-Gurewich considers differences be-
tween “French” and “American” psychoanalysis—not as walls that cannot be breached,
but as symptomatically rich sites for further analysis. (French) Lacanians tend to treat
borderline symptoms in patients as masks for the classical structures of desire: hys-
teric, phobic, obsessional or perverse; and American psychoanalyists often assert that
social change produces these new psychic positions, thus requiring revision of the
Oedipus complex. Feher-Gurewich claims that these “new maladies of the ego” actually
shed light on the clinical relevance of Lacan’s extraordinary statement that woman is
“not-all.” Considering one of her own cases, Feher-Gurewich realizes that the “not-all”
can neither sustain the Oedipal fantasy that produces desire, nor the fantasy that masks
the absurdity of the social order. This patient has learned too early that the Father/Law
does not possess the phallus, and that the Other is ultimately powerless, and, in fact,
does not exist. However, the “not-all” turns this revelation in on herself, believing that
it is she who does not exist, and that it is not that the social order is absurd, but simply
that she does not have access to an understanding of it. Through this analysis, Feher-
Gurewich reaches a new insight regarding borderline symptomatology that a strict
adherence to either Lacan’s theories or to ego psychology will elide. Such symptoms
tell the truth of psychoanalysis: The other does not exist. The task of the clinician,
then, is to show the “not-all” that this is the condition of the Other—not of herself.
A practicing analyst, Claire Nahon asks us to return to Freud’s insistence on the
Bild of dreams—the image in its relation to condensation, regression, autoeroticism—
indeed, to the unconscious itself. The ever more common failure to attend to this
aspect of psychic life, exacerbated by ego psychology, has led to diagnoses of narcis-
sism or borderline personalities in patients who cannot be reduced to these categories.
Nahon insists on returning to the complexities of the image, and of the imaginary, as
sites of the ego’s emergence; only by doing so can the analyst hope to see the uncon-
scious meaning of sexuality and its images. This is particularly apparent in the trans-
sexual, who, in casting out the unconscious from the enclosed space of the psyche, and
embodying it in the flesh itself, unsettles an understanding of sexual difference in
terms of polarity. Sexuality should, instead, be understood through the unlimited plas-
ticity of the unconscious. By returning our attention to the image, we can understand
 Introduction f xxi

the transsexual’s uncanniness as containing the potential for “the emancipatory and
transgressive potentialities of unconscious sexuality.”

Focuses on the Apparatus

In “Closing and Opening of the Dream: Must Chapter VII Be Rewritten?” Jean
Laplanche, one of the foremost thinkers and writers in the history of psychoanalysis
to date, opens our eyes to the importance of a footnote added to a later edition of The
Interpretation of Dreams, in which Freud forces this most attentive reader of the
Freudian text to a major “aha” experience concerning the famous and persistent model
of the psychic apparatus, the apparatus of the soul that punctuates Freud’s writing
(as well as that of many of his most important commentators, from Walter Benjamin
to Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida) at least from the  Project for Scientific
Psychology to the  “Note on the ‘Mystic Writing Pad.’” In his added note to the
Dream Book in  (SE V, ), Freud tells us that his famous linear or optical dia-
gram presents his model of a series of plates as unfurled or unrolled. Pursuing this
major clue as no one has before, Laplanche explores its implications for the—only
apparently—separate matters of what the dream communicates, on the one hand, and
the matter of the origins of sexual desire, on the other.
In “Dreaming and Cinematographic Consciousness,” Laura Marcus notes that,
despite employing metaphors of other visual apparatuses, such as photography, in
illustrating psychoanalytic principles, Freud’s writings are virtually silent on the topic
of cinema. She suggests that this indicates not psychoanalysis’s indifference to film,
but rather the fundamental connection between the two. Indeed, this connection is
foundational not only in the similarities in their apparatus—projection, the screen,
and so forth—but also in that both psychoanalysis and the cinema attend to the tran-
sitional stages of the psyche—the borderlines between waking and dreaming, past and
present, absence and presence.
In “A Knock Made for the Eye: Image and Awakening in Deleuze and Freud,” Yün
Peng takes an important step in redrawing the intellectual-historical map of the alle-
giances and alignments of the last century. Whereas many French and American intel-
lectuals have inherited the superegoic shibboleths of a split between Gilles Deleuze
on the one hand and Freud and Lacan on the other, Peng’s nonpolemical, patient,
and lucid articulation of the concept of the crystal image in Deleuze’s cinema books
(among his last) and of the account of the dream image that Freud offers in The Inter-
pretation of Dreams is exemplary in its return to what these authors actually said,
as opposed to the obeisance to the Verbot according to which these authors (and, by
Peng’s extension, Foucault as well) are not to be mentioned together. Peng’s essay
reveals such splits to have been constructed in the imaginary representations on the
part of these thinkers’ followers. As a model of attention to what has been said rather
xxii F Introduction

than what has been imagined to have been said, this essay should serve as a model
for thoughtful intellectual endeavor and as a testimony to the important difference
between the student of thought and the disciple of a master.

Matters of Intensity
In his lapidary “Insomnia,” Pablo Kovalovsky delves into the processes at that most labile
site of thought, the boundary between wakefulness and sleep. Drawing on the post-
Freudian developments of Otto Isakower and the moment of “subjective destitution”
experienced when falling into sleep, as well as on Bertram Lewin’s later meditations on
the dream-screen in relation to the infant at the mother’s breast, Kovalovsky’s night
thoughts reveal the work of an original thinker, one capable of taking what is most use-
ful and important from many strands—Freud, Isakower, Klein, Lacan, Lewin—in the
fabric of psychoanalytic thought in order to further weave a subtle and profound dialec-
tic shuttling between Freud’s formulation of the dream as the guardian of sleep on the
one hand and the way in which the dream can also serve as a protection from sleep.
In “Strange Intelligibility: Clarity and Vivacity in Dream Language,” Rei Terada
departs from a probing consideration of the troubled distinction drawn between
vivacity (Lebhaftigkeit) and clarity in The Interpretation of Dreams, thus reopening
the question of language in psychoanalysis. Through a reexamination of several of the
germinal dreams in Freud’s text (the Irma Dream, the non vixit Dream, and others),
Terada shows that the instability of the hermeneutical status of vivacity indeed under-
scores or displaces meaning, prompting us to become more attentive to some of
Freud’s more speculative formulations concerning the relation between language and
thought. This deft essay culminates in a vivid discussion of the consequences for the
theory of interpretation (whether analytic or not) of the notion that thought selects
and combines “concentrates” of unthinking stored in language. Thus this contribution
is a remarkable examination of what is at stake in the dream of interpretation in the
wake of the Freudian breakthrough.

Interpretative Arts
Probably best known for his resourceful complications of the encounter between psy-
choanalysis and the cinema written during the s, Raymond Bellour here presents
“The Marnie Color,” a pointedly focused reading of Hitchcock’s film, in which the ap-
pearances of red are tracked down on screen. Typically associated with the staging of
the return of the repressed—Marnie’s frigidity inducing the killing of one of her mother’s
tricks—this red here is read by Bellour as involving something more formal, more fig-
urative. Specifically, by comparing this film to Spellbound—where the psychoanalytic
 Introduction f xxiii

relation itself is put on display in an almost parodic mode—Bellour shows that the
Marnie color bleeds over and into another repressed, that of the film work itself. Here
again psychoanalysis encounters the cinema—not at the site of the symbol, but at the
point where sight itself is overcome by that which focuses its attention.
Jonathan Kahana’s “‘Other Languages’: Testimony, Transference, and Transla-
tion in Documentary Film” rethinks the use of psychoanalytic theory in film theory
through an attention to aurality, specifically in reference to the analytic scene itself,
the documentary interview, and utterances coerced under torture. Kahana examines
instances of the interruption of documentary cinema’s “magical” or “faith-based” rela-
tion to reality. Focusing primarily on Isaac Julien’s film, Fanon, Kahana demonstrates
that documentary cinema can, through such interruptions and interventions, recall us
to the difficulty and importance of listening.
Andrew McNamara’s “Wondrous Objectivity: Art History, Freud, and Detec-
tion” is a theoretical archaeology of art-historical methodology. Here McNamara
offers an account of the struggle between art history’s allegiance to empiricism and the
ambivalence of its investments in critical inquiry and theory. In his compelling theo-
rization of apprehension and singularity, McNamara “interprets” art history’s sympto-
matic relationship to the detail. Citing Yves-Alain Bois’s imperative to reconstitute as
densely as possible the material conditions of the artwork’s production, McNamara
argues that Freud’s reconceptualization of interpretation sheds light on various and
often contradictory art-historical attempts to apprehend the artwork. It is in this
context that McNamara, following upon Carlo Ginzburg’s seminal essay on Freud and
Morelli, turns to a reading of the detective novel and suggests provocatively that the
apprehension of an art object and the fictional solving of a crime perform the work of
framing fantasy.

Thoughtful Articulations
Just when you thought it was safe to forget the dream of a Marxo-Freudian synthesis,
along comes A. Kiarina Kordela’s “Marx, Condensed and Displaced.” Her articulation
of the power of surplus reveals it to be the notion upon which the logics of capital,
sign, and subject themselves must be thought. In each case, Kordela triumphantly
shows how the tendency of the binary oppositions—use and exchange value, meta-
phor and metonymy, etc.—organizing these discourses is the effect of an enabling sur-
plus that, in exceeding such binaries, grounds them in the real of capital. Like Žižek,
who discovers resources for Marxism in Lacan, Kordela reads the latter’s mediations
on surplus enjoyment in Seminar XVII as the means by which to radicalize psycho-
analytic hermeneutics.
Karyn Ball’s “The Substance of Psychic Life” freights its short title with much
portent. Specifically Ball broaches a thorough reconsideration of what substance
xxiv F Introduction

might mean in the psychic register, while also tracking Freud’s rhetorical investment
in substance as the means by which to think the psychoanalytical concept of the
psyche itself. Following the first reception of Jean Laplanche’s reinvigoration of the
concept of sexuality, or more specifically the instinct supporting the Geschlectstriebe,
Ball shows how substance provides Freud with a way to ground distinctions funda-
mental to psychoanalysis—distinctions such as life and death, inside and outside,
space and time, and even memory and perception. Reluctant to simply “textualize”
substance, Ball draws out the way this concept is converted into place names where
biology and chemistry refuse to tread—for example, the mnemic traces that sustain
and reiterate trauma. Perhaps most provocatively of all, Ball’s engagement with both
Kant and the Freud of Beyond the Pleasure Principle establishes the vexing way in
which death and substance converge to radically scandalize all vitalisms.
Klaus Theweleit’s “Young Mr. Freud; or, On the Becoming of an Artist: Freud’s
Various Paths to the Dream Book –” is an unorthodox montage and com-
mentary on the trials and errors along the way to the birth of psychoanalysis. Mobi-
lizing Freud’s relationships (and the correspondences in which they were furthered)
with Breuer, Martha Bernays, and Fliess, as well as alliances and conflicts (Charcot,
Meynert, and so on), Theweleit tracks the vicissitudes of Freud’s search for a monu-
ment and the inscription thereupon, a search coextensive with the very invention of
psychoanalysis itself as a new mode of human relationship. In a powerfully suggestive
turn, this essay moves from the marble tablet upon which Freud, writing to Fliess in
, imagines the memorial to his discovery of the secret of dreams, to the inscrip-
tion upon the compact disc and bodies dancing to its music as not merely a figure by
which to interpret the transference and the memories reactivated within it. Thus
Theweleit himself invents and names the third body as that in which analysands
and analysts, dancers, correspondents, and lovers share in their different enactments
of transference.
The text that concludes the volume, Mary Lydon’s “Such Stuff as Dreams Are
Made Of: Life and Literature,” is preceded by an introduction in which its location
and status are addressed at some length. Professor Lydon died months after delivering
this paper at the University of Minnesota at the Dreams of Interpretation conference.
We felt that its function as an inaugurating discourse was best preserved by making
it the closing piece of the edited volume. This article is exemplary of her expansive
intellect, and of her unique ability to encompass the ethics and poetics of the dream in
her thinking. Professor Lydon, through a consideration of the enigma posed by Beck-
ett’s dreamless character in Waiting for Godot, confronted the problem posed by the
almost impossible communication of dreams. Mary Lydon sought to inaugurate the
event of the conference by recalling for us the challenge placed before both lit-
erature and psychoanalysis by the “French Freud.” We pay tribute to her here in our
attempt to meet that challenge as she so beautifully articulated it.
 Introduction f xxv

Notes
1. See the first section of Michel Foucault’s essay on Maurice Blanchot, “La Pensée du
dehors,” now in Foucault, Dits et Ecrits I (Paris: Gallimard, ).
2. One remembers a millenial issue of Newsweek here (although, since we are talking
about chatter, fama, what everybody says and knows, it really doesn’t matter, since the voice is
the voice of no one in particular) in which Freud was actually killed twice.
3. At least ever since Pascal’s “Mystery of Jesus,” a text so dear to him he had it sewn into
his cloak over his heart, and part of which reads: “Jesus will be in agony until the end of the
world. One must not sleep during that time.”
This page intentionally left blank
R
Relations with
Neighbors:
Ethics
R
This page intentionally left blank
 R . The Ethics
of the Dreamer
Gérard Pommier R

I
nitially it may seem strange to suggest that dreams contain ethical standards, as
they often stage violence, murder, and perverse situations. To move beyond this
apparent contradiction it is necessary to make the distinction between ethics
and morals. Samurai warriors, gangsters, and politicians all possess ethical
ideals dictating their codes of conduct. Both the gangster and the Samurai have codes
of conduct based on the ethical standards of the groups with which these figures
are affiliated. (In the case of politicians, this affirmation is less certain.) For example, a
Samurai who chooses to commit Hara Kiri does so in accordance with the standards
and in the established tradition of the Samurai (haga kuré). Prostitutes also have
ethical standards: for example, no money, no sex. Thus ethics implies only acting in
accordance with the underlying identifications of a chosen group.
As can be inferred from the examples I have chosen, the goals held by any given
group are not necessarily moral. I do not wish, however, to set the solitary nature of
ethics against the collective nature of morals. What interests me more is to show that
the ethics of unconscious desire imposes moral consequences, ones to which the ethics
of such desire is not opposed. The ethical subject stems from what is impossible in his
desire, namely all the monstrous things that appear in its dreams.
Here I shall attempt to demonstrate the manner in which dreams, as essential
manifestations of the unconscious, are the only ethical foundation for subjectivity.
In Spinoza’s treatise, somewhat ironically entitled Ethics, the author sees no founda-
tion for ethics other than the threat of the police, since, for Spinoza, each subject is
guided by the search for what is pleasurable. And this search for what is pleasurable
is limited only by society’s higher interests, which curb the respective appetites of all


 F Gérard Pommier

individuals—hence the necessity of the police. Common interest has a coercive func-
tion in respect to each person’s individual(istic) desires.
The theoretical position I advance here is, to some extent, diametrically opposed
to the vision proposed by Spinoza, since the point I shall develop is that ethics is based
solely on the unconscious and is independent of all external coercion. I shall assert that
the unconscious is the only ethical foundation of all human activity. First I must point
out an interesting problem of translation from French into English: in French there
is a major distinction between “bon” and “bien,” both of which can be translated in
English as “good.” “Good” can mean at once “good enough to eat” or “good,” “right,” in
the ethical sense. Therefore I shall translate “bien”—in the ethical sense—as “right.”
Thus we may distinguish between “Right and Evil,” on the one hand, and “good and
bad” on the other. What I want to emphasize here is that from the point of view of the
good—the fulfillment of needs, or the satisfaction of pleasure—man cannot be distin-
guished from animals, which have no sense of right or evil. Spinoza, too, knows this.
Animals do not have an unconscious, and therefore they have no ethical conduct.
Is there any other criterion of Ethics? Science, for example? Science, or general
knowledge, does not generate any sort of ethical criterion. The only criterion for sci-
ence is to distinguish between precision and inaccuracy—and this has no relation
whatsoever to the notions of right and evil. Furthermore, science does not even take
into consideration the evil it can generate itself! By this I mean simply the evil of bad
consequences, such as weapons, atomic bombs, ecological disasters, and so on. Rather
I point to the evil of the destruction of ethics itself. For if everything is determined,
then there is no more question of being able to choose between right and evil. What
tyranny could be more stifling than that of a universal knowledge, which would pre-
scribe conduct in all circumstances?! One can calculate the velocity with which an
object falls, the temperature of the sun, or the movement of the planets. But if I con-
sider myself, am I, too, an astral body, the trajectory of which can thus be predicted?
At any rate, for myself I am not such an object. I am incapable of precise foresight re-
garding what I shall do next. It is possible to predict the ever-changing course of winds
and clouds, but no one can predict what I shall dream tonight. Even considered in the
light of all the dreams that have been created since the origins of sleep, my next dream
will still be the first of its kind.
The meanings of “right” and “evil” stem from a common root: Oedipal guilt,
which has conveyed a sense of fault. In consequence, for every subject repression and
the unconscious have set the foundations for ethical standards. In showing us the
“evil” of desire, our dreams teach us the ethics of what is considered right. Thus, to
support this postulate or hypothesis of the ethics of the dreamer, I wish to put forth
two arguments. The first is that it is upon the foundations of unconscious feelings of
guilt that the notions of “right” and “evil” are built. The second is that it is the over-
determined nature of causality, such as it is manifested in dreams—and which must
be distinguished from the sufficient reason of scientifico-mathematic reasoning and of
 The Ethics of the Dreamer f 

physical-material determination—which is the guarantee of the individual’s freedom,

as well as his ethical standards.
There is an essential difference between what can be determined scientifically
according to mathematical or physical-material reasoning on the one hand, and that
which is overdetermined on the other. Determination objectifies, while overdetermi-
nation—while it does not deny determination—takes account of subjectivity.
To criticize science is a well-trodden path for religious, philosophical, literary,
and even psychoanalytic thinkers. Musil, for example, in chapter  of The Man with-
out Qualities, writes: “[T]he science that smiles into its beard, or first full-dressed
encounter with evil.”1 Musil goes on to say that the scientist’s ideology resembles that
of “merchants, highwaymen, and warriors.” Science would have no other goal than to
disparage what people value most, for example in “Regarding goodness as only a form
of egoism . . . asserting that man is eight or nine tenths water; explaining the char-
acters’ celebrated moral freedom as an automatically evolved philosophical appendix
of free trade” ().
How can we understand what Musil calls the inclination for evil? The very exam-
ple he provides shows that evil diminishes mankind by reducing humans to being the
products of a determinism that can only diminish them. That man consists of  per-
cent water, or that love is a matter of hormonal or endocrine reactions, and so on—
this is the attempt to reduce oneself to a series of causally determined phenomena.
This inclination toward evil, here attributed to science, is in fact an inclination for
incest: to be the object of the other, that is what makes for the pleasure of science.
Yet, what the dreamer encounters in his sleep are not the products of such deter-
minism, but the products of overdetermination. Overdetermination is what is to be
found in the condensations of any dream figure; as such, images refer to a portion of
diurnal events added to childhood memories, readings, theoretical knowledge, and so
on. Overdetermination is the end result of a super-addition of causal chains contained
in any dream image. Nevertheless, this overdetermination, which thus goes against
the determinisms of the Other and of science, cannot be understood as merely an
accumulation of possible causes all leading to a similar outcome. On the contrary,
overdetermination must be taken as the juncture of contradictory determinants. For
example, consider a subject who simultaneously loves and hates his father. At the same
time, he both desires and has the fantasy of having been raped. The psychoanalytic
meaning of overdetermination could be said to consist in the contradictions among
determinants. And it is this inevitable situation of such contradictions that demands
of each individual that he or she make his or her own choices. Consequently, the sub-
ject is thus confronted with its own freedom to choose, regardless of whether it likes
this freedom (or not), and this leads the subject to determine the ethical standpoint it
wishes to endorse.
Presently I shall attempt to describe how such an ethics is to be realized, thanks
to the powerful link that exists between the capacity for dreaming and the ability to
 F Gérard Pommier

recognize the other as distinct from oneself. This hypothesis can be tied together with
neurophysiological conclusions about the importance of dream activity, and with the
fact that newborns spend a third of their time dreaming.
Whence comes the need to dream? In his Project for a Scientific Psychology,
Freud describes the moment at which the infant, in distress, is confronted with the
complex of the fellow person, with the presence of the nearest person—the Neben-
mensch—in its alterity, which is both comforting and a source of anxiety. This closest
person is divided into a comprehensible part on the one hand, and an incomprehen-
sible one on the other: “Thus the complex of the Nebenmensch divides itself into two
segments, one of which is imposed by a constant apparatus, which remains together
as a cohesive entity as Thing [als Ding]” (SE I, ). The mother is this Other, but in
the Project Freud elevates this other to the title of Nebenmensch: a divisible fellow
being, both a familiar one and a complete stranger. The unknown—the Thing—re-
appears each time someone meets someone else. When speaking or listening, one is
divided between oneself and the Thing, between the Thing considered as familiar and
as what remains unknown and provokes anxiety. The subject itself becomes divided
at the very moment this division of the Thing occurs: the formation of the subject is
simultaneously the instant at which the subject is exiled from the loved object, which
remains unknown. Das Ding—the Thing—is divided as a result of its own disarrayed
existence, and is unveiled by the presence of the other. The birth of the subject is also
its exile from what it loves and does not understand.
The subject and its fellow being come into existence at the same moment. But the
relationship with the other is determined by what is thus an absolutely impossible love.
As narcissism is inevitable, this is a love that is always already there, and always
already lost. It is a love invested at all times by the death drive, and it is the division
of the Nebenmensch, which is itself enacted by this love limited by its opposite. This
division concerns no one in particular, and every individual at once in his or her
relationship with the Thing. And this relationship with the Thing is the relationship
of every subject—to the extent that every subject is divided between itself and the
Thing—with what remains known and what remains unknown about the Thing. It
is this unknown aspect and its insistence that forces us to dream. And this means
there is a constant link between our fellow beings and the formation of dreams. We
always dream for someone or about someone, because our fellow human being has
always been the source of our dreams. Thus children dream intensely so as to per-
ceive, through hallucination, the solution to the problem represented by their fellow
beings, Nebenmenschen.
Dreaming is necessary because the unknown is pushing, and the unfathomable
must be conjured in a dream. But dreaming, then, becomes an aspect of the unfath-
omable. This is what Freud calls “the navel of the dream.” In The Interpretation of
Dreams he refers to it on two occasions: first in the course of the analysis of the Dream
of Irma’s Injection, where he points out, in a footnote, that there exists a point in the
 The Ethics of the Dreamer f 

dream where interpretation can go no further, that the thoughts in the dream express
everything there is to be said and to which there is nothing to be added. The dream is
incapable of further solution. It comes to a standstill, Freud adds, at a point that is
“impossible to recognize [unerkannt].” The term appears a second time in chapter ,
in the section on “Forgetting in Dreams”:

There is often a passage in even the most thoroughly interpreted dream which has to
be left obscure; this is because we become aware during the work of interpretation
that at that point there is a tangle of dream-thoughts which cannot be unraveled and
which moreover adds nothing to our knowledge of the content of the dream. This is
the dream’s navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown. (SE V, )

First the divergence occurs between the thoughts that run in all directions into the
net-like entanglement of our intellectual world, and then second is the unfathomable
representation. And in this “navel of the dream” we encounter exactly the same invari-
ants as in the division we saw in the case of the Thing: thus what we find here is the
division between, on the one hand, the opaque and incomprehensible body as a source
of pleasure, and, on the other, signifiers. It is clear that the unknowable, the unerkannt,
is by no means a representation evading perception. On the contrary, it is entirely
perceived as real while simultaneously being completely recalcitrant to thought. This
resistance itself thus creates thought, which in turn seeks to interpret this unknown,
impossible thought.
Nightmares provide the best example of this division revealed by the navel of
the dream. Usually it is said that nightmares constitute an objection to Freud, who
would explain dreams as the realization of a wish. But in fact, the nightmare poses no
objection, because any desire, taken to its ultimate conclusion, realizes the desire of
the Other, and thus every dream is a latent nightmare. Realized desire becomes a
nightmare, and this is the only explanation for the disguise adopted by dream images.
Indeed, why does representation exist within the dream itself? It is precisely because
the dream already disguises the realization of desire—and this despite the fact that it
is pushing for the realization of that same desire. It is because all dreams move toward
the realization of a destructive desire that they are repressed. All dreams are repressed,
and the representations of the dream contain within themselves a duality that renders
them incomprehensible. The most opaque moment of the presentation of this duality
is the navel of the dream. Every dream is thus the realization of desire, and, simulta-
neously, the repression of that desire.
When the dreamer begins to dream, perhaps he wanted to sleep, to be reduced
to nothing: he wanted to disappear in his sleep. But this “nothing” is, in fact, some-
thing. This nothing is his link with the Thing. And so, when he is sleeping, he is
obliged to dream that he is sleeping. His desire is to fall into himself as grounded in
the Thing (according to the ambivalence of the latin res, which gives both “nothing”
and “something” in the French rien).
 F Gérard Pommier

Dreams dissimulate: they seek not to understand that point at which, if desire
were to realize itself, the subject would disappear. This is the first trauma, which every
subject seeks to conceal by means of creating a story. The dream’s primary hallucina-
tion is a negative machine, which the subject uses to invent stories and to experience
them in order to create his own history. The story is written so as to create dreams,
which themselves are a form of concealing the dissimulation of this hallucination.
Now it is possible to see the train of thought I have tried to sketch: we are obliged
to dream because of the difficulty raised by our encounter with a fellow being. Each
fellow being we encounter reproduces the division of the Thing, and this encounter
is equivalent to the navel of the dream, at which point the dream thoughts are divided
off from the unknown. Each fellow being first occupies the place of the unknown at
precisely this point of divergence of the Thing between the known and the unknown,
which is itself analogous to the navel of the dream. The first encounter between the
individual and language—in other words, a traumatic demand—constitutes the pri-
mary trauma, whence there emerges something hallucinatory, which dreams attempt
to conceal.
The encounter with the unknown is the first representation of the trauma, which
corresponds to the primordial fantasy: “a child is being beaten.” “A child is being
beaten” may be linked to the original trauma, and behind this fantasy can be heard
the scream of the primary experience of disarray during the first encounter with the
fellow person. The primordial or fundamental fantasies cover over the first trauma—
that between the subject and language—which puts all other traumas (sexual trauma,
the primal experience, seduction) into perspective. The subject’s existence develops in
stages according to the series of traumas that cover this primary trauma, which itself,
however, is timeless and is repeated whenever one person addresses another.
In a sense, there exists a continuity between the first shout of the newborn and,
if you will, the cry of orgasm. In a sense, this cry is itself the underlying stratum of life,
a silent cry that accompanies the individual and is repressed at all times.
I hope I have been clear regarding the position of the navel, which is first occu-
pied by one’s fellow being, and which itself exists at a point identical to that of the navel
of the dream as presented by Freud. This corresponds to the division of the Neben-
mensch in the Project for a Scientific Psychology, between that part that depends on the
signifier—the formations of the unconscious—and the unfathomable part represented
by the presence of the fellow person. I have shown this path leading from the presence
of the fellow man to the need to dream. But I would still like to demonstrate that the
link existing between the dream and the fellow person leads to ethical injunctions.
We have seen that the division of the Nebenmensch in return divides the individ-
ual himself. In a sense, this is a kind of mutual recognition, but in this very act of
recognition, the unknown part is violently rejected. It is rejected not only because it
is not understood, but because it is threatening. There is a violence that goes hand in
hand with the recognition of one’s fellow being, a violence that inhabits our relationship
 The Ethics of the Dreamer f 

with him, and that implies an aggressiveness toward him—indeed toward his very
elimination—as soon as he is recognized as such. And this is the source from which
ethics comes to emerge.
This is clear if we recall the development of the super-ego. Freud seeks to explain
this development at the end of Civilization and Its Discontents. He begins by show-
ing that the super-ego emerges as a consequence of aggressiveness, from an urge to
destroy one’s fellow being. In the previous chapter he criticizes the biblical injunction
to love one’s neighbor as oneself. He wonders how this commandment came into
being when the narcissistic relationship with our fellow being urges us, on the con-
trary, toward destroying him, exploiting him, or abusing him sexually. And it is easy
to understand that “love thy neighbor as thyself ” results from an inversion, from the
will to destruction, after the repression of the drive. According to an ordinary process
of repression, the ideology of our culture reveals this relationship at the level of the
drive in the relationship with our fellow person.
But as the other is also a fellow human being, we now understand how the super-
ego develops to prevent the realization of this urge. If the subject were to give way
to his narcissistic aggressiveness, he himself would disappear along with what he
attacks—given that his fellow man is, in fact, himself! This is why he invents the
authority that forbids this aggression. Regarding this Freud writes:
A considerable amount of aggressiveness must be developed in the child against the
authority which prevents him from having his first, but none the less his most impor-
tant satisfactions, whatever the kind of instinctual deprivation that is demanded of him
may be; but he is obliged to renounce the satisfaction of this revengeful aggressiveness.
He finds his way out of this economically difficult situation with the help of familiar
mechanisms. By means of identification he takes the unattackable authority into him-
self. The authority now turns into his super-ego and enters into possession of all the
aggressiveness which a child would have liked to exercise against it. (SE XXI, )

Thus the situation has been reversed, stood on its head, to the extent that the super-
ego now plays an aggressive role toward the ego: “The relationship between the super-
ego and the ego is a return, distorted by a wish, of the real relationships between the
ego, as yet undivided, and an external object” (SE XXI, ).
But we are now faced with a new problem, a contradiction even: Freud had
already considered another genesis for the super-ego as deriving from the Oedipus
complex following an introjection of the father’s characteristics. It is easy to understand
that incorporation can follow aggression against the father. Indeed, identification will
follow the thought of murder, since the underlying motive is to take the father’s place
at the mother’s side. The patricidal son identifies himself in the very act of killing, since
he fantasizes for this very purpose! He internalizes the persona, but at the same time
he internalizes the taboo he himself has just overstepped. This is not a very economi-
cal process! Desire is structured by the taboo with this strange yet efficient charac-
teristic of human sexuality. Thus the “inheritance” of this identification with the father
 F Gérard Pommier

obtains the contrary of the wish: it prolongs the harshness of the desire and ensures
the sustainability of the super-ego.
The death drive is the common denominator of these two super-egos, and it can
move from the fellow being, the brother (the first super-ego, as I have elaborated it
above) to the father (the second): when violence against the fellow being is translated
into aggression toward the father, this represents a considerable economy, since the
fantasy of “killing the father” has never resulted in anyone’s death (it only obliges
one to arduous religious rituals). And the symbolic father suffers even less, since he is
always already dead. The first super-ego is solitary, ethical, while the second is moral
and social.
In the progressive series of transformations beginning with the birth of the
dream in the subject’s relation to the Nebenmensch, the division of the two super-egos
is equivalent to the division of the Thing between the known and the unknown. As
ethical consciousness, this division explains the contradictions of the dream. Thus the
relationship with the Nebenmensch, with the fellow being, shows how ethics emerges
from the unconscious. In its relation with fellow beings, the super-ego represses the
death drive. In our relationship with our fellows, there is first of all this violence, this
outlaw role, which is primarily that of the subject. But with the development of the
super-ego, the individual enters into the realm of transgression: he is already a poten-
tial criminal who must pay for a crime he has merely imagined. In this sense he is a
martyr to a guilt that itself was only a fantasy, as long as the other aspect of the out-
law is that of the one who pays: a Christ-like figure. As I said in my introduction, the
outlaw creates the law in the same way that all dreams of perverse realization ulti-
mately lead to moral laws. We learn ethics by dreaming.

Notes
1. Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities, trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser
(London: Secker and Warburg, ).
 R . “In dreams begin
responsibilities”
Toward Dream Ethics
Jean-Michel Rabaté R

I
n a dense passage of Nadja, André Breton puzzles out a complex sequence of
factors that account for his inexplicable fascination with a terrible play. Admit-
ting that a bad melodrama entitled Les Détraquées had made a powerful im-
pression on him, he narrates a disturbing dream he had at the time. The dream’s
climax came when a moss-colored insect about twenty inches long slipped down into
his throat until it was pulled out of his mouth by its huge hairy legs. Meditating on
the nausea this still triggers in him, Breton tries to generalize, reflecting on the links
between dreams and waking life. Here is what he writes at the end of a long paren-
thetical digression within his story:

Since the production of dream images always depends upon at least this double play
of mirrors, there is, here, the indication of the highly special, supremely revealing,
“super-determinant”—in the Freudian sense of the word—role certain powerful im-
pressions are made to play, in no way contaminable by morality, actually experienced
“beyond good and evil” in the dream, and, subsequently, in what we quite arbitrarily
oppose to dream under the name of reality.1

Here Breton introduces his own version of the Freudian concept of overdetermina-
tion, namely the idea that each element of a dream means several things at the same
time, often with contradictory meanings. Overdetermination leads directly to positing
an extra-moral site for dreams: because of their plurality of meanings, these images are
beyond good and evil; they clash and rebound in a complex polyphony, which does not
preclude, however, the possibility of a different sense of ethics.
Breton’s Nadja argues forcibly that life demands a confusion of the domains of


 F Jean-Michel Rabaté

dream and reality, discovering in dreams a new mode of attitude, a new relationship
to desire as a true foundation of ethics. Dream and reality have too much in common
to be separated, or worse, made to represent each other, as if one side was the “real”
body followed by its shadow. The idea is taken up and developed in a passage of the
first “Manifesto of Surrealism”:

The mind of the man who dreams is fully satisfied by what happens to him. The
agonizing question of possibility is no longer pertinent. Kill, fly faster, love to your
heart’s content. And if you should die, are you not certain of waking up from the dead?
Let yourself be carried along, events will not tolerate your interference. You are name-
less. The ease of everything is priceless.2

The strangeness of dreams entails that one has to acknowledge that they belong to
a different realm, in which moral issues have no relevance. This does not mean that
dreams are worthless fantasies—on the contrary—or that one should not attempt to
think the world of dreams and reality together. Breton adds in “Manifesto”: “And yet
I can believe my eyes, my ears: this great day has arrived, this beast has spoken. If
man’s awaking is harder, if it breaks the spell too abruptly, it is because he has been led
to make for himself too impoverished a notion of atonement” ().
Like André Breton, but in less ringing tones, Gérard Pommier makes a vibrant
plea for the foundation of ethics in the domain of dreams, while suggesting their being
similarly situated “beyond good and evil.” It seems at first sight that this ethical foun-
dation beyond common morality would be more consistent with a program defined
by a revolutionary or aesthetic “avant-garde” than in conformity with Freud’s prudent
conservatism. According to Freud’s view, isn’t man asleep often slipping back into
a “regressive” moment, moving closer to unbridled drives, becoming the prey of all
sorts of murderous or destructive urges? How can one found an ethics on a state
that, according to Freud himself, barely bridges the gap between the normal and the
pathological?
And, indeed, if a measure of freedom (a small measure to be true) is granted
in dreams by their very overdetermined nature (“granted” is not the right term, since
after all Überdeterminierung postulates or demands a certain type of interpretive free-
dom that may not translate as freedom to act), dreams, in turn, in their layered and
confusing essence, open onto a domain in which I cannot arrange or predict anything
according to my intentions. I will never manage to force myself to dream this or that;
no one can decide to have a happy or sad dream in advance; no one can dream in order
to solve a philosophical problem—even if it happens for some subjects—for such a
notion, put forward by Herbert Silberer under the name of the “functional phenome-
non,” met with Freud’s nuanced but firm rebuttal. Freud’s intense discussion with the
neo-Jungian Silberer should serve as a warning to anyone who might be tempted to
found the ethics of the dreamer on higher ideals, on an almost rational thinking con-
tained in dreams—in short, on secondary elaboration. No: if there is an ethics of the
 “In dreams begin responsibilities” f 

dream, if dreams provide the only foundation for an ethics, the foundation will have
to be found in primary processes and in the dream’s intimate connection with drives.
But what of the role of censorship? We may remember that when Freud revisited
The Interpretation of Dreams in the last decade of his life, he compared the world of
dreams to “a modern State in which a mob, eager for enjoyment and destruction, has
to be held down forcibly by a prudent superior class” (SE XXII, ). A lot could be
said about the cautious politics implied by this image, but the least one can deduce
from it is that if there is, at first sight, any “ethical” issue, it would have to be filtered
by the various agencies of censorship. The danger, as Pommier reminds us, is to con-
fuse issues of ethics with morality, or to think that when we are in doubt about ethics,
the best answer will turn out to be the police.
If dreams provide a foundation for an ethics of desire and the unconscious,
however, how can we avoid the dead-end of a situation in which everyone would be
assured of an ethical position, provided he or she remains true to a particular dream?
In this sense, Creon would be as “ethical” as Antigone, since both are true to their per-
sonal dreams of justice (which is not far from being Hegel’s interpretation of the play,
but was not Lacan’s), and the conflict that makes the play’s dilemma so universal would
have no sense. For according to that view, one might just as well say that they disagree
and then collide—that’s all.
Is this the problem Yeats had in mind when he wrote “In dreams begins re-
sponsibility”? The self-made epigraph to Responsibilities () alludes no doubt to
the dreams of national liberation that were then rife in Dublin, and were similar to
those that would soon lead to the sacrifice of a few Irish heroes in the doomed anti-
British insurrection of Easter .3 We are far from a “mob” eager for destruction
and enjoyment here, since the main problem of the leaders of the coup was that the
crowd failed to join them. Yeats’s “dreams” keep their Romantic aura, which is derived
from a mythical past. The archaic origin is always invoked as a paradigm of lost unity
and perfection, especially in the case of a failed nationalist uprising that knew itself
to be doomed from the start. But beautiful failure in a generous enterprise and the
subsequent blood of the martyrs will more often than not reinforce the appeal of such
dreams, the added ethical power of which will then strengthen the “cause.” This is not
exactly the case with Freud’s dreams, although indeed they appear much more politi-
cal than he himself would like to admit.
To advance I quote a passage from an essay by Pommier recently published in
Lacan in America, and which should be quite relevant here. Pommier, who wishes to
account for usual resistances to psychoanalysis, takes the canonical example of Antigone:
We all love Antigone, don’t we, this magnificent heroine who braves the laws of the
city in the name of higher laws that appear to be placed even higher than our modern
humanitarian human rights. But we should ask ourselves a question: would Antigone
have reacted so bravely if she had been in analysis? Would she have acted in the same
way knowing that her desire to bury her brother with her own hands was the other
 F Jean-Michel Rabaté

side of her desire to kill him, or the result of her ambivalent incestuous love for him?
You see then how psychoanalytic discourse can be hated and how there are perhaps
good reasons to resist it! And if Antigone had said: “I realize that my passion to bury
my brother is as great as my passion to kill him with my own hands, but nevertheless,
I will not give up on my desire and keep obeying the higher laws”—then this would
probably not have made a very good drama.4

As this commentary shows quite pointedly, we would be wrong to mix ethics up with
the election of “higher” ideals.
It is also clear that one of the reasons Antigone remains so powerful as a char-
acter is that she seems to be acting all the time as in a dream: she crosses the stage
and the city as a sleepwalker who obeys less the injunctions of her conscience than of
her deepest unconscious. It is as a sleepwalker that she goes to the end of a dream of
justice, only to wake up when it is too late. Here, rather than go back to Musil’s witty
accusations of the evil ideology of a value-free Science, I would be tempted to quote
a friend of his, a fellow Austrian and one similarly obsessed with the issue of ethics,
Hermann Broch. In his polyphonic trilogy, The Sleepwalkers, we meet one character,
Esch, who is defined as the “Anarchist,” and who sets out to enact a dream of justice
and denunciation. Esch begins a journey through Germany in a sort of trance; he has
lost sleep, which means he cannot return to his previous values:

Great is the fear of him who awakens. He returns with less certainty to his waking
life, and he fears the power of his dream, which, though it may not have borne fruit
in action, has yet grown into a new knowledge. An exile from dream, he wanders
in dream.5

For Broch, “sleepwalking” characterizes an intermediary state enacted by all the

characters of the novel at one point or another. In their goings on (they murder each
other once in a while) they share the same dreamlike precision, the hallucinatory acu-
ity of perception that characterizes the last anti-hero’s actions. Hugenau acts with a
sense of security; he remains suspended in a dream that began when he decided to
desert the army in time of war. Everything that followed was given gratuitously, as if
he were rediscovering a child’s vision and beginning a period of vacation. I shall return
to the Nietzschean echoes of this conception of freedom and ethics and, to go faster,
I cite from the ending of the last section of The Sleepwalkers:

Whatever the individual man’s attitude to the course of the revolution, whether he
turns reactionary and clings to outworn forms, mistaking the aesthetic for the ethical
as all conservatives do, or whether he holds himself aloof in the passivity of egoistic
knowledge, or whether he gives himself up to his irrational impulses and applies him-
self to the destructive work of the revolution: he remains unethical in his destiny, an
outcast from his epoch, an outcast from Time, yet nowhere and never is the spirit of
the epoch so strong, so truly ethical and historical as in that last and first flare-up which
is revolution . . . the last and greatest ethical achievement of the old disintegrating
 “In dreams begin responsibilities” f 

system and the first achievement of the new, the moment when time is annulled and
history radically formed in the pathos of absolute zero! (–)

Without falling into such apocalyptic rhetoric, it looks at times as if The Interpretation
of Dreams was willing to allow for an identical moment of ethical destruction and a
rebirth of values. This is probably why Nietzsche is quoted several times by Freud. In
a first sketch of what later in the book will be defined as “overdetermination,” he com-
pares the intensity of the dream images to the intensity of the impressions from the
day—the “material” that has given rise to them—and writes: “The intensity of the ele-
ments in the one has no relation to the intensity of the elements in the other: the fact
is that a complete ‘transvaluation of all psychical values’ takes place between the mate-
rial of the dream-thoughts and the dream” (SE IV, ). The Standard Edition trans-
lation misses the recurrent tag in the section devoted to the Forgetting of Dreams:
“As we already know, however, a complete reversal [sic] of all psychical values takes
place between the dream-thoughts and the dream” (SE V, ). Joyce Crick translates
more accurately: “a total transvaluation of all psychical values has taken place.”6 Freud’s
German is eine völlige Umwertung aller psychischen Werte,7 which suggests a direct
equivalence between what dreams accomplish and what Nietzsche planned to do in
the book he announced as early as the Genealogy of Morals, a book often described as
Nietzsche’s major work on ethics.8
It was Nietzsche’s unfinished and posthumous Will to Power—quite a different
text as we know—that was eventually subtitled “Attempt at a Revaluation of All Val-
ues” (Versuch einer Umwertung aller Werte). Let us note the curious coincidence of
dates: Nietzsche died in , but his book was published in , a year after Freud’s
Traumdeutung. Without reopening the debate on the extent to which Nietzsche’s
influence on Freud is significant, or referring to Freud’s own awareness that he was
often merely rephrasing Nietzschean themes, let me just state here that Freud’s ref-
erence indicates his strong perception of the ethical function of dreams.9 Moreover,
this ethical function is perceptible not in the explicit moral (or immoral) content of
dreams, but in the metamorphic process of their formation—that is, fundamentally, in
their production of images “beyond good and evil.”
To grasp better the somewhat paradoxical nature of these statements, let us go
back to the beginning. Freud begins his Traumdeutung with a survey of the available
literature on dreams, and one subchapter in this summary is devoted to what has been
translated either as “the moral sense in dreams” (SE IV, –) or, more literally, as
“ethical feelings in dreams” (The Interpretation of Dreams, –). When Freud reca-
pitulates current theories about the links between ethics and dreams, he wisely con-
cludes that points of view differ and that no agreement has ever been reached on the
links between dreams and morality: “The certainty with which one writer asserts that
the dream knows nothing of moral demands is matched by the assurance with which
another affirms that mankind’s moral nature also holds good in our dream-life.” (The
Interpretation of Dreams, ). He does suggest, however, that his own theory about
 F Jean-Michel Rabaté

the real nature of dreams will eventually solve the riddle, for when he criticizes the
“remarkable inconsistencies and evasions” of most writers, he makes fun of the embar-
rassing difficulties they meet:

Strictly speaking, for all those who believe that the moral personality of man disin-
tegrates in dreams, any interest in immoral dreams would come to an end with this
statement. They could reject the attempt to make the dreamer responsible for his
dreams, and from the wickedness of his dreams conclude the existence of an evil ten-
dency in his nature with as much composure as they would the apparently equivalent
attempt to demonstrate from the absurdity of his dreams the worthlessness of his
intellectual attainments when awake. The others, for whom the “categorical impera-
tive” extends even into dreams, would have to assume responsibility for immoral
dreams without reservation: it is only to be hoped that if they themselves have dreams
of a reprehensible kind this does not oblige them to lose faith in the soundness of their
own morals. ()

The last dig at Kant is a recurrent theme in Freud (and will be taken up by Lacan in a
more perverse fashion). Freud has indeed found a solution to all these aporias, to what
might be described in a Kantian way as the “dialectics of dream morality,” when he
shows how the dream is fundamentally a “dream-work,” the complex machinery of
which taps the energy of desire. But does this theoretical displacement entail that all
such ethical considerations are idle? Lacan and Pommier would disagree, though I
shall attempt to point out difficulties that remain in their versions of dream ethics. Fol-
lowing Lacan’s lead in his Seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Pommier moves
back from the Traumdeutung to the Entwurf, and returns to Freud’s momentous intro-
duction of the term of das Ding at the core of the subject’s psychic structure. Let us
recall how Freud links the issue of the “fellow-creature,” the Nebenmensch, with the
problematic of das Ding:

Thus the complex of a fellow-creature falls into two portions. One of these gives
the impression of being a constant structure and remains as a coherent “thing”; while
the other can be understood by the activity of memory—that is, can be traced back
to information about the subject’s body. (SE I, )

Lacan is, of course, entirely right to see in this Thing a center of exteriority within
the subject, an inner exterior as it were, or a trace of “the prehistoric Other that it
is impossible to forget—the Other whose primacy of position Freud affirms in the
form of something entfremdet, something strange to me, although it is at the heart of
me, something that, at the level of the unconscious, only a representation can repre-
sent.”10 Later I shall pay more attention to the curiously tautological last part of the
sentence, because first I wish to pose a basic question: why does Lacan never pay
attention to the very explicit mention of ethics in the Project while he is apparently
investigating “the ethics of psychoanalysis” in his seminar? Is it because he is so eager
to connect Freud’s Ding with a Heideggerian meditation on the “Thing that things,” or
 “In dreams begin responsibilities” f 

to launch into a heady discussion of the Thing=X of Kantian metaphysics, revisited by

Lacan via Sade?
Nonetheless, no reader of the Project can fail to be struck by the very powerful
description provided by Freud of the small child’s helplessness—a Hilflosigkeit that
requires attention and help and then leads to a fundamental sociability defined by an
“understanding” with other people, a Verständingung in which one sees the source of
all morality: “This path of discharge thus acquires an extremely important secondary
function—viz., of bringing about an understanding with other people; and the origi-
nal helplessness of human beings is thus the primal source of all moral motives” (SE I,
). Why does Lacan remain blind to this tantalizing suggestion? Is it because when
he encountered it, in , it may indeed have smacked more of a humanism or a per-
sonalism that he wished to avoid at any cost?
Is not the dream, essentially, an oxymoron, a paradoxical state in which we ex-
perience both this basic helplessness and also a totally imaginary delusion of power
and control over everything? As Pommier states, when Freud follows the dream core
to its darkest center, to its unanalyzable umbilicus, are we not on the very same path
that leads to the discovery of the Thing in us, as the trace of an irreducible otherness,
arguably first met when encountering some “fellow-beings”? The sense of power and
impotence I can discover every night through my dreams should introduce another
lesson to be gained from overdetermination: my ability to represent this otherness
through dream images—be they delusions, harbingers, or truth—at least fundamen-
tally as fragments of a narrative. But, as Lacan wrote with an exact insight, the “some-
thing strange in me” is indeed “something that on the level of the unconscious only
a representation can represent.” Thus, to discuss Freud’s central insights on what I
have called “dream ethics,” I shall take a slightly different point of departure, negotiat-
ing between Freud’s concept of egoistic dreams and the theory of egoism deployed in
representations and fictions, notably in Ayn Rand’s novels.
I guess most of us would agree that an egoist is not a very ethical person, since it
seems that it is only his or her private values that count. Yet for Freud, one essential
characteristic of dreams is that the dreamer, by the effect of the structure of the dream,
is totally egoistical. As we know, Freud first demonstrates that every dream represents
the fulfillment of a wish. Then, taking the example of a “dream of convenience” (a dream
in which he tries to satisfy his thirst by imagining that his wife offers him an Etruscan
urn), he concludes that one could see how beautifully and efficiently everything was
arranged: “Since its only purpose was to fulfill a wish, it could be completely egoistical”
(SE IV, ). The thesis is reiterated several times in the following sections, as in the
section on “typical dreams”: “This would not contradict my assertion that dreams are
wish-fulfillments, but my other assertion, too, that they are accessible only to egoistic
impulses” (SE IV, ). When Freud suggests that the dreamer becomes a child again,
one cannot forget that for him, “[c]hildren are completely egoistic” (SE V, ). An
almost humorous footnote was added in , with a reference to a lecture given in the
 F Jean-Michel Rabaté

United States by Ernest Jones on “the egoism of dreams.” Jones met with strong resist-
ance when an American lady declared that the Freudian hypothesis was valid for Aus-
trians, but not for Americans: she was sure that all her dreams were strictly altruistic!11
The leitmotif of egoism in dreams recurs throughout The Interpretation of
Dreams until it acquires the character of a dogmatic thesis in the structural account
of the “Dream-Work.” Typically Freud retains the moralistic overtones of “egoism” in
his description of a structural function deriving from the position of the “subject of
enunciation” or the unconscious Cartesian cogito present in the dream:
Dreams are completely egoistic. Whenever my own ego does not appear in the con-
tent of the dream, but only some extraneous person, I may safely assume that my own
ego lies concealed, by identification, behind the other person; I can insert my ego into
the context. . . . Thus my ego may be represented in a dream several times over, now
directly and now through identification with extraneous persons. By means of a num-
ber of such identifications it becomes possible to condense an extraordinary amount
of thought material. The fact that the dreamer’s own ego appears several times, or in
several forms, in a dream is at bottom no more remarkable than the ego should be
contained in a conscious thought several times or in different places or connections—
e.g., in the sentence “when I think what a healthy child I was.” (SE IV, –)

What Freud offers us, in other words, could be called the “grammar of egoistic over-
determination,” in which the active and passive voices keep revolving around a mobile
subjective center—much as he was to propose later about fantasy in “A Child Is Being
Beaten.”12 According to Pommier’s logic, this grammar also paves the way for a new
grammar of ethics.
Freud’s analysis of egoistic dreams paves the way for a later development on the
writer as a person gifted with the paradoxical power of at once releasing and sharing
this egoism. In “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming” (), he points out the links
between children seriously engaged in playing, dreamers deeply ensconced in their
private images, and writers of popular fiction (“the less pretentious authors of novels,
romances and short stories, who nevertheless have the widest and most eager circle
of readers of both sexes” [SE IX, ]), who know how to create heroes with whom
we immediately identify. We identify with the recurrent figure of the hero to whom,
despite all the dangers braved, “nothing can happen”: “this revealing characteristic of
invulnerability we can immediately recognize—His Majesty the Ego, the hero alike of
every daydream and of every story” (SE IX, ). Popular fiction functions at the level
of daydreaming and panders to our childish fantasies: if all the women fall in love with
the hero in a totally unrealistic manner, we are nevertheless as flattered as if this might
happen to us. The difference between day- or night-dreamers, on the one hand, and
novelists, on the other, lies in a sense of participation.
We are bored or repulsed by the telling of intimate images or fantasies, whereas
we are kept interested by narratives that provide such great pleasure: “How the writer
accomplishes this is his innermost secret; the essential ars poetica lies in the technique
 “In dreams begin responsibilities” f 

of overcoming the feeling of repulsion in us which is undoubtedly connected with the

barriers that rise between each single ego and the others” (SE IX, ). Freud answers
his own question by disclosing the two most common techniques: “The writer softens
the character of this egoistic day-dream by altering and disguising it, and he bribes
us by the purely formal—that is, aesthetic—yield of pleasure which he offers us in the
presentation of his phantasies” (SE IX, ). Thus Freud’s view of literature is power-
fully simple: the function of art is a mere means to an end, which consists in the over-
coming of the barriers that separate one ego from other egos with the ultimate aim
of releasing the deeper egoism of a dream or a fantasy that can be shared by all. Art is
clearly reduced to a little bribe that will then release even greater pleasure—an “incite-
ment premium” or a “fore-pleasure” before a quasi-orgasmic ego-trip can be unleashed.
These ideas correspond with surprising exactitude to the argumentation put forward
by a very popular novelist who also happened to be have invented a whole philosophy
of egoism, Ayn Rand.
Ayn Rand was a professed Romantic, a writer attached to portraying ideal figures
and clinging to hero-worship. Her deliberate idealization provides a basis for a whole
vision of life in which raising one’s self-esteem implies understanding the rules of
radical egoism. Her earliest note for The Fountainhead, her first best-selling novel,
stresses this concept of egoism: “The first purpose of this book is a defense of egoism
in its real meaning.”13 Indeed, the rather contrived plot culminates when the “genius”
architect Howard Roark is led to dynamiting cheap buildings just erected for the poor
because his original design had been tampered with, and then he has to defend his
“egoistic” conception of art and life in court.
One idea put forward by Ayn Rand is that the egoist’s indifference to others frees
him from his petty delusions, restoring his self-esteem by bringing him in closer
contact with the Drive (the Freudian Trieb) hidden beneath his limited desires. This
constitutes a sort of inverse pornography, in a contagion of separateness affirming
the solipsistic structure of the drives. The Lacanian Master posits his absolute Ego
by considering only his relationship to drives, which then compels others to move into
a hysterical position of recrimination and theatrical negation until they themselves
overcome their limitations and turn into Masters. The narratological issue in these
novels boils down to an interaction between the intolerable demands arising from the
subjective entanglements of sexual desire and a truth to be sought on the side of the
solipsist drive underpinning creativity.
In Ayn Rand’s later developments of her philosophy, “Selfishness” comes to mean
“pure devotion to an ideal,” while “altruism” means a perverted spirit of sacrifice for
the masses instilled by any religion of God or humanity. These terms clearly evoke
more or less the opposite of what they mean in everyday discourse. And the main rea-
son one can find for her choice of “Objectivism” as the name for her system is that
she wishes to avoid any reproach of subjectivism or solipsism: for the only “objective”
value we have here is, in fact, the Freudian Trieb, posited as the single locus of truth.
 F Jean-Michel Rabaté

Since one should not take Rand’s philosophy too seriously, I would like simply to
point out that the weakness of her thinking is compensated for by a way of writing that
has managed to captivate her audiences. Tapping into the same logic that underpins
our dreams, she knows how to produce “page-turners” despite the general incoher-
ence of plot and the weakness of the writing. The explanation is to be sought in the
way Rand blends the allegorical vision of pulp fiction, in which everything is good or
evil, with a pretense of rationalization, which itself hides a fascination for the drive
hidden in desire. Her “philosophical novels” are simply extended versions of the Har-
lequin genre, in which the trick is always to produce a figure of “love at first sight” and
then to multiply obstacles until the desired reunion is achieved. In Rand’s fictions it
is always the woman who fears the absolutist character of love so that she will want
to destroy the object of her passion by killing it. We haven’t left the domain of day-
dreaming, but we are also addressing the heart of the problem of ethics in its intricate
connection with politics.
As Slavoj Žižek has remarked, in a subtle reading of Rand’s “hysterical lesbian-
ism,” this novelist “falls into the line of over-conformist authors who undermine the
ruling ideological edifice by their very excessive identification with it.”14 Her overen-
thusiastic endorsing of capitalism (which might also remind us of Freud’s curious
insistence on the idea that the dream plays the role of the capitalist with respect to
the unconscious) retains its hysterical force, so that somehow the Master’s discourse
is forced to confront his failure. Capitalism is never pure enough for Rand; it con-
stantly falls prey to the recurrent danger of collectivism or religiosity. “A pure system
of capitalism had never yet existed, not even in America; various degrees of govern-
ment control had been undercutting and destroying it from the start.”15 One of the
ironies besetting Objectivism in the domain of economics is that one of its most gifted
and famous disciples is none other than Alan Greenspan.
Since all her strong heroes, her “Prime Movers,” are embodiments of the
Freudian Drive in its autotelic affirmation, Rand’s position comes curiously close to a
certain feminism in her showing how her fascination for the masculine Will leads her
to a position of hysteria, but a hysteria that can be overcome, surmounted, and tran-
scended. The main fantasy is that the creative Ego can live and produce just for him-
self, independent of the gaze of the big Other—which is not tantamount to asserting
that the self makes up reality. What this can teach, finally, is that solipsism and relativ-
ism can be avoided if and only if the subject destroys his narcissistic ego in the name
of a transcending Egoism that contains the dialectical means by which it can be super-
seded (be it through an almost impossible gift or through an even more paradoxical
hospitality toward the other). Above all, dreams may yield the key to a more rigorous
sense of ethics by reminding us of the proximity between the Other and the other,
hinted at by a deeper echo, a submerged rhyme linking the darkest “navel” of dreams
to an openness to what I may have to call, in spite of all, “my neighbor.” The Neben-
Mensch is also a Nabel-Mensch, and this German pun is strengthened by the fact that
 “In dreams begin responsibilities” f 

it was with the famously personal and revealing Dream of Irma’s Injection that Freud
for the first time puts forth the notion of the “navel” [Nabel] of dreams.16
This abysmal site seems a strange place to secure a foundation for ethics, but it
is precisely because it can function as a nonplace or a “not-all” that ethics can keep its
radically dialogic nature, a nature put forward by Buber and Levinas, among others. It
is also the site at which ethics and aesthetics meet, as Lacan indicated by his startling
decision to read Antigone not as a play articulating a traditional ethical dilemma, but
as a drama staging the impact of feminine beauty on a collective audience. Thus we
are strongly reminded of the fact that dreams also stress the need to take into consid-
eration “the means of representation” and the “considerations of representability,” to
refer once more to chapter  of the Traumdeutung. It is in this scene of an “other” pres-
entation that my rebus language as well as our common language, shot through by
a shared Otherness, constantly touch their jagged borders: again and again they en-
counter their limits, showing us quite simply, as Wittgenstein had it, the site of ethics.

Notes
1. André Breton, Nadja, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, ), .
2. André Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism,” in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard
Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ), . I have slightly
modified the translation.
3. William Butler Yeats, Collected Poems (London: Macmillan, ), . Yeats gives as
his source an “Old Play.”
4. Gérard Pommier, “New Resistances to Psychoanalysis,” in Lacan in America, ed. Jean-
Michel Rabaté (New York: The Other Press, ), .
5. Hermann Broch, The Sleepwalkers, trans. E. and W. Muir (New York: Universal
Library, ), .
6. I quote Joyce Crick’s translation of the first edition of The Interpretation of Dreams
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), , .
7. The Traumdeutung has the phrase in italics with quotation marks the first time only
() and repeats it in the text on . Sigmund Freud, Studienausgabe II, Die Traumdeutung
(Frankfurt: Fischer, ); all subsequent references will be to this edition.
8. See Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (), in On the Genealogy of
Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, ), , and editor’s
note .
9. See the copious book put together by Reinhard Gasser, Nietzsche und Freud (Berlin:
Walter de Gruyter, ). Like most commentators linking the two authors, Gasser does not
mention the ominous presence of a Nietzschean “transvaluation of values” in the Traumdeutung.
10. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans. D. Porter (New York: Norton,
), .
11. See SE IV, , n. . Ernest Jones, who is quoted here, concludes a paper on “A For-
gotten Dream” with the remark: “Most of the individual features of Freud’s dream theory are
 F Jean-Michel Rabaté

also illustrated in the analysis, the almost grotesque egocentricity of the dream-thoughts.” See
Ernest Jones, “A Forgotten Dream,” in Papers on Psycho-Analysis (Boston: Beacon, ), .
12. See SE XVII, –. Symptomatically, Joyce Crick’s translation of the first edition of
The Intrpretation of Dreams downplays the theme of egoism. When Freud writes explicitly,
Träume sind absolut egoistisch, Crick translates, “Dreams are absolutely self-centred” (), as
if such Freudian “egoism” were in bad taste. For the German original, see Sigmund Freud, Die
Traumdeutung (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, ), .
13. Quoted by Barbara Branden, The Passion of Ayn Rand (New York: Doubleday, ),
.
14. Slavoj Žižek, “The Lesbian Session,” ; Lacanian Ink  (), .
15. Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness (New York: Signet, ), .
16. For the word Nabel, see Die Traumdeutung,  and .
 R . The Dream in
the Wake of the
Freudian Rupture
Willy Apollon

Translated by Steven Miller and

John Mowitt R

The Freudian Rupture Today

Even as he maintains remarkable rigor in his search for the validation of his clinical prac-
tice, Freud does not entirely subscribe to a certain conception of science—in particular,
to the conception of experimental science. Nevertheless the knowledge (le savoir, thus
translated passim) of psychoanalysis Freud invents only presents itself in experience.
With dreams Freud claims that a space other than the one defined by neuronal, synap-
tic, electrical, or chemical interconnections, and other than the imaginary, traverses, in
both man and animal, the psychical apparatus regulating them. This is a space where,
among other activities he will attempt to define, the dream produces thoughts. On the
other hand, these dream thoughts reveal the constitution of a knowledge, that is, intel-
lectual work, intellectual intuition, memory, logical reasoning, etc., to which conscious-
ness cannot gain access by its own means. And thus in inventing psychoanalysis, Freud
revolutionizes the very notion of experimentation as a mode of access to rational and
scientific knowledge. What he proposes—once he abandons hypnosis—is not to submit
the dream to a critical examination of the sort an experimenter would have carried out.
Instead he proposes that one trust in the dream as the bearer of another thought and
another logic, ones other than those animating the consciousness of both the dreamer
and the experimenter. Experimentation only gives access to what takes place in con-
sciousness, whether that consciousness belongs to the experimenter or to the subject
submitted to the experiment. Freud needed something else. He had to create the pos-
sibility of gaining access to this knowledge revealed by dream thoughts, access to a
mental object situated in a place other than the one to which consciousness has access.
Freud effectively subverts the notion of experimentation by grasping the dream
as an experience of the subject outside the fundamental conditions of consciousness—


 F Willy Apollon

conditions that are the basis of all experimentation with claims to be scientific. To
this end he distinguishes the narration of the dream from the experience of the dream
that the narration reconstructs. The very mode of his analysis of the dream is what
operates this distinction—an insight we do not often take into account. The excellent
work that today’s biological sciences have been doing on the dream tends to distract
us from this fundamental distinction. At the very least, when faced with this work and
this research, we should ask ourselves Freud’s question: What is a dream outside the
narration that evokes its experience only in reconstructing it? This question does not
concern the cat or the monkey, but it has to do with any one of our dreams. If it is not
taken seriously, the significance of the Freudian rupture with respect to this question
will escape us. When he analyzes the narration of the dream, what Freud in fact seeks
is precisely the experience of the dreamer; but what he attains is what he will call the
“dream thoughts.” On the one hand, the experience of the dreamer brings him up
against a real (un réel, passim) that will not yield to consciousness and its instruments
of analysis. On the other hand, the dreamer, upon awakening, remembers scraps of
this experience and attempts to reconstruct it in the signifiers through which his or
her consciousness grasps everyday life. Freud calls this passage—for a real conscious-
ness cannot assimilate to the signifiers through which consciousness grasps reality—
both a reconstruction and a transformation. Its product is the very loss of experience.
Only traces of experience remain, and these are what Freud interrogates. He thus sets
up his research on the experimental content of the dream as an inquiry. He puts him-
self in the position of those researchers and scientists who seek traces of the dawn of
humanity and the great stages of its history in order to reconstruct the movement and
the episodes of its evolution. He examines the smallest detail of the dreamer’s narra-
tion in search of an organization that would account for this intimate experience.
What he finds are strange remains, pieces of spaces and times, of a lost history, that of
the being’s confrontation with something it cannot assimilate. Every day, whenever
we decide to remain faithful to the Freudian discovery, we recreate this frustrating but
insistent experience with each of our patients. Everything happens as if the experience
of the dream were right there, always within reach, ever so close to being grasped by
consciousness, by intuition, and intelligence. But it remains ceaselessly out of their
reach—leaving us only scraps, these dream thoughts that, along with Lacan, we ana-
lyze under the heading of the signifier. We are left with this vortex, this hole where
even signifiers fail to articulate themselves and make sense, much less to deliver to an
intuitive or reasoning intelligence the long-awaited revelation.

Dream Thought and the Knowledge of the Other Scene

The difficulty begins when we start to wonder why Freud decided to follow the dream
rather than to submit it, as any other scientist would have done, to a critical examination.
 The Dream in the Wake of the Freudian Rupture f 

In effect, what we are dealing with when we deal with the psychoanalytic dream is a
narration (un récit, passim). The neurophysiologist considers the dream a product of
the brain, and his or her task is to analyze the verifiable manifestations of the brain
activities according to neurophysiological methods. He or she may identify its neuro-
logical and physiological components; he or she may attempt to scan a representation
of the activities of the brain in a dream state, and to make hypotheses about the links
between these activities and REMs during sleep. Doing all these things and doing
whatever else such a scientist can do, nonetheless this person does not thus have
access to what Freud calls a dream. The dream the biologist studies is definitively not
the one that Freud analyzes. The neurophysiologist does teach us many interesting
things about the function of the dream, about the way the dream functions as a mech-
anism allowing the living being to try multiple associations between the facts of mem-
ory and those of current perceptions in order to adjust the individual’s behavior to
changes in the environment and in the social group. The neurophysiologist also has
very instructive things to teach us about the function of the dream for the newborn
child, about the way it engages more and more complex explorations of the informa-
tion coming from various sensations, explorations that assure the child’s adaptation
and its early acquisition of survival skills. Basically the neurophysiologist always leads
us back to the idea of the utility of the dream in managing memories necessary to the
articulation between the individual and its group or environment, on the one hand,
and to the neuronal, synaptic, electrical, and chemical connections that, on the other
hand, assure the dream’s use in daily life. In so doing, this scientist comes close to the
idea, presumed to be Freudian, that the dream takes part in the management of
hypotheses, experiments, and solutions to which the individual has recourse, whether
conscious or not, in order to resolve the problems of everyday life. This is all quite
interesting. But it is fundamentally foreign to what Freud discovers through the dream
and what prompts him to revise his therapeutic techniques in order to adjust his clin-
ical practice to what he learns from the dream.
Indeed, the activities of the dream as considered by neurophysiology operate in
the space of perception, of sensations, and of memories, all of which consciousness
uses as tools in its analysis of situations, environmental modifications, and in its
efforts to solve problems of adaptation and survival. This is all certainly vital, but it is
limited to the dream’s function in survival. In contrast, the mental objects that Freud
calls dream thoughts operate in a space that is entirely other. It is not a space of lan-
guage, in which certain memories support in consciousness the relation of the living
being to its social group, the activities of its coexistence, and its survival. Let us take
as an example the phenomena of so-called culture that anthropologists have taught us
to recognize in chimpanzees, those primates genetically closest to Homo sapiens. Fol-
lowing the lead of certain psychologists, psychoanalysts try in vain to split language
into verbal language and nonverbal language when confronted with the discovery of
the function of language in the evolution of some species. Today it is necessary to take
 F Willy Apollon

account of the rupture of speech through which Homo sapiens transcends language in
order to have access to a space other than the psychical apparatus—for the apparatus
is precisely what Homo sapiens has in common with the other species sharing the
territory on which all must provide for their survival. Beyond the consciousness that
traverses the psychical apparatus, this rupture reveals the insistence of a knowledge or
this scene, where death is at work in the jouissance causing the subject of speech.

The Death Drive

The subversion of language by the upsurge of speech in Homo sapiens opens this
being onto a specific space determined by the structure of an address, in which a non-
programmed death is at work, a death not linked to the development and growing old
of the individual. In species for which the organization of social life is overdetermined
by the concern for survival, the structure and field of language regulates the activities
of communication both between individuals and the group, and between individ-
uals and the memories necessary for the analysis of new and dangerous situations.
Language thus becomes a dimension of consciousness and of collective memories
and their role in adaptation, survival, and reproduction. This is a concept of language
according to which the complete retention of the data passed between sender and re-
ceiver is as essential to consciousness and its functions as it is to the dream as a neuro-
physiological activity in the service of such functions. With speech, another dimension
intervenes within a specific field.
Beginning with Homo sapiens, the fact of speech introduces into language a
structure of address in which the hypothesis of the Other is central. The space struc-
tured by communication as the fundamental manifestation of a collective conscious-
ness that perceives, remembers, anticipates, and decides—such a space is subverted
by the structure of address to the Other introduced by speech, which presupposes
a subjective event, an event that is decisive and determinant for survival. Collective
consciousness does not have access to it. The point is that the space structured by an
address to the Other is the place of a work jouissance—the work of death imputed to
this Other. Indeed, humanity has never been able to speak except to address an inti-
mate experience to the group, an experience of which the group as such has neither
perception nor consciousness. Therein lies the ground and status of the notion of the
Freudian subject. Subjective speech constructs a space where mental objects translate a
singular intimate experience and to which no perception and no intellectual intuition
correspond. This experience with which the individual is confronted separates it from
the group and subjects it to something other than the concern for survival, adaptation,
and reproduction. The individual discovers a radical autonomy and break from the rest
of a collectivity, a break that progressively constitutes him or her in his or her subjective
solitude as the object of an anxiety that signals the proximity of his or her own death.
 The Dream in the Wake of the Freudian Rupture f 

In this experience, man claims to see and to hear beings who do not fall within
the bounds of common perception. One’s nights are not the only things haunted by
these “voices” and these “visions.” Some people claim to see a lost ancestor and to
receive revelations from this figure about their origins. Others conceive of the dream
as a voyage to another place, one more true than the space of collective life. Thus what
progressively emerges for humanity outside access to collective or individual con-
sciousness reveals itself to be more important than life itself—to the point of becom-
ing the axis of all collective life and all rules of coexistence. At the same time, Homo
sapiens becomes the only species the objective of which seems to be to destroy itself,
going beyond even the irrational tendency to destroy the environment in order to pro-
cure its subsistence. The concomitant upsurge in humanity of a space that transcends
the psychical apparatus and of the auto-destructive drive was never lost on the author
of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Totem and Taboo, and Civilization and Its Discon-
tents. Toward the end of Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud notes that the goal of all
life is death. Thus for him the opening of this space that subverts the psychical appara-
tus opens into the dream as the subversion of consciousness. That which is constructed
in the dream carries into biological life the logic of an antinomy. From this scene, other
than the one that governs consciousness, the work of a death inhabits the human
being, a death Freud calls the second death in that it is not governed by the same rules.
According to Freud, what the dream evokes on this scene other than consciousness is
the work of the second death, which leads the human being down paths unmarked by
the norms, the rules, and the ideals of culture. Confronted by an experience rendered
incommunicable by that which traverses consciousness and driving it to both its limit
and its disappearance, doubtless humanity was compelled to create speech.
Accordingly, speech communicates nothing. It evokes. It creates a space where
constructions accessible to consciousness are possible. The Freudian dream is a con-
struction of this order. In the same way that mathematical constructions make the
relations underlying numbers and algebraic operations accessible to intelligence rela-
tive to a space with definable and calculable limits, the narration of the dream, in effect
speech without a subject and inspired from an other place, constructs mental objects
and relations that make accessible to consciousness the phantasmatic logic whereby
death regulates the smallest details of our everyday life. The space of the Freudian
dream is this space, constructed by the rupture that subjective speech institutes in the
field of linguistic communication. For us—as for the first humans and for children—
what is elaborated in such a space is only calculable and constructed through a sub-
jective speech given over to a liberty defying the logic and rules of communication.
Freud evokes this speech liberated from language and its means of communication
with the concept of “free association.” In the narration of the dream, the dreamer re-
appropriates the experience that traversed him or her during sleep, and where the
dream thoughts have constructed a solution with regard to what will have been un-
assimilable for consciousness during its waking hours.
 F Willy Apollon

The Question of Transference

From The Project to The Interpretation of Dreams, what Freud discovers and puts to
work is a space that transcends the psychical apparatus by introducing into the human
being a relation to “thoughts,” mental objects, the logic of which themselves subverts
the powers and limits of consciousness. Freud has not yet elaborated his concept of
the second death as sustained by the death drive, but he already knows there must be
a particular instance to account for this space where dream thoughts fracture psychic
space. As we reread Freud today in the wake of Lacan, we know that already a jouis-
sance in which a death not programmed into our DNA is at work, structuring this
space, calculating, and deciding for us through the activity of the dream. To the very
extent that what, for Freud, is elaborated in the dream cannot be reached by means,
such as contemporary neuroscience posits them today, that consciousness has at its
disposal, regardless of whether these are understood as perception, intuition, intelli-
gence, or collective memories, or for that matter, even the will or the domain of the
sensible itself—to this extent it becomes a question for Freud of knowing by what
means or by what constructions such objects or dream thoughts can be made accessi-
ble to consciousness or intelligence, thus becoming either the object or the cause of
knowledge. To respond to this question, Freud will set to work examining what is at
work in the narration of the dream. Since the dream is, for the moment, the only expe-
rience through which he can gain access to what plays itself out on this other scene
and which introduces a rupture in the powers of consciousness, he will create a strat-
egy to enact this subversion of consciousness and the psychical apparatus and to ana-
lyze its effects.
Such are going to be the stakes of the transference for Freud: it is a strategy for
enacting what happens on this other scene so as to grasp its stakes, its logic, its means,
and its objects. And what if one were to object that the dream is already inadequate to
this task? In effect, the activity of the dream, to which the dreamer’s narration refers,
is precisely what confronts him or her with the work of the unconscious. The dream
is going to be the model upon which Freud will construct his strategy for gaining
access to what thus escapes consciousness and its powers of intuition, analysis, and
intervention. But what then is involved in positing transference as a strategy, modeled
on the dream, for gaining access to the knowledge of the unconscious? Couldn’t one
read The Interpretation of Dreams simply as a text sufficient unto itself? Why bring
in the question of transference? At stake here is a difficulty specific to psychoanalysis
as a practice and as a strategy of treatment. The great texts of Freud, such as The
Interpretation of Dreams, bear witness to Freud’s concern to take into account what
happens in the analytic experience as rigorously as possible. They are not primarily
theoretical texts developing a new conception of humanity within the field of the
human sciences. Only secondarily do they have such a dimension. They are first and
foremost writings meant to account for the clinical practice of psychoanalysis.
 The Dream in the Wake of the Freudian Rupture f 

The basic strategy of this practice is transference. Furthermore, the success of

clinical practice rests upon its ethical dimension, so much so that Freud will not hesi-
tate to recommend that Tausk give up working with this or that patient, arguing that
the patient seemed to lack ethics. It is within the framework of the strategy of trans-
ference that the ethical dimension assumes all of its importance and significance.
Accordingly it seems that the explication of a dream as an opaque text or rebus, and
the operation of interpreting the same dream by referring certain dream thoughts
to certain elements from the life of the dreamer, are two activities of a very different
nature. It is a question of two perspectives on the dream entailing two different read-
ings of The Interpretation of Dreams.
Here it becomes necessary to measure the importance of the concept of work
such as it operates in The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud literally says that the dream
works. But what is it, in fact, that matters about this dream-work? In fact it is only
somewhat later, with the analysis of the Rat Man, that we will be given a better idea
about what was already at stake in The Interpretation of Dreams when Freud refers to
the dream-work. Freud needs this concept to support his conception of the dream as
an experience in which the unconscious goes into action unbeknownst to the dreamer.
What does this concept represent in the scientific universe in which Freud’s thought
is immersed? The steam engine, electricity, and the telephone have barely been in exis-
tence for twenty to twenty-five years. The concepts of force and inertia in mechanics
and in physics are in the midst of their development, and they are transforming the
concept of work. In physics, the closely related notions of energy, transformation, and
the magnetic field, along with, in mathematics, the notions of construction, and the dis-
placement and the conservation of the properties of a set in the course of a displace-
ment—all these combine to make possible an entirely other approach to phenomena,
objects, and activities of spirit that, until then, had been inaccessible to consciousness
and its ways of knowing. When I say an entirely other approach, I mean an approach
that is as independent and autonomous from philosophy and metaphysics as it is from
theology and other religious discourses. It was Freud’s ambition to give his depth psy-
chology the scientific means to have access to the so-called activities of the spirit,
in order to found the clinical practice he calls psychoanalysis. From that early point
on, Freud already possessed a field of concepts that allowed him completely original
hypotheses about the possible construction of a model for the field of the unconscious,
of the forces at work there, and of eventual action upon such a field. The Interpretation
of Dreams is impregnated with these concepts, which articulate an epochal epistémè
for Freud.
For the analyst who adopts Freud’s position and his work, it is the clinical per-
spective that is determinant because of the ethical strategy of the transference. Thus
the analyst’s reading of The Interpretation of Dreams risks differing rather profoundly
from that of an academic intellectual or a scientific researcher. From the perspective
of the intellectual, The Interpretation of Dreams seeks the meaning of the dream in
 F Willy Apollon

analyzing the elements of the narration constituted by the givens of the dream. Intel-
lectual work contents itself with seeking the dream’s meaning in the givens of the
dream’s narration and with establishing on this basis a conception of the human or the
dream. This perspective is congruent with all the efforts to deepen our knowledge
about myth, even fantasy—considered from the point of view of its origins—and of
their respective functions. The scientific researcher, for his or her part, finds him- or
herself obliged to question the relation between the narration of the dream and the
experience of the dream as such. His or her technical means lead to concentrating
research on the nature of this experience and to reducing it to what is accessible to
what such research is capable of accounting for—in particular, to neurology.
From the perspective of the analyst it is the ethics involved in the transference
that will give the dream its function and its scope. For us analysts the transference cre-
ates a field on which it is possible to enact and to interact with this other scene that
traverses the psychical apparatus; and it is within this framework that the dream
becomes the royal road to the unconscious. Indeed in the analytic session, what is put
in play is the narration of the dream. This narration can be the seventh or the ninth
version the analysand tells him or herself, as he or she tries to get as close as possible,
or to distance him- or herself as far as possible, from what constitutes the kernel of
this experience of the dream. This experience is itself rather curious, since nothing the
dreamer claims to have seen or heard has in fact been perceived. Still, we cannot con-
clude this to be a hallucinatory phenomenon, particularly if we take into account its
frequency and universality in the human species. The narration of the dream presents
itself as a construction, in the mathematical sense of the term, one that gives con-
sciousness access to an experience that took place on a scene to which consciousness
itself does not have access. This construction as such is not a spontaneous activity of
the spirit, in the sense that it would have no orientation or predetermination. At the
moment that the mathematicians are asking themselves about a place where the mere
existence of numbers would allow the validation of their operation so as to respond to
the even more radical and decisive question of whether one can trust in the results
of these operations, two positions and two methods will confront one another. The
logicians will put their trust in the rules and principles that insure the rigor of the
demonstration, while the intuitionists will prefer to invoke the necessary construction
of the very place of such a demonstration. This is exactly the problem Freud was con-
fronting, and he responds to it in the same way as his contemporaries in mathematics.
In psychoanalysis, as in mathematics, construction is a rigorously oriented activity. It
is overdetermined by the assumption of a position that is only unveiled once the work
of construction concludes. Thus, the different versions of the narration of the dream
the analysand tries out, before choosing one to tell to the analyst, are transformations
of an initial construction that has defined the basic elements of the narration. It is this
work that we see Freud ceaselessly taking up in order to reach the initial construction
that has yielded the dream thoughts.
 The Dream in the Wake of the Freudian Rupture f 

Across a sequence of texts that runs from The Project for a Scientific Psychology,
The Interpretation of Dreams, and the case history of the Rat Man to “The Uncanny,”
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud establishes
a place, inaccessible to consciousness, where the destiny of the human being is de-
cided. He undertakes a construction that makes this place and its operations acces-
sible to consciousness in order to allow humanity to take a position with respect to
what plays itself out in this place. With such an undertaking Freud not only aims to
complete what Darwin and the evolutionists brought to the conception of humanity—
the scope of his work goes beyond that. He claims to allow humanity to participate in
its own place, subjectivity, to participate in what happens to it and passes beyond it,
rather than simply undergoing it. Such is the perspective within which, today, we
should belatedly situate The Interpretation of Dreams. The dream is that construction
that offers us a symbolic representation of what traverses us and carries us beyond the
axis of what we want and what we hope for. It is therefore the model for those con-
structions by which we might come to assume and participate in what exiles us from
the places of our biological, social, historical, and cultural entanglements.

The Clinical Consequences of the

Freudian Rupture Regarding the Dream
It is in the clinical practice of psychoanalysis that this operation of the dream, in-
separable from the rupture that Freud introduces within our conceptions of human-
ity, has its full impact. Today this practice—more specifically, the practice defined by
the action of transference—allows us to discern four dimensions in The Interpretation
of Dreams, and thus to recenter clinical work around Freud’s own objective: an ethics
that includes rather than represses, negates, or hopes to cure humanity of the dark
forces and unconscious thoughts that subvert human life. Indeed, transference counts
on a modification of the ethical position of the analysand with respect to the death
drive and the absence of the Other. In one way or another, depending on the particu-
larity of the clinical case, what the construction of the dream makes accessible to the
subject in analysis is a defect or discrepancy in the analysand’s ethical position with
respect to the work of the death drive within. In relation to this action of death drive,
his appeal to the Other, through which the analysand seeks to escape both his solitude
and his responsibility, remains futile. The dream thus confronts the dreamer with
something that, in a certain sense, cannot be logically assimilated. Freud invents the
transference, or the introduction of a third party, thus allowing for the construction of
a fictive address for the dream. Thus, Freud produces the transference as an interven-
tion within the construction produced by the Other, or the unconscious, in the dream,
even before this construction of the Other has undergone the analysand’s manipula-
tions and transformations. It is thus necessary for us to grasp the status of the fictive
 F Willy Apollon

address Freud introduces for the dream, insofar as the dream is a construction of the
Other meant to signify something. This fictive address is a position introduced into
the construction that the Other makes of the dream, in order to overturn its strategy.
In effect, the introduction of this fictive address transforms the construction that the
dream is into a message addressed to the analyst by the unconscious of the analysand.
This reversal, operated within the construction of the dream by the invention of trans-
ference, becomes fundamental in that it finally makes psychoanalysis possible as a
science of ethics, a science of the possibility of the subject’s intervention and partici-
pation in what affects it beyond and out of reach of its consciousness.

The Bad Encounter—A Real Consciousness Cannot Assimilate

In his model of the dream Freud thus shows us how the dream as an experience is a
construction produced on another scene, that of the unconscious, to make what plays
itself out on that scene accessible to the scene of consciousness. In more technical
terms, let us say that Freud makes the dream, as experience, into a construction of
the Other to represent what causes the subject on the scene of the unconscious. The
invention of transference introduces the element of fiction, or the hypothesis of an
address corresponding to the analyst or, more precisely, to his desire to know. And this
invention aims to steer the dynamic specific to this construction of the unconscious
toward a certain transformation. From there the analytic apparatus is ready to require—
through the dream—both the interpretation of the Other that is addressed to the
analyst and, within the same strategic field, the response of the subject in terms of a
change in its ethical position.
Within the framework of the transference defined as the condition of possibility
for the clinical practice of psychoanalysis, the subjective experience of the encounter
with the unconscious in the dream, or, of the jouissance in which the second death
does its work, as well as of the absence of the Other to the request of the subject—this
experience is submitted to a specific constraint. The dream thereby enters fully into its
own dimension as a discourse without a subject to which the constraint of trans-
ference proposes an address. One could underestimate, in effect, this fundamental
dimension of the dream, which presents itself in the narration of the dreamer, as a dis-
course the enunciation of which cannot be attributed to the subject of consciousness.
In its construction of a space in which the inaccessible and the nonlocalizable take
on a symbolic consistency, making them susceptible to evocation, this discourse of the
dream—like all discourse—presupposes a subject of enunciation the place of which
cannot be determined within the utterance itself. In other words, the dream does not
give us the Other who constructs the dream, but it does presuppose its position. The
status of this Other is calculable in the construction of the dream. But the ethical posi-
tion of this Other remains a problem. In other words: why does the Other construct
 The Dream in the Wake of the Freudian Rupture f 

the dream? This problem brings us back to Freud’s formulation: what does the Other
want of me?
Freud tells us that at the heart of the construction the dream is, that something
occurs as a vortex, something that can be treated as a black hole within the space cre-
ated by this construction. This is the navel of the dream. It is the point in the dream
where the signifier fails. In a way it is the internal limit of the dream as a construction.
At this limit point, the dream escapes all signification. Today, clinical practice estab-
lishes that this internal limit on construction nullifies in advance all interpretations
of the dream. Everything happens as if the dream were in fact the construction of
this internal limit, the calculation by the Other of a point that resists assimilation. This
translates perfectly the encounter of the subject with a real, with something that
remains fundamentally foreign to all the powers of consciousness, from perception
and intuition to the domain of the sensible and of the will. This encounter with the
real, which is at the heart of the clinical practice of psychoanalysis, opens the space of
the sublime for the subject, in that it realizes the rediscovery of an experience that
leaves reason powerless, but not indifferent.

The Defect in the Signifier—

Its Limit as the Ethical Moment of the Dream
This powerlessness of reason there at the place where the signifier fails in calculating
a fitting position for the subject in the dream is a decisive logical moment in the strate-
gies of transference. Freud did not underestimate the role of intelligence and reason
in the strategies of consciousness with respect to this intrusion of something other,
where a death propelled by the unconscious imperils the aims of the ego on the social
scene. Certainly he did discern, in the dream-work and in the processes of the dream,
that the whole mounting of the construction cannot do without the activities of intel-
ligence and reason—perhaps even to an extent outside the scope of consciousness. But
he also left us remarks of stunning insight—in his “Notes on Obsessional Neurosis,”
in his text on “The Unconscious,” and in his “Metapsychological Supplement to the
Theory of Dreams”—about intellectualization and rationalization in the distortions
of the dream. But this entire work of reason and intelligence encounters a limit that
the dream constructs so that it may calculate the position of powerlessness in which
the subject finds him or herself with respect to what is decided for him or her (or
against, but that amounts to the same) in the field of the Other.
The powerlessness in which the subject finds himself faced with this thing, the
work of death, and which the construction of the dream makes into the navel of its
narration, can be detailed in two forms. First, it takes the form of something impos-
sible to say with respect to what the subject encounters in the space opened by the
dream. This is undoubtedly one of the reasons for the revisions of the narration of the
 F Willy Apollon

dream—as Freud suggests in chapters , , , and  of The Interpretation of Dreams.

These revisions are not only attempts to obscure what remains unbearable for con-
sciousness in the experience of the dream; they also refer to the defect in the signifier,
to the fact that language is powerless to bear the speech of the subject faced with what
breaches consciousness. The “difficulty in saying” (mal à dire) the subject encounters
in its confrontation with the real, and which subtends the navel of the dream, is a
metaphor of castration in which the subject is sent back to the horror of its own death,
as well as to the solitude of the subject’s responsibility. It is not surprising that the re-
visions of the dream normally slant toward the forgetting of details surrounding the
bad encounter.
But even more radically, the moment at which the signifier turns out to be defec-
tive in the encounter with the real makes the subject confront the emptiness of the
ideologies with which consciousness arms itself so as to bolster the positions of the
ego in its relations with the other on the social scene. The knowledge the dream
thoughts make accessible to the analysand calls into question the ideological founda-
tions of his or her narcissistic positions. This is important to observe in the clinical
practice of dream analysis today. The knowledge of the dream obliges the subject to
reconsider its ethical positions, in the sense that such knowledge progressively un-
veils the way the logic at work in the phantasm radically contradicts the aims and the
pretensions of the ego on the social scene. The knowledge of the dream also brings
to the light of day not only the mode in which death is at work in the symptom, but
also the profound link uniting this work of jouissance to the structure of desire, where
the scenario of the phantasm offers up an imaginary construction. These effects of the
dream-work are not spontaneous. They presuppose, of course, the constraints of the
transference by virtue of which an ethical commitment detaches the analyst from
the stakes of his or her own narcissism, so that the transference may center on the love
of that knowledge produced by the activating of the unconscious in the dream.
Chapters  and  of The Interpretation of Dreams show us evidence that the
dream-work triggers the action of the unconscious, from which the analysand derives
a new knowledge of what until then consciousness had been unable to assimilate. But
this activation of the real of jouissance in the unconscious is precisely what both the
analysand and the analyst can come to dread. The occurrence of such a shared fear
is precisely what Freud cautions us against in transference love, where the process
of transference is reduced to a dual relation between the analysand and the analyst. In
the case of neurosis, such an approach to transference, in which the narcissism of
the analyst takes the place left empty by the absence of the Other of the unconscious,
can only become an obstacle to the work of the unconscious. In perversion it can
only transform the work of transference into a competition and a fight to the death.
In psychosis this approach to transference only makes it swerve into erotomania.
Against such impasses, only the ethics of the analyst, which keeps the transference
oriented toward the love of the knowledge to be derived from the dream, can sustain
 The Dream in the Wake of the Freudian Rupture f 

the action of the dream that puts the unconscious to work in the production of knowl-
edge of jouissance.
The knowledge coming from this putting to work of the unconscious in the
dream through transference undermines all the certainties and assurances that sup-
port the ego in its assumption of positions on the social scene. The analysand is thus
constrained to make an ethical choice between, on the one hand, the knowledge that
comes from the experience favored by the dream-work and, on the other, the preser-
vation of both the ideological and narcissistic positions taken up within the social
bond. The analysand comes up against these ethical stakes from the moment the navel
of the dream forces him or her to confront the powerlessness of the signifier with
respect to the real that surges up on the occasion of the dream-work. This limit to
saying and to interpretation, which the process at work in the structure of the dream
seems to calculate, leads the analysand into a singular solitude where he or she is faced
with the unbearable thing the dream brings into the open. At this limit of the dream-
work, the subject is alone faced with the real, and with the unsustainable exigency of
that subject’s responsibility for its own acts. It is this precise moment that the ethics
of the analyst pinpoints in the clinical analysis of the dream. No interpretation—least
of all the analyst’s—can substitute for the exigency that an ethical position or decision
come from the analysand at this strategic moment. The Freudian dream thus assumes
its full meaning as a demand coming from the Other that the subject alone should
decide about its relation to jouissance. The knowledge that supports the dream-work
is then the subject’s only support with regard to this demand from the Other.

The Response to the Desire for the Analyst’s Knowledge

The dream-work, which allows analysis to count on the production of a knowledge
that contests the ideological and narcissistic position of the analysand to the point of
compelling him or her to take a new ethical position, comes about due to the maneu-
ver the analyst performs in establishing the transference. This maneuver is made pos-
sible by the conception of the dream that can be deduced from chapters  and  of The
Interpretation of Dreams. Here the dream is conceived of as the construction of a
space where the dynamic in which unconscious thoughts are put to work culminates
in a representation of desire. What is at stake, then, is knowing by what means the ana-
lyst can obtain this activation of the unconscious that gives rise to a knowledge about
jouissance as it is metaphorized in the representation of desire.
Here the conception of the transference as love of the knowledge expected to come
from the unconscious assumes its full clinical importance. In effect, the dream is clearly
not a matter of passing from interpretation to interpretation. It is a matter of recogniz-
ing how the dream calculates the point that limits the reach of interpretation, a point
at which the analysand is required to take a position with respect to the knowledge
 F Willy Apollon

coming from the Other about the real of jouissance. The strategy of the analyst thus
becomes decisive. In other words, because the Freudian dream entails the specific work
of constructing a space for the representation of the activated knowledge of the Other,
it presupposes both a psychoanalytic act as well as the ethical position of the analyst
at its foundation. Not every dream has the characteristics of the dream Freud speaks
of in The Interpretation of Dreams. Every dream is not a psychoanalytic dream. The
transference as such must be involved in it, as must the analytical act that supports the
transference. This is what clinical practice belatedly imposes on us as its conditions,
compelling us today to reread The Interpretation of Dreams from a new perspective,
one that, at least to me, seems closer to what Freud was seeking to do in writing it.
What, then, is thus required of the analyst as the condition of the dream in the
analytic experience? What is properly required is that the analyst takes up Freud’s
position with respect to the dream at the moment that he was writing The Interpreta-
tion of Dreams. But what is Freud’s position at this precise moment, such as it appears
in the structure and the global strategy of his writing? It is obvious that Freud was not
interested in an eventual dual relation between himself and any of his patients, and
even less in what might be repeated between them about the affective block between
his patients and one or both of their parents. What interests Freud is only gaining
access through the dream to a knowledge elaborated on the scene of the unconscious
in the course of the analytic experience, a knowledge that escapes the grasp of the
means he has at his disposal as an intellectual, a man of science, and a researcher; it
is a knowledge that also escapes the consciousness of his patients—but also a knowl-
edge that Freud expects to come from the organization and the work of the dream
itself. One of the most stunning but also notorious revelations to come from the expe-
rience of the passe and the contrôle—by which today we can, in certain cases, verify
or even validate Freud’s most daring affirmations and intuitions—is that the dream
does not spontaneously, nor in the absence of constraints, yield the stakes of what is
woven together on the scene of the unconscious. For this to occur several conditions
are necessary—though, curiously, they are not sufficient.
Today the repetition and resumption of the analytic experience make it belatedly
apparent that Freud’s desire to know was fundamental in triggering the process of the
dream as it is put to work in The Interpretation of Dreams. Also apparent is that the
very least one can demand of the analyst in the experience of the treatment is that he
or she take on Freud’s desire to know—if only because it pertains to what, from the
other scene, drags the life of the analysand through the arcana of despair and suffering.
This ethical constraint of analytic practice on the position of the analyst is built
into the analyst’s experience of his or her own cure to the extent that, in his or her expe-
rience as an analysand, the transference was a matter of taking on the desire to know of
the analyst in the form of love (if not passion) for the knowledge the analyst expected
from his or her own dreams. Like Freud, in effect every true analysand, who has left
behind a therapeutic demand for love, the demand for help, or the appeal to the Other
 The Dream in the Wake of the Freudian Rupture f 

so as to take over from the analyst the desire to know, is aware of this passion, which
prompts him or her to wait only for the Other, to await across the dream (among other
manifestations), this knowledge where his or her unconscious constitutes itself as the
discourse. Strengthened by this experience, the analyst then takes distance from every
dual relation into which the patient might drag him or her by means of the narration
of the patient’s sorrows, or exploits, or with any attempt at conversation. The analyst
confines him- or herself to the exigency of knowing what, from the place of the uncon-
scious, motivates the avatars of the patient’s life. The analyst’s concern for knowledge
must be cultivated from both his or her silence and interventions, until it becomes
something the analysand can share. It is within this ethical problematic that the desire
to know of the unconscious joins the analyst and the analysand together in the same
work, in which the dream acts as a response of the Other to the desire to know, which
binds the analysand and the analyst to the same passion for knowledge.
What functions as knowledge in this response of the Other in the dream is jus-
tified in the dream-work itself, as Freud conceived it. This work is at once a matter
of constructing a symbolic space, the place of the other scene, and the activation of
the drive upon this other scene. But as we have suggested above, the narration of the
dream incorporates the experience of this construction and this activation into the
dream thoughts as a discourse lacking a subject of enunciation. The analyst’s desire
to know is articulated around a question that addresses the subject’s bad encounter
with the real—an encounter that, in the form of day residues, provoked the dream. Of
course the analyst wants to know what weaves itself together on the other scene of
the unconscious. But he already knows, thanks to his own experience, and to Freud’s
indications, that the dream questions the ethical position of the subject with regard
to what it would recoil from during its waking hours. The dream is interpretation.
Within the regime of the signifier and its defect, it deploys a certain relation of the sub-
ject with a real that, as a stranger, intrudes upon the subject’s everydayness. It is this
relation of the subject to the death at stake in the jouissance before which it recoils that
becomes the object of a desire to know on the part of the analyst. Thus it is not sur-
prising that such a desire constructs the strange body as an object or as a constraint
within the work of elaborating the dream, so as to construct the subject’s relation to
jouissance. It is in this sense that we say the desire to know introduces into the dis-
course without a subject the constraint that it be addressed in such a way that the nar-
ration of the dream constructs the interpretation of the Other concerning the ethical
position of the subject with regard to jouissance.

An Unpleasant Surprise for Reason at This Beginning of the Century

With The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud issued us right into a depth psychology—
at an initial stage, that was his term—that submits our conceptions of humanity and
 F Willy Apollon

spirit to a rupture that subverts both the psychical apparatus and consciousness, giv-
ing spirit all the room it needs for the revolution undertaken before him by Darwin. In
fact, with this text—the profound meaning of which escapes us if we separate it from
The Project for a Scientific Psychology and from Beyond the Pleasure Principle—Freud
introduces a decisive point of view that radically changes our approach to the question
of spirit. In it he constructs the model for a space that traverses the psychical appara-
tus, a space inhabited by the forces of death that fundamentally contradict our ideas
about life, social coexistence, and even natural evolution. Our concept of life finds
itself subverted by this death, which, in accord with a logic that does not obey simply
the laws of biology, leads life to death’s door. Or rather, in accordance with Freud’s
wishes, these are the very laws that his conceptual contribution would revolutionize.
Our notion of society, guided by a civilization haunted by the idea of enviable progress,
is compromised by an internal discontent where the worst is not the enemy of the
good. All of our most modern conceptions will be contradicted in advance by this dis-
content, and will be so to the precise extent to which they are developed in the shad-
ows of a quasi-religious caution and an interdiction upon thought that were initially
imposed on Freud’s works, within both the field of medicine, with its scientific and nat-
uralist orientation, and the field of politics with the rise of Nazism. The oddest thing
that Freud’s text announces, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, is that the
good news is that the dream thoughts are the worst nightmare of a humanity whose
only objective in life is death. These dream thoughts contest constituted knowledges
and the pretentions nourished by them. They calculate the limits of such knowledges
with regard to an ethic according to which humanity, in total solitude and faced with
its future and that of the environment, must take responsibility for its successes, as
well as its errors.
 R . Freud’s Dream
of America
Patricia Gherovici R

F
ully immersed in a book I was writing on hysteria in the Puerto Rican ghetto,
I chanced upon historical material about the colonial history of the United
States at the end of the nineteenth century. It was in that connection that I
reopened the pages of The Interpretation of Dreams in which Freud describes
one of his most peculiar dreams, a dream of a castle by the sea, a dream of naval war,
too, a complex narrative dealing with the Spanish-American War (SE V, -). This
was the war that ended with the annexation of Puerto Rico by the United States;
it meant the end of four hundred years of Spanish domination over the island, and
it inaugurated a new form of colonialism for the United States. You can imagine my
surprise and excitement when I discerned a confirmation that this historical incident
had left unmistakable traces in Freud’s own dreams.
We tend to forget the echoes of colonial struggles that found their way into The
Interpretation of Dreams, above all because we rarely associate the Austrian context
of the turn of the century with overseas imperialism. In this essay I wish not just to
test the extent of my own interpretive paranoia, but to reconstruct the circumstances
surrounding Freud’s momentous discovery of the meaning of dreams. By a curious
historical coincidence, one of the most influential findings of the twentieth century
took place at the same time that Puerto Rico was passing to U.S. control. In the name
of liberty, justice, and humanity, American forces occupied Puerto Rico, beginning a
new chapter in the Caribbean island’s colonial history. “Our purpose is to grant all
those who may come under the control of our military and naval forces the advantages
and benefits of civilization,” proclaimed Major General Nelson A. Miles upon occu-
pation of Puerto Rico on July , . In his invasion speech, Major General Miles


 F Patricia Gherovici

announced the “advantages and benefits of civilization” and expressed his desire “to
put the conscience of the American people into the island.”1 If the conscience of the
American people was going to be put into the island, however, one may wonder about
the fate of the Freudian repressed, and most important, of the unconscious, now
“under the control of military and naval forces.” To start answering, let me quote Freud
describing his dream:

A castle by the sea; later it was no longer immediately on the sea, but on a narrow
canal leading to the sea. The governor was a Herr P. I am standing with him in a big
three-windowed salon, in front of which rise projections of walls like fortress battle-
ments. I belong to the garrison, perhaps as a volunteer naval officer. We fear the
arrival of enemy warships, because we are in a state of war. Herr P. has the intention
of going away; he is giving me instructions what to do in case of what we fear. His sick
wife is with his children in the besieged castle. When the bombardment begins, the
big hall is to be vacated. He breathes heavily and tries to get away; I hold him back
and ask him in what manner I should let news reach him in case of need. Then he says
something else, but at once his head sinks down dead. I may have overstrained him
unnecessarily with questions. After his death, which makes no further impression
on me, I wonder whether the widow should remain in the castle, whether I ought
to announce the death to the Higher Command, and whether I should take over the
control of the castle as next in command. Now I stand at the window and inspect the
ships, which are passing by; they are merchant vessels, which rush rapidly past on
the dark water, some with several stacks, others with bulging decks. Then my brother
is standing beside me, and we both look out the window upon the canal. At one ship
we are frightened and cry: “There comes the warship.” But it turns out that only the
same ships are coming back which we have already seen. Now comes a little ship,
comically cut off so that it ends in the middle at its broadest; on a deck there are pecu-
liar cup or box-like things. We cry out as of one mouth: “That is the breakfast ship.”2

In his analysis of this dream, Freud acknowledges that the dream contains allusions
to the maritime war between America and Spain and to anxieties it had created about
the fate of his relatives, who had recently moved to New York. He explains that the
deceased Herr P. appears as a substitute for himself, from which we may infer that
Freud was one of the first casualties of the Spanish-American War. Freud’s personal
connection with this war could be seen as having wider implications. Perhaps the
creator of psychoanalysis was already aware of the ominous consequences of Ameri-
can colonialist aspirations at a time when the United States looked to the Caribbean
islands as territory to be conquered. What is even more ominous is that the dream
describes an Etruscan urn looking like a boat—quite similar to the Greek urn in which
Freud’s ashes were to be deposited in .
To understand better the political implications of the day-residues that have
elicited this dream, it is indispensable to recapitulate certain events that Freud does
not develop in his analysis of the dream, but that quite strikingly reappear in his rec-
ollection of it. They arouse our suspicion because they emerge in Freud’s dream not
 Freud’s Dream of America f 

just as distorted remnants, but almost as word-for-word transcriptions of what he

had read in Austrian newspapers about the Spanish-American War. Although Freud’s
interpretation of the dream alludes to them in passing, because he seems more inter-
ested in idiosyncratic or private associations leading to a distant past (an enjoyable
Easter trip to the Adriatic, a trip to Venice, some Etruscan pottery, mourning customs,
funeral boats, gloomy thoughts of an unknown future), the material of the dream is
brought forth by the curious historical events that took place in the month preceding
it. To enhance scientific neutrality, Freud chooses in his narrative to downplay the
obvious political content of the dream.
After a careful examination of all the issues in the daily paper, Leslie Adams
asserts that this dream must have taken place on the night of May –, .3 This
thesis is confirmed by all the curious details that crop up in it. At this time there were
fears that New York might be attacked by the Spanish fleet. Freud’s dream recombines
elements of the battle of Manila, which was fought on May , the news of which
reached the media by cable only a week after, on May . It is clear that Freud had read
the relatively bewildering account of the battle, which was spread over the first three
pages of the Neue Freie Presse on the morning of May , .
Here are the events that preceded the dream. After mounting tension between
the Americans and the Spaniards, the USS Maine, which had come into the harbor of
Havana on a friendly visit, was shattered by an explosion and sank on February ,
. President McKinley was notified in his bedchamber that  Americans had
been killed. The Hearst press began throwing the American people into fury with a
saga involving an endangered, virginal, young, beautiful woman who had been kept
unjustly in prison by the Spaniards. War was actually declared two months later, on
April . By May , the world press reported that a strong Spanish squadron under
Admiral Cervera had left the Azores and taken to the high seas in a westward direc-
tion. Would it attack America or the West Indies? The fear extended along the coast,
reaching as far as New York. Lighthouses were dimmed and buoys were placed from
Maine to Florida. The whole Atlantic coast was on the lookout for enemy ships.
Worried watchfulness was the mood in every newspaper during the following days.4
Only on May  did the Neue Freie Presse make it clear that the Spanish fleet had
been sighted off Puerto Rico, which implied that it was headed for the Antilles and
not New York.
While this international drama developed, a dreamlike series of events had un-
folded elsewhere. Admiral Dewey, in charge of part of the American fleet, had been in
Hong Kong when the war began; he then sailed into the Pacific and had been lost to
view. On the last night of April, Dewey, aboard his flagship Olympia, led his fleet into
the harbor of Manila. This action should have led to certain destruction according to
the principles of warfare because the Spanish fleet was entrenched and supplied in a
land-locked harbor, well protected by the guns of fortresses. At five o’clock on Sunday
morning, May , Dewey’s fleet swept in front of the enemy squadron in single file, as
 F Patricia Gherovici

if in a parade. The Spanish fleet began to fire, but the American ships swept on, not
answering the fire, in exasperating contempt of the poor marksmanship of the enemy.
It looks indeed as if the historical event already had the structure of a dream.

“Call off for breakfast!”

The most astounding element of this episode was the behavior of Admiral Dewey.
According to contemporary press reports, including those in the Viennese papers,
which covered the battle in great detail, he stood on his bridge quietly, remarking on
the weather and the distant hills, saying that they reminded him of his native Vermont.
A half hour went by while his fleet swept back and forth, coming into ever-closer
range. He finally uttered, “You may fire when you are ready, Gridley.” Sailing in closer
ellipses, the American ships all opened fire. At half past seven, after two terrible hours
of steady firing, Dewey ordered, “Call off for breakfast!” This was a command that
became world famous. Admiral Dewey interrupted the battle at breakfast time, just
when conditions for battle were excellent and there was no resistance on the enemy’s
side. Some men cried out, “For God’s sake, Captain, to hell with breakfast; give it to
them now,” while the Spaniards raised a great shout as they thought the Americans
were fleeing. After breakfast the firing resumed and lasted several hours. Finally, when
the smoke was gone, the Americans could see that that all the Spanish ships were sink-
ing or on fire. Captain Cadarso, commander of the Reina María Cristina, had fallen
dead on the bridge and had been replaced by his second in command, who was im-
mediately killed. The rear half of the ship had been blown up, and Admiral Montojo,
commander of the fleet, would not quit the other half. The marksmanship of the
Spaniards was obviously terrible: during the battle not one shot of theirs hit any tar-
get. Half an hour past noon—in time for lunch—the Spanish fortress hoisted the white
flag. Even though the scene of destruction was awful, with flaming hulks, shattered
fragments of ships, and the water-battery devastated on the Spanish side, this was
nonetheless a “clean war” for the Americans, as not one single person on their side had
been killed.
During the breakfast cease-fire, however, the Spanish, who controlled the city
of Manila, had sent a message of victory to Madrid. Later they sent a second message
of defeat, concealed in comforting euphemisms. Although victorious, Dewey was pre-
vented by the Spaniards from using the cable. Exasperated, he fished it from the sea
and cut it. As a result, the outcome of the battle was learned only much later, when
a ship reached Hong Kong. Thus for a whole week the Americans knew that there
had been a battle, but they were not sure whether Dewey had won or whether the
Spanish fleet was heading to New York. Finally, the full story was published in Vienna
on the morning of May . Only a week after the battle did the public realize that the
Spaniards had been defeated and that New York was out of danger.
 Freud’s Dream of America f 

We see many elements of the dream appearing as repetitions of the battle events.
Let us review just a few: Freud talks about “the arrival of enemy warships, because
we are in a state of war,” and says “I hold him [Herr P.] back and ask him in what man-
ner I should let news reach him in case of need. Then he says something else, but at
once his head sinks down dead. I may have overstrained him unnecessarily with ques-
tions.” It is easy to imagine how “overstrained” the international public may have been
then, submerged in tense expectation after hearing contradictory accounts, fearing an
attack on New York and worried about the uncertain results of the battle. “I wonder
whether I ought to announce the death to the Higher Command, and whether I should
take over the control of the castle as next in command.” During the battle, Captain
Cadarso, commander of the Reina María Cristina, was killed, and, like Herr P., he was
replaced by his second in command. Since the cable had been cut after the battle, nei-
ther the general public nor even even the High Command were properly informed.
Who was in control “of the castle” remained unknown between May  and May .
“At one ship we are frightened and cry: ‘There comes the warship’. . . Now comes
a little ship, comically cut off so that it ends in the middle at its broadest; on a deck
there are peculiar cup or box-like things. We cry out as of one mouth: ‘That is the
breakfast ship.’” The appearance of the seemingly nonsensical “breakfast ship” is self-
explanatory after Dewey’s striking, dreamlike breakfast cease-fire and his famous
command. As for the strange shape of the “little ship, comically cut off so that it ends
in the middle at its broadest,” let us recall that the rear half of Captain Cardarso’s ship
had been blown up, and that Admiral Montojo, commander of the fleet, had refused
to quit the other half.

Safe on his ship, the old man quietly sails into port
This dream of Freud’s provides an excellent example of the function of overdetermina-
tion: “[T]wo interpretations are not mutually contradictory, but both cover the same
ground; they are a good instance of the fact that dreams, like all other psychopatho-
logical structures, regularly have more than one meaning” (SE IV, ). Let us note
that in this dream the day-residues do not seem to undergo many distortions; they
are not mere allusions, but reappear almost intact in the dream material. Since, as
Freud says, “our dream thoughts are dominated by the same material that has occu-
pied us during the day and we only bother to dream of things which have given us
cause for reflection in the daytime” (), the political implications of the dream are
even more relevant.
I shall now concentrate on the striking political and historical relevance of this
dream, taking advantage of the positive character of overdetermination. Freud does
not see the dream as having only one unique and exhaustive meaning; rather, he
sees it as a point of emergence for a series of meanings. Louis Althusser’s concept of
 F Patricia Gherovici

overdetermination (for something to occur, there must be several conflicts at work)

can help in this case, since the Freudian heritage in Althusser’s “symptomatic read-
ing” of Marx’s Capital confirms that we need to cross the gap between the social and
the individual.
Each of Freud’s dream elements is overdetermined. Even when motivated by
very personal and idiosyncratic circumstances, every point is nonetheless traversed by
the effects of a wider context, betraying a connection with social structure. Following
Lacan’s topological model, one can read the dream as a knot tying different meanings,
corresponding to various levels, together. From this perspective, the Freudian idea of
overdetermination demonstrates that the dream has several causes working together,
bringing about a new concept of causality. If, however, the manifest content of the
dream seems to be motivated by very identifiable daytime ideas, I do not want to stress
only one meaning. Thus, I would also like to speculate on the psychic factors instigat-
ing this dream in order to trace back its latent content. In this regard, Freud himself
offers a lucid interpretation of the dream. He alludes to a line of Schiller, “Still, auf
gerettetem Boot, triebt in den Hafen der Greis” (Safe on his ship, the old man quietly
sails into port), allegorizing life and death. He analyzes this dream as expressing fears
about his own death.
Interestingly, Freud notes that the Governor’s death left him quite indifferent,
despite the fact that his analysis showed that Herr P. was a substitute for himself.
Freud’s fears involve the future of his family after his premature death. The profound
impression awakened by the arrival of the warship led him to recall an event that had
occurred a year earlier, during a “magically beautiful day at the room on the Riva degli
Schiavoni” in Venice. At the sight of a ship, his wife had cried out “gaily as a child: Here
comes the English warship.” When those words reappear in the dream, they are cause
for deep fright.
The “tense and sinister impression” at the end of the dream is produced by the
return of the shipwreck (Schiffbruch, literally “ship-break”)—the cut-off, broken-off
ship. Freud analyzes the appearance of the “breakfast-ship” by referring to the word
English, which is the leftover of his wife’s phrase, Here comes the English warship, which,
in the dream, becomes “Here comes the warship.” This missing signifier reappears in
the word breakfast (literally, breaking fast). “Break” relates to “ship-break,” which
returns intact, and “fast” becomes “fasting,” then connected to mourning dress. Freud
notes that the breakfast ship was comically cut off, and that on the deck there were
peculiar cup-like or box-like things bearing great resemblance to some objects that
had attracted his attention when he had seen them in Etruscan museums. They were
rectangular trays of black pottery similar to modern-day breakfast sets. These were, in
fact, the toilette objects of an Etruscan lady. The idea of black “toilette” relates also
to mourning dress, thus making a direct reference to death. Then Freud attributes the
origin of the “breakfast-ship” to the English word breakfast, here linked to both ship-
breaking and the black mourning dress:
 Freud’s Dream of America f 

[B]ut it was only the name of the breakfast ship that was newly constructed by the
dream. The thing had existed and reminded me of one of the most enjoyable parts
of my last trip. Mistrusting that food would be provided at Aquileia we had brought
provisions with us. . . . And while the little mail steamer made its way slowly through
the “Canale delle Mee” across the empty lagoon to Grado we, who were the only pas-
sengers, ate our breakfast on deck in the highest spirits, and we had rarely tasted a
better one. This then, was the “breakfast-ship,” and it was precisely behind this mem-
ory of the most cheerful joie de vivre that the dream concealed the gloomiest thoughts
of an unknown and uncanny future.5

Here life and death converge, as in a pagan wake, in which intense joy and deep fear
all get played out in this rich dream. Behind a memory of the happiest joie de vivre, the
jouissance de vivre emerges. Freud’s analysis about what lies behind the coining of the
“breakfast ship” includes the phrase, “The thing had existed.” It is almost impossible
not to hear echoes of both Freud’s and Lacan’s elaborations on das Ding, the “unfor-
gettable thing” that ex-ists beyond our attempts at symbolization. The dream stops
when the domain of the Real is encountered.
Still Freud chose not to explore the evident parallel between his inner thoughts
and the sociopolitical realm. However, the impact of the historical events that may
have brought up “the gloomiest thoughts of an unknown and uncanny future” were
clearly there.

So the dream will be

In a letter to Fliess written one year after this dream (May , ), Freud calls the
Traumdeutung simply der Traum (the dream) and writes: “So the dream will be. That
this Austria is supposed to perish in the next two weeks made my decision easier. Why
should the dream perish with it?”6 As William McGrath observes, even though Freud’s
“ironic estimate of Austria’s durability was not borne out, Freud’s sense of impending
political disintegration was well founded”:

The bitter divisions over language, nationality, and class that beset the Habsburg
Empire seemed to threaten its existence repeatedly during the closing years of the
nineteenth century, when Freud was engaged in what proved to be his most impor-
tant scientific project.7

As McGrath notes, Freud’s comment sets the writing of The Interpretation of Dreams
against its political background, demonstrating Freud’s awareness of how profoundly
influenced his “dream” had been by the political conditions of his day.
During his analysis of what is called the Castle by the Sea Dream, Freud men-
tions that the dream-work brings about a suppression of affects. Thus, it reduces intense
 F Patricia Gherovici

emotions to a level of indifference. Since political issues often raise intense emotions,
can we say that the suppression of the political implications of a dream is due to their
highly emotional tone? I will contend that political elements not only make their way
into the dream, but that the collective is a formation of the unconscious, itself compa-
rable to a dream.
Manila’s almost surrealist battle had baffled the principle of noncontradiction,
since both sides for a while were uncertain about the issue. If there were political alle-
giances for Freud, they were mixed. On the one hand, he was worried about his rela-
tives living in New York. Four years earlier, in , the brother of Freud’s wife, Eli
Bernays (who was married to Freud’s sister, Anna), had emigrated to the United States,
and in  his relatives were living at  Madison Avenue (between st and
nd Streets). However, Freud’s position in the dream, fearing the arrival and attack
of the breakfast-ship, may remind us that he was not very fond of America, that he
considered it a “gigantic mistake,” being the “anti-Paradise” and “useful to nothing else
but to supply money.”8 We may assume that Freud regretted the defeat of the Spanish,
perhaps in the name of the long-standing Spanish-Austrian alliance, and sided with
the former Empire, now weakened and victimized. An earlier event in Freud’s life will
shed more light on the content of this dream.
Freud had a particular transferential relationship to the Spanish language, which
he fondly called “the beautiful Castilian tongue,” and which he had learned on his
own at a young age. As an adolescent, he founded an exclusive secret society with his
intimate friend, Edward Silberstein. This he called the “Spanish Academy.”9 So as not
to allow the others to understand, they used Spanish as a secret language. Freud had
taught himself Spanish to read Don Quixote in the original. Perhaps, in the same way,
he had set aside—in fact abandoned—hypnosis to teach himself a new language, psy-
choanalysis, so as to listen to the unconscious in the original dialect of hysteria.
Let us remember that Freud had this dream in , three years after the pub-
lication of Studies on Hysteria, thus at a time when he was establishing the foundations
of psychoanalysis. When he abandoned hypnosis and created psychoanalysis, Freud
abandoned a therapy that was structured like a crowd, according to the demonstration
of Massenpsychologie. (Freud states that, in hypnosis as in the crowd, the psychic
mechanism at work is basically the same.)
Freud’s main thesis describes hypnosis as a crowd of two, an idea that is taken
not in the metaphorical sense, but quite literally. What is at stake for both hypnosis
and for the crowd is group identity. Crowds erase difference because they crave con-
formity: they need a master to love and to be loved by, without any concern for truth.
Whenever we find mass phenomena, we encounter segregation. Segregation is not a
secondary consequence, but the condition of a crowd’s formation. Segregation is what
constitutes the crowd.
Segregation is the disavowal of difference. All group formations erase difference
because their constitution is based on a principle of identity. Any attempt to stress
 Freud’s Dream of America f 

differences, no matter how minimal, can be experienced by the crowd as an attack that
threatens its very existence. Against the grain of the logic of group formations, psycho-
analysis opens up a space of tolerance for difference if analysts are prudent (remain-
ing on their guard against the temptation of playing the prophet or the master), and if
they stubbornly refrain from the practice of suggestion, that is, if they abstain from
exercising a form of hypnosis (and from producing a therapy that can be called a
crowd of two).

The crowd, the dream of dreams

Freud renders the meaning of dreams intelligible; he makes the royal path to the un-
conscious interpretable. Nonetheless, as we have seen, in his analysis of this dream
he chooses to disregard any of the obvious political implications of its content. Is this
because psychoanalysis is a clinical practice built upon singularity, difference, and
particularity? Then how can it stand up to the challenge of history, which entails an
engagement with collective formations? How is the psychoanalytic practice affected
by the political conditions of its day? How far do the affairs of the city extend? Could
it be that psychoanalysis, in spite of its love for knowledge, passionately ignores, in fact
actively “resists,” the social?
At the very end of the dream, at the sight of a small ship, Freud and his brother
cry in one voice, “That is the breakfast ship.” Freud tells us about this last scene of his
dream: “[T]he rapid movements of the ships, the deep dark blue water and the brown
smoke of the funnels—all this combined to create a tense and sinister impression.”
What rises up at the end of this dream seems clearly to be anxiety. As Freud and Lacan
formulate it, anxiety would be the radical way in which the subject sustains, even in an
unsustainable way, a relationship with his or her own desire. Freud’s dream ends with
breakfast, marking the end of the night; satisfying the desire for hunger; waking up
from history to the concrete needs of everyday rituals: it is time for breakfast. The
war—even the dream—can wait. Admiral Dewey himself had repeated this gesture in
going from the collective imperative of the war to the individual need for food, punc-
tually interrupting the battle to have breakfast.
As we have seen, the brothers Freud cry in one voice: “as of one mouth” would
be a literal translation of the German. One might think of another mouth, the one and
only mouth, the open mouth leading to the throat at the back of which Freud found
the secret of dreams. When Lacan, in his second Seminar, discusses the dream of
dreams—the dream princeps, that of Irma’s Injection—he mentions in passing this
very dream about the Spanish-American War.10 There, in fact, Lacan establishes a
peculiar connection between language, segregation, and psychoanalysis when he pro-
poses a correlation between the crowd and the dream. His specific topic of discussion
is the ego seen under the light of his mirror-stage logic. Here Lacan notes that the
 F Patricia Gherovici

narcissism we see in dreams is not there for the subject from the start, but rather is a
“new psychic act,” as Freud calls it: it comes into being in the mirror stage, the ego does
not exist before a relationship with a semblable is started. The borrowed image of
one’s own body is appropriated in anticipation, and it becomes the principle of every
unity the subject may perceive in objects. At the time Lacan was still telling the ego-
psychologists that the subject of the unconscious is decentered in respect to the ego.
Thus, this subject is alienated and in a constant state of tension, perpetually in a state
of fictitious unity in a world structured around the wandering shadow of the ego.
Lacan even calls this an “egomorphic” world.
In dreams, because of an easing-up of imaginary relations, this constitutive
alienation is even more poignant. The very truth of the subject appears exposed in its
decomposition, in the real brought by the night, and which usually culminates in anx-
iety. Referring to the Irma Dream, Lacan adds that there is a moment when some-
thing of the real, something at its most unfathomable, is attained. He therefore
explains how the quest for signification contains a moment at which the meaning
of the Dream of Irma’s Injection is revealed to Freud. Strikingly, Lacan names this
moment the crowd, stating that this crowd is not just any crowd, but a crowd struc-
tured “like the Freudian crowd.”11
What is Lacan doing when he describes the revelation of the secret of dreams
as a crowd? Lacan puts this moment in the dream side by side with the Freudian crowd
(the type of crowd that Freud analyses in Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse) because
he locates an analogy in their structures: both the dream and the crowd are forma-
tions of the unconscious that result from a failed jouissance and, as such, are equiva-
lent to other formations of the unconscious, such as parapraxes, slips of the tongue,
and symptoms.
Using these sets of equivalences, one could better understand how the ahistoric-
ity of the unconscious is traversed by history; how the political is articulated with the
subjective; how the sexual and the group life are intertwined. The crowd illustrates
the relationship of each member with its own image. If Lacan compares the dream
to the Freudian crowd, it is precisely because this crowd, according to Lacan’s reading
of Freud, is structured as the image of the body of the subject; indeed, it is structured
as a polycephalic subject or even an acephalic subject.12 It is well known that the Irma
Dream allowed Freud to discover the royal path to unconscious desire. If dreams and
the Freudian crowd share a common structure, a dream or a crowd can be read as an
“inmixing of subjects.”13 This corresponds to the dialectics of intersubjectivity, which
take place when a subject is constituted in its interacting, “mixing” in with things or
with other subjects as counterparts: the genesis of meaning has no other site. Accord-
ing to Lacan, subjects only become subjects of speech (barred subjects) once speech
exists, and there is no before. The polycephalic subject of the crowd is made up of
the imaginary plurality of the subject, of the multiple identifications of the ego. Lacan
 Freud’s Dream of America f 

notes that this polycephalic subject is almost an acephalic subject, a subject that no
longer has an ego, and yet is the subject who speaks and gives to all the characters in
the dream their nonsensical lines.
The acephalic subject speaks the nonsense of the dream beyond the ego, re-
vealing a knowledge, for instance, of the arrival of the uncanny breakfast ships of the
Spanish-American War—called “a splendid little war” by the U.S. Secretary of State,
John Hay. This is the war that included both the famous battle of Manila, which was
punctually called off for a breakfast break, and an invasion of Puerto Rico, which was
often described in military records as a “picnic.”

Identity Is Structured Like a Crowd

Lacan notes that Freud says, about his dream, something Freud himself paraphrases as
“I’m not in the dream where one might think. The character who just died, this com-
mandant who is with me, it is he who is I.”14 The fact that Freud was not situated in the
dream where one might suppose him to be uncovers the unfathomable, fundamental
component of the narcissistic relation upon which identity is based. This is the same
type of relation revealed by the crowd as by hypnosis—an identity always constructed
in alienation, that is, as other. This dialectic entails a passionate rapture and overjoy:
I am the other, the other is me.
In the dream context, the Spanish-American War, to which Freud is alluding,
resulted in a new form of colonialism for the United States, and has had lasting con-
sequences that are still changing America’s identity today. The rise of the Hispanic
“crowd” brings up questions about race, identity, and culture. Indeed the Hispanic
could be seen as the repudiated other of the construction of American identity.
If the Hispanic as other is segregated, we could say that this separation occurs
precisely because of its role as the leftover other upon which identification has been
built. Here the mirror stage appears replayed in racial disarray. As the paradigm of
all resemblance, the specular, anticipated image of the body functions as an image
alienated in a fictional figure. The Hispanic as marginal would appear as the other
under the domination of its American counterpart. However, in this dialectic of Other
and other it is not so easy to determine, in these pendular oscillations, who is the
one and who is the other. This fascination with the image of the other will bring over
into the world of objects a tinge of hostility or transgression, by projecting onto them
the manifestation of the narcissistic image. When facing a fellow being, the pleasure
derived from meeting oneself in the mirror is transformed into an outlet for the most
intimate aggressiveness. This aggressiveness emerges full force in racism, and runs
the risk of being resolved through murderous or suicidal aggressiveness.15 This logic
of identification entails that one cannot see oneself, but one can find one’s image in
 F Patricia Gherovici

the neighbor in the crowd, granted that there is a leader that occupies the place of
the ideal.
Freud’s dream collapses the individual together with the collective, because these
are in fact inseparable. Identity is structured like a crowd. The transference that makes
all groups cohere is part of a movement, started by love, that always includes some
narcissistic element, and can at times crystallize in a “crowd of two” when the object
is placed in the position of ego ideal (Ichideal), as in the process of hypnosis.
How could the crowd be the model for subjective identity? One might well assert
the contrary: a crowd would abolish the subject, who gives up her individuality to
belong to the crowd. But in fact the logical order is reversed: first there is the crowd,
second there is the individual; first the dream, afterward the subject. Something quite
extreme takes place, both in the crowd and in the dream. A truly dramatic instance
may indeed have been lost in translation. Isn’t Freud’s Massenpsychologie mistranslated
into English as Group Psychology? Why is the signifier “group” replacing that of the
crowd? William McDougall makes it clear that a group is not a crowd. Interestingly, in
the Spanish version of Freud’s complete works, among the illustrations accompanying
the text of Massenpsychologie there are two pictures taken in the United States around
. The captions claim that crowds became part of the American life years before
they appeared in European countries.
If there is a discrepancy in translation, the reasons may be both geopolitical and
chronological. It seems that the first part of the twentieth century has been rightly
called the age of the masses, from Le Bon to Canetti,16 and that the end of the last
century has been variously described as the age of nationalities or of minorities. Could
it be that we need to shift our conceptual paradigms to address a different situation,
one described by Michel de Certeau as that of “culture in the plural”?17 Can we over-
haul the model of identification, mass hysterization, and mass delusion, of which
we formerly have made great use? Has the mass phenomenon been extinguished and
replaced by mass-media phenomena? Or is the idle crowd of Massenpsychologie, re-
pressed by a linguistic slippage in its mistranslation as “group,” returning with a ven-
geance in the “mass” of the Hispanic minority? If in the present, the “crowd” has been
replaced by minority “groups,” as collective formations these nonetheless share a com-
mon pattern, that of a similar and failed jouissance. Perhaps it was also in the name of
jouissance that since October  in Washington, under waving flags, tens of thou-
sands of Hispanics gather massively. “Gone are the days when people could talk about
Latinos as a mob without ideas and without a political program,” declared Juan José
Gutierrez, director of Coordinadora , the group organizing the march. Nonetheless,
the event was portrayed in the New York Times as “the first mass protest organized
by Hispanic people in the nation’s capital.”18 This is how the journalist described the
event: “[A]s much as the march and rally reflected anger among Hispanic people, it
was an attempt by many participants to display pride in their heritage and to remind
the larger society of their presence.”
 Freud’s Dream of America f 

Freud’s Dream of Amerika

According to Freud’s own logic in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (),
even though his “Spanish Academy” had but two members, it was already a collective
formation, a crowd of two, and conceivably a repetition of the mythical primal horde.
This myth, often contested because of its weak anthropological foundations, is in fact
an ahistorical myth used by Freud because this Darwinian fantasy allows him to
explain the function of the father as what guarantees the place of a speaker who may
believe that jouissance is possible. However, it is at the level of the brothers, who feel
guilty afterward, that things start to move for civilization. Back to the dream: Herr P
is dead, left behind are his wife and children. Freud and his brother stay alone in charge
of the garrison, taking care of the castle and of the wife and children. A replay of the
old totemic myth? The immediate historical context traverses this dream, creating a
continuum between Freud’s private psychic life and the political world. The collective
is not opposed to the unconscious. As Freud’s dream illustrates, the collective is itself
a formation of the unconscious.
Why is Freud dreaming about this war, fought far away in foreign lands? His
interest in the war was probably influenced by the political situation of Vienna at the
time and by the prevailing sense of looming disintegration. The  government of
Count Badeni obtained the anti-Semitic Christian Socials’ support, which had a pro-
found emotional significance both for Jews and for Germans nationalists.19 Freud may
have been identified with both groups. We also know of the growing anti-Semitism in
Vienna at the time, and of the direct impact it had on Freud’s career. His dream of his
uncle with the yellow beard (February ) shows his concern about his university
appointment being blocked by anti-Semitic pressure. Freud was obviously in the posi-
tion of the segregated other. On the other hand, Peter Gay notes that Freud honestly
admits, in The Interpretation of Dreams, that in his life he needed an enemy as much
as a friend. Therefore, Gay understands Freud’s lifetime staunch anti-Americanism as
a construction of a gigantic collective manifestation of the enemy he said he couldn’t
do without.
The Viennese Jew Freud may have seen America as “Amerika,” that is to say as a
mystic writing pad upon which to project his experience of otherness—as may have
been the case for the Czech Jew, Kafka. Neither Kafka, when he wrote Amerika, nor
Freud at the time of the dream, had visited the United States. America was the most
familiar and most strange at the same time, fascinating in and through its otherness.

Life Is a Dream
Freud woke up from his dream of the Spanish-American War, but the United States
still dreams this same dream of a Hispanic-versus-American War over and over
again. Latinos have become the largest U.S. minority (a crowd!), and, given massive
 F Patricia Gherovici

immigration and high birthrates, by  nearly one quarter of the U.S. population, an
estimated ninety-six million people, will be Latino. Hispanics overall are younger than
the rest of the nation’s population. They are also the least educated and the poorest:
 percent of Latino children in the United States live in poverty, the highest poverty
rate in the country’s history.
I have suggested elsewhere that the United States constructs itself as an empire
with the Spanish Empire as the repressed Other. Therefore, the role of Hispanics, as
Spanish-Americans becoming the “first” minority, is crucial. If Martin Luther King
were here with us today, he would not say “I have a dream,” but exclaim “[W]e are the
dream, we are the crowd, we are the Real thing.” Or perhaps he would repeat the mem-
orable words of the main character of Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s Life Is a Dream. In
this play, the imprisoned Polish Prince, coincidentally named Segismundo (Sigmund!),
had been kept in a tower since birth by the King in order to foil the prediction that his
fate was to bring disgrace to the kingdom and his father’s downfall. After years of
imprisonment the King had a change of heart and the young man was brought to court
for a trial while in a drugged sleep. Awakening to the majestic grandeur of the court,
he saw his father, the King Basilio, and vengefully tried to attack him. The guards in-
tervened, and Segismundo, asleep, was returned to his prison. Back in his tower, he
believed that everything was just a dream. Nonetheless, when a peasant revolt liberated
him, Segismundo was magnanimous with the vanquished King and, aware that his
new life was but a dream, this time he behaved more prudently. This was what he said:
I dream that I am here,
burdened with these prisons,
and I dreamt that in another,
I saw myself in a more joyful state,
What is life? A frenzy,
What is life? An illusion,
a shadow, a fiction,
and the greatest good is small;
all life is a dream,
and a dream, is a dream.20

If we agree, as the mirror stage teaches us, that the collective is a formation of the
unconscious, and that the individual, far from preceding the crowd, is in fact produced
by it, then the unconscious is at once singular and yet traversed by the plural. The
unconscious makes of the collective a singular question. The subject, however, is lost
in the dream, but reappears in the telling of the dream. Freud’s originality as a psy-
choanalyst was in taking the dream in its associations to its forgotten parts. This is
to say that Freud takes the dream as the telling of the dream. What is important in
clinical practice is that the dream can be told; the dream makes us speak. If the social
link materializes oneiric life, then, paraphrasing Gérard Pommier, one may say that the
social link allows us to dream while awake.21
 Freud’s Dream of America f 

Notes
1. Ralph Hancock, Puerto Rico: A Success Story (Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand Co.,
), . Quoted by Roberta Ann Johnson in Puerto Rico: Commonwealth or Colony? (New
York: Praeger Publisher, ), .
2. SE V, –; translation slightly modified.
3. Leslie Adams, “A New Look at Freud’s Dream ‘The Breakfast Ship,’” American Jour-
nal of Psychiatry  (): –. I am much indebted for a very careful examination of the
Neue Freie Presse articles.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., .
6. Sigmund Freud, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, –
, trans. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, ), .
7. William McGrath, Freud’s Discovery of Psychoanalysis: The Politics of Hysteria
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), .
8. All quoted in Peter Gay, Freud: A Life of Our Time (New York: Doubleday, ), .
9. Ibid., .
10. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory
and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis –, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: W. W.
Norton & Co., ).
11. Ibid., .
12. Ibid., .
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid. This passage that Lacan mentions is found at SE V, , , and .
15. See Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection (New York: W. W. Norton & Co, ), –.
16. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (; New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, ).
17. Michel De Certeau, La cultura en plural (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Nueva Vision, ).
18. Steven Homes, “Hispanic March Draws Crowd to Capital,” New York Times, October
, , .
19. The language conflict between the Czechs and the Germans was resolved by the
government of Badeni, which had the support of Karl Lueger’s anti-Semitic Christian Socialists.
They assured him of their support or abstention in parliament in return for the confirmation
of Lueger as mayor of Vienna. This development offered cause for profound anxiety to all Jews
living in Vienna.
20. My translation.
21. Gérard Pommier, Libido illimité—Freud apolitique? (Paris: Éditions Point Hors Ligne,
).
This page intentionally left blank
 R . Literature and
Pathology
Masochism Takes the
Upper Hand
Avital Ronell R

Unbearable Examples of Suffering

Ever resisting the temptation to be born again, even today, as we mark the one-
hundredth anniversary of its initializing text, psychoanalysis was from the start just
about the only one to confront human cruelty, the punishing aspects of the psyche,
without a theological alibi—in fact, with no alibi or safety net. Psychoanalysis ventured
forth without an alibi—with no excuse, as it were. This is one of Derrida’s recent
themes: that psychoanalysis met head-on with unbearable examples of suffering, but
took no recourse to theology. It may have scanned monotheism, or even served as wit-
ness for Dr. Schreber when he took wedding vows to the Almighty, but it rigorously
steered clear of cutting a deal with transcendental power brokers.1 Psychoanalysis
took no recourse, had no alibi, but bravely faced the facts of human cruelty. The tra-
jectory of Derrida’s argument leads him, via psychoanalytic writings on war—“Warum
Krieg?”—to pass severe words on the United States, the only Christian and democratic
nation to uphold the death penalty. Why has psychoanalysis as a political body had
nothing to say about this state of affairs? Psychoanalysis, which has had so much to say
about death drives, paranoid aggressions, annihilating forces, and has itself led a num-
ber of historical initiatives that are yet to become comprehensible to us? From the
start, psychoanalysis viewed itself as a legitimate transmitter of dissident views and
did not hesitate to voice them publicly or privately (as in the correspondence between
Freud and Einstein, to name but one example, where the uninterrogated principles of
war are at issue). In its own way, according to different idioms, psychoanalysis put out
a call for revolution. In fact, it has jammed the switchboard with such calls: a micro-
revolution should occur in every analytic session. A lot remains to be done, not the


 F Avital Ronell

least of which involves responsibility and a fuller understanding of that for which psy-
choanalysis is held responsible.
We are here because psychoanalysis is mortal. Psychoanalysis is ineffaceable,
irreversible, but like every civilization, mortal. It needs our testimony. Psychoanalysis
has taken suffering seriously, that is to say, without justifying or transcendentalizing—
approving—suffering, without taking recourse to the Christian reappropriation of pain
that is always in some measure seen as justifiable. Pain is unjustifiable. As Jean-Luc
Nancy has written, it is perhaps unjustifiable that pain be unjustifiable.2 Still, anyone
who tries to present a case for its justification is a stoic or a Christian or worse. One
could be a Hegelian, getting by on the “work, patience, and pain of the concept.”
Nonetheless, there is an area where suffering and distress tend to subsist on them-
selves or expand their scope by morose delectation or masochistic surplus. And here
we enter the area that I would like to tour. It would be more accurate to say, remem-
bering the architectural cues and spatial mappings of the T-deutung’s injection of
Irma, that we are entering the propylaeum of what I hope to see—if seeing is at issue.

The Question of Stupidity

I would like to inflect these preliminary notations in such a way as to consider a kind
of symptomatology—actually, a parasymptomatology—that flies beneath the radar of
psychoanalytical appropriations. Here I am not speaking to those fields or grammars
of behavior that were excluded from the purview of psychoanalytic intervention—in
the sense that paranoia was acknowledged to exceed the probe of Freud’s thought—
but with a view to discerning what delimits the field of psychoanalytic responsibility
today and engages the aporias of understanding with which it accounts for its insight.
To some extent psychoanalysis is a figure for understanding—possibly, indeed, for
the irony of understanding, so that the limits of understanding become a crucial con-
cern for those of us engaged with and by analysis. For his part, Freud was scrupulous
about naming his hesitations and doubts as he proceeded; he submitted himself and
his work to rigorous tests, and he was prepared to retract or revise at a moment’s
notice. The diction of doubting with which he often approached a problem remains
exemplary. Freud’s hesitations were rigorous. To this end, he was necessarily on the
side of and an exponent of tremendous Bildung, capable of mobilizing prodigious eru-
dition to assist in the effort of sense-making.
Let me state my question, then: It is not clear to me what, on this side of class
struggle, he would do with the class of Dummkopfs—a certain slacker ethos, or the
reserve of cultural stupor so widespread today, a class of phenomena that cannot
be reduced to the protocols of resistance or transferential stalls with which we are
familiar. I am asking about a psychic space beyond—or, more exactly, beneath—that
of resistance.
 Literature and Pathology f 

Masochism gets close—but no cigar—in terms of the problem I am trying to

approach here: namely, it demarcates, in Freud’s various writings on the subject, a
psychic slump toward a radical passivity and primary stupor that are susceptible to
at least two appropriations. There is good stupor and bad stupor, just as, in another
context, there is good and bad memory (the Hegelian split between Gedächtnis and
Erinnerung) or the good pharmakon and the bad pharmakon. There is, for instance,
the philosophical experience of stupor, disclosive of what is “awesome,” the sheerly
stupefying stupor, what occupies Heidegger in the Freiburg lectures, namely the Greek
experience of thaumazein.
What of the irrecuperable stupidities? A major phobia in the lexicon of learn-
ing, expulsed from any Wissenschaft worth its salt and originary wound, stupidity also
opens up new unintelligibilities (as F. W. Schlegel might have said), an unexpected
range of noncognitive stammers, marking at times a new beginning, repeating the
philosophical primal scene of stupor. Stupidity stumps and stunts anyone who tries
to approach it critically. It also points to what has been historically inappropriable: the
banality and stupidity of evil, as Hannah Arendt says of Eichmann.
So let us consider the way psychoanalysis has considered or, in some instances,
evaded such cognates of unknowing as puerility, idiocy, ignorance, stupidity—para-
concepts that have been evicted equally from philosophical and psychoanalytical
premises. Still, philosophy itself, in its empiricist days, had to smuggle in the idiot-
child, to invent it, in order to account for the radical experience of stupidity; or rather,
in the works of Locke, Hume, Condillac, in order to arrive at an originary type of
memory. Psychoanalysis shares with philosophy a refusal to admit the problem of
stupidity into its door or onto its couch—but for entirely different reasons that have to
do perhaps with deploying another logic, lending support to the blunder, motivat-
ing linguistic misfiring, accommodating the uninsurable reference or reading the
anasemic stumble. On a more everyday-life kind of level, should such a thing exist, it
was rare to have Freud be bored by his patients or remark on the dimwittedness of one
in his charge. On the contrary. Rat Man was highly intelligent, we are told on several
occasions, and why wouldn’t he be? He had read some Freud, as Freud himself tells us,
setting the countertransferential machine in motion. There is no question regarding
Wolf Man’s or Irma’s or Dr. Schreber’s or Anna’s or Dora’s or even Little Hans’s in-
telligence. Nonetheless, when Freud gets to Dostoevsky, he begins to write of mental
impairment by means of epilepsy and masochism.
In the meantime, between then and now, psychoanalysis changed its tone and
began deploying, at some level of rhetorical consciousness, a diction that involved—
well, stupidity—as if the affect of discovering stupidity in the other would give it some
traction. The tone in a number of essays and seminars of Jacques Lacan would be exem-
plary in this instance. For here is a thinker who is not shy about outing even his own
disciples as imbecilic. Melanie Klein is painfully stupid, but manages (accidentally) to
get it right. The Americans are hopelessly stupid (ego psychologists). Lacoue-Labarthe
 F Avital Ronell

and Nancy have achieved in their book on him what no student of Lacan would
be capable of doing, being too dumb to grasp the true stakes of his return to Freud.
Nor should we leave out of consideration Lacan’s reflections on the idiot king, when
he scours the psychic interior of the despotic ruler. There is something unquestion-
ably Nietzschean about treating practically everyone as puerile and stupid (though
Nietzsche never did so: he credited stupids with cleverness and, at most, with acting
stupid or like Christians, who introduced a substantially new and improved wave of
stupidity, revaluating and honoring the stupid idiot: o sancta simplicitas!). Be that as
it may, when Lacan developed the need for establishing a crowd of ordinary, delusional
Dummkopfs in his seminar and at his lectures, psychoanalysis began setting up the
masochistic imperatives of true learning. The masochist signs on with an educator,
enrolls in a kind of oedipedagogy he is bound to flunk or maybe even pass—what is
important is that he is bound to it.
Freud mentions masochism three times in the T-deutung—linking it at one
point with “humiliation in thought,” and later on, in his article on Dostoevsky, con-
necting it to a certain kind of ethical behavior. As we ask the question of responsi-
bility, of what it is to and for which we hold psychoanalysis responsible, we want to
understand the exhaustion, the depletion of the psychoanalytic subject; we do not
want to leave out of the picture what persistently poses a challenge to my sovereignty
and autonomy.

The Epistemé of the Airhead, Knucklehead,

Birdbrain, Space Cadet, Bimbo, Etc.
Where politics intersects with ethics, the question emerges of where to draw the
line—if there is one—of responsibility. To be what it is, responsibility must always be
excessive, beyond bounds, unaccomplished. You are never responsible enough; and it
is unclear whether, like Heidegger (whom I discuss at length, but not today), it suffices
to say, “I made a stupid mistake” (in  I made the dumbest—untranslatability, blah-
blahblah) in order to adjudicate a lapse in responsible thinking. To explore the extreme
limit of such responsibility I have appealed to the debilitated subject: the stupid,
idiotic, puerile, slow-burn destruction of ethical being that, to my mind, can never be
grounded in certitude or lucidity or prescriptive obeisance.
Some of these issues are most compellingly addressed by the troubled writer,
Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose acute sense of answering for the other is frequently in-
voked by Levinas: “We are all responsible for everyone else—but I am more respon-
sible than others.”3 Dostoevsky teaches us about the assumption of ethical liability
by placing responsibility close to the extinction of consciousness, at the point where
it becomes necessary to ask: what can be assumed by the limited subject? The domain
of the human all-too-human, menacing enlightenment with knuckleheadedness,
 Literature and Pathology f 

punctually threatens hopes of an original ethicity, which, in the case of The Idiot, Dos-
toevsky also posits.
Freud had a significantly ambivalent relationship with Dostoevsky, one that
allowed him to posit a link between masochism and ethicity while deploring the man
Dostoevsky himself. To shed some light on this difficult relationship, I have to travel
at warp speed, I’m afraid, according to a new algorithm of the Entstellung or distor-
tion, which the T-deutung teaches. Freud’s quarrel with Dostoevsky is over idiocy, or
the medical appropriation of idiocy. But this quarrel is secretly allegorized in the text
of The Idiot itself.

Holy Simpleton!
Within the folds of The Idiot a slow burn occurs, a contained rage against the impu-
dence of stupidity, all of this waged in a battle, it would seem, over small narcissistic
differences. Dostoevsky seeks to establish a strong boundary between stupidity and
idiocy to offer sanctuary to the sacred alien, Prince Myshkin, whose purity is menaced
by neighboring narratives of stupidity. (Please bear with me as I fast-forward to Freud’s
discussion of masochism in conjunction with Dostoevsky.) For theological Reasons,
Dostoevsky needs to keep idiocy clean, close to kenoticism—the humiliation and
emptying out of Christ.
Dostoevsky’s figure for stupidity, from which he tries continually to distance the
sacred idiot, is Gogol’s character, who is last seen scarfing a pie. In a gesture of extreme
ambivalence, Dostoevsky escorts the reader to his literary father, the “great writer”
Gogol, should the reader be invested in reading a brilliant exposition on stupidity.
Making straight Gogol’s territory, he clears the runway for essential idiocy. The image
(fixed by Dostoevsky citing Gogol) of gorging on a pie offers a considerable contrast to
the emptying out of self for which the Idiot stands.4 The stupid subject, the Gogolian,
is generally fortified, defended, living within a calculated economy of compensation
and disavowal, holding it in and keeping it up. He subsists on a system of denial that
does not deny itself a thing.
The Idiot?—Well, the Idiot can’t hold anything down or be sure of very much. In
any event, there is little material consolation here, and the confidence for which his
simplicity allows falls on empty spaces. He lives on the edges of nihilist temptation, a
permanent evacuee who cannot be said to appropriate much of a thought—nor do
we witness him eating, that is, assimilating, digesting, ruminating. Judging from his
elaborate condemnation of capital punishment, he remains a passionate advocate for
social justice. Closed in on himself, unavailable to the registers of social anxiety, the
subject of stupidity, here as in the novel’s other examples, is nowhere in question, but
protected, satiated, full . . . of himself. It—stupidity—is the closest we mortals come to
an experience of plenitude. Myshkin, running on empty, keeps tripping over a body
 F Avital Ronell

that will not hold still, much less hold him together; he is a traveling mark of insuffi-
ciency, open and exposed, politically anxious and socially improbable.
In a sense the sudden inclusion, the determined intrusion of Gogol in the novel
seems to be saying, kettle-logic style (I’ve had to sacrifice a close reading of this pas-
sage here): I, Fyodor Mikhailovich, am not writing on stupidity, which has been beau-
tifully addressed by my mentor, to whom I owe so much; frankly, it would be too
tedious for me to be writing on stupidity, which is so ordinary; in any case, even if I
were writing on stupidity, that subject, as I underscore, has been covered by the great
writer, Gogol, to whom I refer you, especially if you want to experience a literature that
flatters the moral outrage of the reader (to the extent that Gogol punishes his stupid
protagonists, whereas Dostoevsky sympathizes, as Freud would say, with the predica-
ment of the idiot).

The Library Pass

Now my reading of the insistence of Dostoevsky’s elaborate inclusion of Gogol in-
volves a suspicion of a cover-up. I am interested in the link Dostoevsky refuses to make
as he shuts down the border between stupidity and idiocy, and of which we get a
clue regarding the occluded corpus in the harassed ending of Myshkin’s narrative.
When everything is closing in on him, the Idiot is bound in a secret yet troubling way
by another scene of writing. Moved through cityscapes by unconscious promptings,
Myshkin goes to meet his destiny. Something impels him forward; his mind fades and
punctually returns. “Strange to say, he was at one moment keenly observant, at the rest
absent-minded to an incredible degree.” Shunted through an atmosphere of anguish
and “terrible dread,” he experiences “unutterable dejection” (). The Idiot sketches
one clear gesture. It verges on being illicit; in any case, objections are raised:

All the ladies described afterwards how Myshkin had scrutinised every object in the
room, had seen on the table a French book from the library, “Madame Bovary,” lying
opened, turned down the corner of the page at which the book was open, asked per-
mission to take it with him, and not heeding the objection that it was a library book,
put it in his pocket. ()

The next scene, which provides a body, is cued. At this point we dwell on the level
of unconscious motivation, following a kind of frenetic drive impelling Myshkin to
stash the illicit book despite a chorus of objections. Why this particular volume,
though? Why does he take it to heart? Is there a way to understand why this object
he puts in his pocket behaves as true coin? Any number of reasons appear to justify
why Madame Bovary would name an irreversible destiny for the Idiot. Such features
could be a matter of braiding thematic destinies; monitoring linguistic synchronici-
ties; or pointing up ironic mirroring and its structural reversals. Unhampered linkages
 Literature and Pathology f 

could be forged: Charles, the incompetent doctor, and Myshkin, the idiot healer;
Emma and Nastasya on the same destructive path; flunking out of school; the shared
status of the clinic; the petite-bourgeoise Madame Bovary, the aristocratic Idiot
Prince; deflected histories of desire, public censure, we all fall down, and on and on.
Yet in this case we would do well to micromanage the reading protocols and stay
away from smooth thematic promises. For if Myshkin’s unconscious meanderings
have led him to an open book, binding it somehow to his heart’s desire, the gesture of
appropriating the book also involves closing and hiding it, slipping it into the invagi-
nated folds of an internal pocket. In the moment of greatest trouble, he reaches for
a book, for another book or the book of the other. This book itself appears to have
awaited him.
In his last pages of sanity, Myshkin takes in and inseminates himself with the
seminal work of Flaubert, in what can be seen as a counterphobic act. The necessity
of this act is based on a number of considerations. In the first place it suggests that
the Gogol inoculation has by now worn off. The sensitive area Gogol had protected in
Dostoevsky is now exposed to possible incursion. Gogol had kept something in the
work out of harm’s way; he maintained certain inviolable boundaries. At least he per-
mitted the fantasy of such boundaries to stay in place. For some reason Dostoevsky
has needed to keep the Idiot safe from the encroachment of the very concerns that
belonged to Gogol’s work.
But when the chips are down, he has Myshkin reaching for it. Now, what does
this shift in loyalties tell us? (Or maybe we are confronted with another level of con-
sciousness, and Flaubert arrives on the scene to collect an unconscious debt, or to
gamble on another level of textual transaction?) Flaubert, in any case, would not
have allowed for the clean distinctions the name of Gogol has arranged in the text of
Dostoevsky. He could not be an accomplice to a transcendentalizing strategy separat-
ing off stupidity in order to guarantee the sanctity of idiocy. Admittedly, Emma and
Charles sometimes read like the ancestral echo of dumb and dumber, and there is
dumber still. But stupidity takes everywhere: it fans out, contaminates like an invisible
toxin, without allowing for much of a free zone in the merciless economy of Flaubert-
ian irony. In fact Flaubert is the unsurpassed thinker of stupidity, which is one reason
why Myshkin must first clear him out, close and shut him up, in order to terminate.
Gogol, in other words, functioned as something of a decoy for Flaubert, where
the ordinary meets its match in extraordinary inmixation. Stupid can be extraordinary,
too, even transcendental: flailed by stupid expectations, Emma also has her transports.
Charles Bovary occupies an undecidable limit between idiocy and stupidity (which
covers the clinical and the functional, the touching and the mundane), as does the
immortally simple Félicité of “Un Coeur Simple.” But when he pockets Flaubert, tak-
ing him in or closing him off—taking him out of library circulation, interrupting the
reading of someone else: “turned down the corner of the page at which the book
was open”—the Idiot also stages an act of incorporation. Why would The Idiot enact
 F Avital Ronell

the incorporation of Gustave Flaubert?5 To what extent does the textual body get
organized around the unassimilable fact of this foreign body, which lodges itself at its
heart’s center?
Beyond the critical reprimand Flaubert might represent in terms of the false
containment of bêtise that Dostoevsky attempts (and the attendant disruption of the
sacred, which poses Flaubert as a destabilizer of the project at hand) there is some-
thing else as well. Something that exceeds the strictures posed by anxiety of influence
(another name for the interference Flaubert runs), which overwhelms the literary
channels of transmission, and reverts to the elusive body of work both men share.
Why does The Idiot pocket Flaubert, thereby protecting or exposing him, making him
the chosen one, at once harassed and idolized?
Flaubert, namely, is the Idiot. That is, he fills the whole space of the concept,
draws it around himself with sober dignity. Generously inhabiting idiocy, the author
of Madame Bovary goes further. He not only thought the thought of bêtise, and
assumed it in his greatest maturity; but early on he himself hadn’t been able to read
for an awfully long time—“Gustave est bête”6—and he was famously considered by his
parents to be an idiot:
[L]’idiotie d’abord, l’alarme du père . . . les années stériles de Paris et, pour finir, la crise
de Pont-l’Evêque, le haut mal.
First the idiocy, the father’s alarm . . . the sterile years in Paris, and, to end it, the
crisis of Pont-l’Éveque, the great illness.7

Finally he had himself committed to the maternal clinic to complete a life sentence (we
know how greatly Flaubert struggled to complete the sentence).
There remains the other detail, a hidden name. Broadcasting from inside the
head of little Gustave, Sartre claims that this dimension gathers the secret strand that
ties all the syndromic aspects together, making sense of them:

[D]ans le cerveau du petit, quelque chose c’était détraqué, peut-être dès la naissance:
l’épilepsie—c’était le nom qu’on donnait à la “maladie” de Flaubert—c’était, en
somme, l’idiotie continuée.
(S)omething was malfunctioning in the child’s brain, perhaps since birth: epilepsy—
that was the name given to Flaubert’s “illness”—that was, all in all, idiocy continued.8

These (over)determinations begin to offer a perfect if uncanny fit: they designate the
epileptic fit that held both Flaubert and Dostoevsky in abusive custody. For Flaubert,
any disclosure of his condition was taboo. This in part explains why Dostoevsky
appropriates Flaubert to his work as an explicitly illicit act. Dostoevsky also has to
defend himself against his formidable counterpart. It is not only that they share and
inscribe the same body, or that Flaubert might rise up, in The Idiot, to demand retri-
bution (or, more likely and equally scary, to point out a misplaced comma). Flaubert
would not stand for the transcendence Dostoevsky hypes, or toward which he prompts
 Literature and Pathology f 

the epileptic body. On the side of will and repression, Flaubert has refused to take
the sort of metaphysical medication to which Myshkin resorts—a fact that, in itself,
should not perturb the unfolding of Dostoevsky’s incomparable insight. Nonetheless,
the bad conscience named Flaubert appears to creep up on him in moments of seri-
ous doubt.

On the Relatedness of Ethics to Masochism

What does Dostoevsky have on Flaubert? Or is it rather Flaubert who intrusively punc-
tures a system of protection that his Russian counterpart has attempted to secure? In
ways that are not yet comprehensible, the two are often at each other’s throats. Both
authors have something to say about the pathologized body. They understood the laws
of submission to which the afflicted body points. Flaubert invented the addicted body;
while Dostoevsky, himself an addict, stuck with idiocy and its cognates. Elsewhere,
Dostoevsky would venture into the domain of addictive and criminal psychologies.
In terms of their material-historical bodies, they shared the same disease. Though it
seems unorthodox to look at their medical records, we need to remind ourselves that
the history of certain pathologies belongs to literature and continues to occupy the
space of the imaginary, eliciting a reading and calling for a sense of the world that
opens up parergonal abysses. In Dostoevsky’s case, Freud notoriously destabilized the
status of the writer’s accepted diagnosis, calling it, in part, a fiction.
The difference—or, let us say, one difference—between Flaubert and Dostoevsky
can be seen in the persistence with which the Russian author imbricated the fact of
epilepsy in his novels. Visible and acknowledged, if not thematically flaunted, the con-
dition became an object of literary endeavor. On the other side of the line, the œuvre,
like the family of Flaubert, remained silent about epilepsy. The name of the illness
was never pronounced en famille. Instead, a masochistic process of disavowal was
launched. The family maintained strict secrecy around Gustave’s epilepsy, even though
both father and brother were leading physicians who were attending him by using
conventional methods for treating the condition. The payback for receiving house
calls consisted of joining the familial repression of the disease.
Dostoevsky’s gesture of uncommented appropriation in The Idiot indicates a
double relation to Flaubert’s phantom. He knew Flaubert’s secret and was, in a sense,
bound to out him. Myshkin was on his last lap when something propelled him toward
Madame Bovary. At the same time, he is stopped short of exposing Flaubert’s secret.
When Myshkin spies the open book, he offers a seal of protection, closing rather
than disclosing, in the end safeguarding and concealing its meaning in a hidden
pocket. It could be said that Dostoevsky takes the secret upon himself in the way
Myshkin assumes custody of Rogozhin’s pain, namely by becoming the receptacle of
a disavowed history. Custodian and keeper of Flaubert’s secret, Dostoevsky inscribes
 F Avital Ronell

Flaubert as his double, as the living intimation of an unrepresentable experience of

epilepsy. It is as if Flaubert held the key to the unavowable community of pain. A
master at doubling the stakes, when the chips are down Dostoevsky zeroes in on his
French other. In the end Madame Bovary and Prince Myshkin become a couple, hers
being the only book to which he will hold on as he enters the irreversible closedown.
As medical observation or ontological index, as literary and historical figure,
epilepsy remains elusive. And it is still not understood how this highly complicated
condition commands textuality. Figuration begins with Greek mythology. Hercules,
the herald of epilepsy, has mutated, as his illness has manifested itself historically, into
Buddha, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoléon, Lord Byron, Pascal, and Van
Gogh, among others.9

Freud
Perhaps the most significant knock that the literary elaboration of epilepsy received
was introduced by Freud’s work on the subject. Something happened to the ancient
scene of epilepsy precisely when Freud intervened to consider the case of Dostoevsky.
Occupying a special place in the unfolding of Freud’s own œuvre, epilepsy was the
only somatic illness about which Freud wrote after psychoanalysis was established.
Where key researchers took pains to distinguish hysteria from epilepsy, Freud treated
Dostoevsky as a hystero-epileptic—essentially, that is, as a severe hysteric. It could be
that this heuristic decision gave Freud some leverage, given that epilepsy as such—a
postulate Freud denies—rebuffs attempts at decipherment. As the contemporary psy-
choanalyst M.-H. Sutterman argues, it could also be the case that on still another level
Freud was motivated by a parricidal impulse and wanted to overthrow the theories of
his teacher and master, Charcot, the father of the hystero-epileptic division.10 Indeed,
the couple of hysteria and epilepsy was severed according to effects of sexual differ-
ence, with women acquiring hysteria and men epilepsy. The article treating Dosto-
evsky constitutes Freud’s first discussion of hysterical attacks since his earlier paper
on the subject written twenty years before (in ). Here Freud sheds light on the
enigma of Myshkin’s exaggerated kindness and trusting nature, qualities that acquire
definition in an essential elaboration of social masochism.
The condition of epilepsy, when prompted out of its periods of latency, sends
the subject out of consciousness, as it were; it mechanizes the body by means of the
robotic lurches it encourages, thus configuring the automaton. In a sense it mineral-
izes a self that, according to the findings of a number of clinical studies, is sexuated
indifferently—that is to say is asexual, seraphic, or often bisexual or androgynous.
Wrung out by the punctual yet unpredictable manifestation of symptoms, the subject
succumbs to the greatest extremes of passivity. The afflicted are plainly jerked around
by a force exceeding their control.
 Literature and Pathology f 

As Freud and others claim, epileptics tend to be drawn into sadistic scenes dom-
inated, as it were, by a masochistic attachment. Their sadism gets expressed outwardly
in small doses, but more consistently when turned against themselves. Hence the
many greatly humiliated and offended subjects of Dostoevsky’s œuvre who repeatedly
contend with infantile omnipotence. It is thus that the sadomasochistic engagements
to which Dostoevsky held are of consequence for Freud.
At one point some light is shed on Dostoevsky’s addictions, the most promi-
nent of which were evinced, of course, in his gambling binges. Freud interprets these
compulsive and hysterical qualities in terms of Dostoevsky’s need for great punish-
ment, the requirement he exacted of the world so as to provide him with humilia-
tion and tangible debt—needs that gambling satisfied. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the
development becomes classically Freudian, linking the depleting addiction to the truth
of castration. Like all addictions, deriving from the “primal addiction” of masturba-
tion, gambling pitches the subject toward the threat of castration while raising the
stakes of terrific guilt.11 Both the addiction and the epileptic attack are said to grow
out of ambivalence toward a severe and sadistic father (“the boy wants to be in his
father’s place because he admires him and wants to be like him, and also because
he wants to put him out of the way” [SE XXI, ]). Ambivalence puts the death drive
in gear.
Priming and miming the sexual act, the attacks also move beyond the pleasure
principle to double for death. The lethargic, somnolent states Dostoevsky documented
“had the significance of death: they were heralded by a fear of death” (SE XXI, ) and
produced what Freud subsequently calls “deathlike attacks.” Several other sources have
underscored the extent to which Dostoevsky anxiously awaited death with an almost
daily regimen of rituals and preparations. Among other stunts, he left nightly notes
on his pillow to those who might find him dead the next morning. And he ran over
regularly to the house of his doctor, with whom he enjoyed nearly telepathic relations,
and would spend the night there as his guest, in his care. The sleepovers staved off
some fear, but could not arrest the symptom in the long run.
Back to Freud’s couch. The attacks, in sum, indicate an identification with a
dead person, “either with someone who is really dead or with someone who is still alive
and whom the subject wishes dead” (SE XXI, ). While identifying the subject with
the dead center of the death-wish, this is how the attack in fact carries the “value of a
punishment.” One has wished another person dead, “and now one is this other person
and is dead oneself.” Hysterical epilepsy means that you have not gotten away with
murder: you are the way. You have thrown your body in the way of the targeted object
of a murderous impulse and will continue to trade positions with the intended other,
dancing for the death commissioned by you.
Freud makes the macabre dance contingent on a death wish, but not on the death
wish of the other (as Sutterman subsequently contends)—that is, on the likelihood,
within the transmitted intimations of fantasy, that the infant has gotten the message
 F Avital Ronell

of the near extinction wished upon her by the attending parent. Both views agree on
the fantasy of an early murder scene, which the child, at once victim and perp, con-
tinues to perform into adulthood. Where Sutterman argues that the attack originates
in the fantasy and dread of infanticide, Freud would age the infant and make this a
secondary effect of a projected death wish. Psychoanalytic theory asserts that the tar-
get for a boy is usually his father and that “the attack (which is termed hysterical) is
thus a self-punishment for a death-wish against a hated father.” The punishing attack
is the way of putting a restraining order on that part of oneself struggling to get the
offending father and already locked in identification with his demise.
Thus Freud pins the violent attacks on the father complex. Aggravated or con-
firmed by Dostoevsky’s latent homosexuality, the father complex is largely responsible
for the passive positions occupied by Fyodor Mikhailovich when faced with the mas-
sive existential insults leveled at him, and, furthermore, informs his inordinate sub-
missiveness to the Tzar and God—to “little father” and big daddy. Dostoevsky’s attacks
are in imitation of the dead, of that which he wished dead and which now wishes him
dead, in a deadly karmic cycle according to which what goes around comes around to
get you, especially because it stems from your unconscious. As we know from other
texts, father is more alive when (wished) dead than he is while living.
Here the perished father stamps the coming to term of futurity, filling the mean-
ing of a destiny. In a notable aside, Freud offers that destiny itself reverts, in the end,
to paternal projection; the very concept of fate itself is fatherly: “Even fate is, in the
last resort, only a later projection of the father.” The unavoidable resonances of fate
and father are fairly well set in place, at least since the Nietzschean hints of a
homonymic cooperation between amor fati and amor vati. All kidding aside, the kid’s
symptoms of death-like attacks can thus be understood “as a father-identification on
the part of his ego, which is permitted by his super-ego as a punishment” (SE XXI,
). The internalized desire of the father gets the upper hand over the ego-identified
father, in a rumble that has the subject falling to his death. The repetitive punishment,
a punctual ritual, is the price exacted by superego’s fury.
But how can two fathers rule and rumble? Freud narrates the split-off of the
father function. The so-called epilepsy of our author has arisen as a consequence of
the repression of the hatred of the father in the Oedipus complex. The repression gets
supplemented. “There is something fresh to be added: namely that in spite of every-
thing the identification with the father finally makes a permanent place for itself in
the ego” (SE XXI, ). Received into the ego, the identification establishes itself there
as a separate agency, in contrast to the rest of the ego’s contents: “We then give it
the name of super-ego and ascribe to it, the inheritor of the parental influence, the
most important functions” (SE XXI, ). If the father was hard, violent, and cruel,
those attributes are taken over by the super-ego and thus, in the relations it holds
with the ego, the passivity that was supposed to have been repressed is reestablished.
The super-ego has become sadistic; and the ego becomes masochistic, passive, even
 Literature and Pathology f 

“feminized,” by super-ego’s control systems. “A great need for punishment develops in

the ego, which in part offers itself as a victim to fate, and in part finds satisfaction in
ill-treatment by the super-ego—that is, in the sense of guilt. For every punishment is
ultimately castration and, as such, a fulfillment of the old passive attitude towards the
father.” To top it off, Freud writes:

“You wanted to kill your father in order to be your father yourself. Now you are your
father, but a dead father”—the regular mechanism of hysterical symptoms. And fur-
ther: “Now your father is killing you.” For the ego the death symptom is a satisfaction
in phantasy of the masculine wish and at the same time a masochistic satisfaction; for
the super-ego it is a punitive satisfaction—that is, a sadistic satisfaction. Both of them,
the ego and the super-ego, carry on the role of father. (SE XXI, )

When Dostoevsky was put under arrest by the Tsar’s police, his symptoms were also
arrested. The astonishing fact, reported by Dostoevsky himself, that in Siberia he
was free from his attacks merely substantiates Freud’s supposition that these attacks
served as his punishment. When humbled by fate in this extreme way—serving time,
serving father—he had no further need of the punishing attacks. All that can be made
out is that Dostoevsky was released from having to punish himself when he “got him-
self punished by his father’s deputy. Here we have a glimpse of the psychological
justification of the punishments inflicted by society. Large groups of criminals want to
be punished. The super-ego demands it and so saves itself the necessity for inflicting
the punishment itself ” (SE XXI, –).12 A rigorous psychology of the institution
of penal systems would have to contend with this point raised by Freud, namely that
super-ego casts about for strict external forms of punishment, the only condition
under which ego can be relieved of unsparing symptoms. Lest one rush to authoritar-
ian conclusions about the helpfulness of instituting systems of incarceration and the
like, remember that Freud does not encourage the state to double for the punitive
function or to satisfy its demands. Moreover it is no doubt important to observe that
Dostoevsky was innocent, even though super-ego and the police had collaborated on
the necessity of deporting him.
Freud’s contemplation of this case advances an explanation for the fact that Dos-
toevsky passed unbroken through the Siberian years of misery and humiliation:

Dostoevsky’s condemnation as a political prisoner was unjust and he must have

known it, but he accepted the undeserved punishment at the hands of the Little
Father, the Tsar, as a substitute for the punishment he deserved for his sin against his
real father. Instead of punishing himself, he got himself punished by his father’s
deputy. (SE XXI, )

The greater part of Freud’s commentary refers to the epileptic criminal depicted in
The Brothers Karamazov and the parricidal pact sealed by the dominant fraternity,
both of which illustrate his theories. Both The Brothers and The Idiot lead to ethical
 F Avital Ronell

hesitations, which urge, in turn, a critical review of what we think we know about
ethics—or of what we have traditionally allowed ethics to exclude, discard.
On a number of occasions Freud appears to invite a comparison of the criminal
with the epileptic. He observes that Dostoevsky has shown boundless sympathy when
it comes to criminals. A recurrent symptom in his works involves an immoderate
display of sympathy for the evildoer, a tendency itself at the same time associated
with that of forgiving all. Allowing parenthetically that he has little interest in under-
mining an ethics of sympathy—“In saying this, we are not disputing the ethical value
of this kindliness”—Freud goes on to say that his inquiry concerns a general quality
that, to the degree that it underlies the mechanism of kindly sympathy toward other
people, can be most readily gleaned from “this extreme case of a guilt-ridden novel-
ist. There is no doubt that this sympathy by identification was a decisive factor in
determining Dostoevsky’s choice of material.” Symptoms of excessive sympathy and
extreme kindliness pervade his work, where a steady decriminalization of the protag-
onist takes place.
A complicated dossier has been opened. Freud takes some care to avoid destabi-
lizing a possible ethics. Even so, his article takes on the presumed virtue of kindli-
ness. Under scrutiny, the qualities of overlarge kindliness, including courteousness
and politeness, point to an improbable source in perversity. The reportedly Christian
values of love and sympathy, viewed in terms of Dostoevsky’s masochistic rap sheet,
are connected to a very strong destructive instinct. Dostoevsky could easily have been
a criminal, as Freud says a number of times in a number of ways.
Literary critics have often been dissatisfied with Freud’s uncompromising review
of the symptom Dostoevsky. When reckoning the debt we have incurred to the great
writer, Freud was unwilling to pass over Dostoevsky’s retrograde submission to nation
or religion: “ . . . a position which lesser minds have reached with smaller effort. This
is the weak point in that great personality. Dostoevsky threw away the chance of
becoming a teacher and liberator of humanity and made himself one with their gaol-
ers. The future of human civilization will have little to thank him for” (SE XXI, ).
Nor does he suppress mention of Dostoevsky’s apparent confession to a sexual assault
upon a young girl. The Freud that calls Dostoevsky to account knows the difference
between rape and fantasy.
Yet Dostoevsky turned the criminal instinct against himself, in the form of a
destructive pathos fueled by masochism. His personality retained sadistic traits “in
plenty,” traits that have shown themselves in his

irritability, his love of tormenting and his intolerance even towards people he loved,
and which appear also in the way in which, as an author, he treats his readers. Thus
in little things he was a sadist towards others, and in bigger things a sadist towards
himself, in fact a masochist—that is to say, the mildest, kindliest, most helpful person
possible. (SE XXI, –)
 Literature and Pathology f 

It is no doubt of some importance that even the reader gets pulled into the dragnet of
sadistic intention, becoming inscribed in the small print of a published contract and
positioned as victim to the abuses of Dostoevsky’s sadomasochistic indulgences. In
what way does the writer violate the implicit contract with the reader, submitting the
reader to the manuscript and not the other way around? Freud does not motivate this
inclusion, but, elsewhere, in M & Mono, he briefly explains how he is violently moved
by textual controls. With Dostoevsky something like a masochistic alert goes off, or at
least a feeling of disappointment. But for the moment let us steer clear of disappointed
reading relations, at least until I clear out of here.
Reaching beyond the particular instance provided by the self-tormentor, Freud
keys into a quality that affects the underpinnings of sociality and binds community with
the glue of perversion. As it turns out, courteousness and helpfulness—what together
resemble an outstanding ethical stance—involve a key feature of sadism turned in-
ward. This apparent contradiction has not escaped current popular forms of expres-
sion, according to which notorious sadists, historical and fictional—such as Hannibal
Lector, for instance—supplement their anal-sadistic sieges with princely postures of
politesse. Consistent yet extreme forms of kindliness are traced back by Freud to the
ironies of the sadomasochistic contract, possibly the most social of contracts.

P.S.
Now that we have entered the realm of lectors and readers, we can ask once again what
it might have meant for Prince Myshkin to select Madame Bovary as the one indis-
putable item on his reading list. It is not as though he clutches Madame Bovary to his
breast because she is the dominatrix of choice, though a case could be made for such an
arrangement (her masochistic world appears to bear down on his, which it reflects, even
duplicates at times). Sealing and concealing the book, Myshkin signs in, and, under the
name of the other, binds himself irrevocably to this power that comes from elsewhere.
He lends a countersignatory force to Madame Bovary by means of which he engages
a reciprocal movement of countersigning, forming one body with the language of Flau-
bert. Henceforth Dostoevsky is bound up in Flaubert, who signs in turn and seals his
fate. When Krafft-Ebing gave Leopold von Sacher-Masoch the credit for having refined
a clinical entity “not merely in terms of the link between pain and sexual pleasure, but
in terms of something more fundamental connected with bondage and humiliation,”
he was also pointing to cases of masochism without algolagnia.13 The mobility of maso-
chism on the grand chart of humiliation was established. The discovery, shared with
regional differences by Dostoevsky and Sacher-Masoch, offers a motive for opening
onto other courses and objects, onto different figures or experiences of subjection. The
novel braces itself against the inevitability of such displacements, which it, in turn, also
instigates. It is necessary to note, at the end of the novel, that the murder weapon will
 F Avital Ronell

be taken from the pages of a book: a knife whose source and sorcery are located in the
folds of a text. Dostoevsky’s allowance for the book as a place of wounding, as the pre-
cise domain from which a knife can be drawn and thus a fatal blow incurred, reinforces
the lacerating potential of the other book, whose retrieval is cleanly marked, even if
the knife it wields remains as mysterious as it is untouchable. Feminized, even phalli-
cized (no contradiction here), the book beckons and destroys, covers up and punishes.
The vow and disavowal are closely linked in the masochistic process. Deleuze
reveals how the rhetoric of masochism consists in persuasion and education, guided
by an effort to get the other to “sign,” that is, to cosign a contract, to honor a recipro-
cal vow: “The masochist draws up contracts while the sadist abominates and destroys
them.”14 In every respect, the masochistic “educator” stands in contrast to the sadistic
“instructor,” the one who knows it all already and has only scorn for the rhetoric of
persuasion, the method of wimps and dummies. The masochist, trying to enroll the
other in a course of surrendered complicity, gets his clause on a contract, and is ever
on the lookout for the compliant signature. For whom is the other signing?
What the masochist carries in his heart, Deleuze argues, is the miniaturized
image of the humiliated father: s/he has made contact with the secret of that humilia-
tion. According to both Freud and Deleuze (though they are miles apart on key aspects
of this analysis) the masochist remains prey to the paternal secret and is enlisted as
a loyalist of the father’s symptom. In the case of Dostoevsky, one could propose now
that he has affected the corporeal absorption of the letter: “symptom,” we recall, comes
from syn, together, and piptein, to fall. Succumbing to the symptom, the “falling sick-
ness,” he produces an act of commemoration, or punctual reiteration, of the father’s
humiliation. Yet, too real, frozen out by trauma, the father’s secret had to travel, to
become symbolized, and even, in order to survive, to be redirected and fraternalized.
To reclaim the safer bounds of the novel, the name or cryptaphor of Flaubert miniatur-
izes, folds; his fall is timed to occur together with the imminent collapse of Myshkin—
or, more likely, he catches the fall.
Dostoevsky, out and open, needs the guarded and humiliated Flaubert to cosign.
Needing to secure for himself a partnership with the humiliated other, the masochist
works from a place of harried destitution. This is why I argued that the rapport with
or relation to Flaubert was double (at least double) according to sadomasochistic pro-
tocols, involving the need to protect and the urge to expose. Tracked down for his sig-
nature at this crucial juncture, Flaubert is at once reassuring and disenfranchising, the
accomplice and persecutor. Yet his status in the novel is left rigorously suspended—
and remains part, henceforth, of the suspense, even suspended on the body, which car-
ries the other writing to term. Suspense is not a stray shot, aleatory or random, but a
strategic factor in the masochistic process. Masochism makes use of suspense. Deleuze
points up the masochistic rites of torture and suffering, which imply actual physical
suspension (the hero is hung up, crucified or suspended).
Let us now suspend this session.
 Literature and Pathology f 

Notes
1. See Jacques Derrida, États d’âme de la psychanalyse (Paris: Galilée, ).
2. See Jean-Luc Nancy, “La douleur existe, elle est injustifiable,” in Revue d’éthique et de
théologie morale  (December ): –.
3. See Emmanuel Levinas, “Responsibility for the Other,” in his Ethics and Infinity, trans.
Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, ), –.
4. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot, trans. David Magarshack (New York: Bantam, ),
.
5. In the interest of containment, we leave aside the issues of sexual difference marking
these passages. Madame Bovary is spread open; Myshkin takes (her), but then he in turn is
inseminated, and so forth.
6. Jean-Paul Sartre, L’idiot de la famille: Gustave Flaubert de  à  (Paris: Galli-
mard, ), .
7. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
8. Sartre, L’idiot, –.
9. For an outstanding analysis of epilepsy and temporality see Kimura Bin, Écrits de
psychopathologie phénoménologique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, ), on a phe-
nomenological psychopathology based on the existential analysis [Daseinsanalyse] of Ludwig
Binswanger. Bin focuses on the ethical constitution of the epileptic, with observations on the
heightened sense of duty and the exasperated sense of obligation on the part of the epileptic in
relation to others.
10. See Jean-Martin Charcot, Dostoïevski et Flaubert: Écritures de l’épilepsie (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, ).
11. Strachey notes that Freud’s letter to Fliess of December , , suggests that mas-
turbation is the “primal addiction,” for which all later addictions are substitutes. See Sigmund
Freud, The Origins of Psychoanalysis: Letters to Wilhelm Fliess, trans. Eric Mosbacher and James
Strachey (New York: Basic Books, ), –.
12. Gilles Deleuze discusses the aggressive and hallucinatory return of the father in a
world that has symbolically abolished him. The aggressive return of the father disrupts the
masochistic situation. See Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty: Masochism (New York: Zone
Books, ), .
13. Ibid., .
14. Ibid., –.
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R
Family, Friends,
and
Other Relations
R
This page intentionally left blank
 R . Sounds of Satan
Laurence A. Rickels R
What a young fool he had been! Yet he was not sure that he regretted his action:
had he stayed on Earth, he would have witnessed those closing years over which
time had now drawn a veil. Instead, he had leapfrogged past them into the future,
and had learned the answers to questions that no other man would ever know. . . .
But most of the time, with a contented resignation that comes normally to
a man only at the end of a long and busy life, he sat before the keyboard and filled
the air with his beloved Bach. Perhaps he was deceiving himself, perhaps this was
some merciful trick of the mind, but now it seemed to Jan that this was what he
had always wished to do.
—Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End

T
he Devil has two points of entry in Freud’s science. He is along for the aside
in which Freud, in your dreams, addresses philosophy and music. But then
he also takes center stage when Freud analyzes cases of possession, in delu-
sions and in dreams. The Devil of possession belongs to the rehearsal stage
of Oedipal plot developments when father is your bosom body. In addition to the pre-
Oedipal or phallic mother and the Oedipal father or parent, there is a pre-Oedipal
father, the primal father in everyone’s development, the one who, through monopo-
lization of sexual difference or sexuality, gives rise to early theories of anal birth.
Both frames of Devil reference already appear in The Interpretation of Dreams.
In the chapter  stretch of philosophical interrogation of reality, Freud makes reference
to the Devil in Tartini’s dream. The composer Tartini dreamt up the sale of his soul to
the Devil, who, in this dream, then seized a violin and played the sonata the composer
took back with him into the waking state. The Devil dream is an ornamental and par-
enthetical illustration dangling from the preceding paragraph in which precisely noth-
ing was concluded about true reality: “The unconscious is the true psychical reality;


 F Laurence A. Rickels

in its innermost nature it is as much unknown to us as the reality of the external world,
and it is as incompletely presented by the data of consciousness as is the external world
by the communications of our sense organs” (SE V, ; emphasis added).
Freud’s example of Devil dream possession in The Interpretation of Dreams is
cited from the record of a nineteenth-century French pediatrician: the record shows a
thirteen-year-old boy whose “sleep became disturbed and was interrupted almost
once a week by severe attacks of anxiety accompanied by hallucinations. He always
retained a very clear recollection of these dreams. He said that the Devil had shouted
at him: ‘Now we’ve got you, now we’ve got you!’ . . . He woke up from the dream in ter-
ror, and at first could not cry out. When he had found his voice he was clearly heard
to say: “No, no, not me; I’ve not done anything!” or “Please not! I won’t do it again!” or
sometimes: “Albert never did that!” (SE V, –). Freud interprets the dream delu-
sion as, one, referring to masturbation in the past, interrupted by denial and threat-
ened punishment; two, as responding in the present to increased temptation arising,
arousing with the onset of adolescence; and, three, as reflecting the present tension,
what Freud terms the “struggle for repression,” which transforms the suppressed libido
into anxiety, and thus presses it into the service of punishment. There is an audio por-
tion on the record that emerges with the loss of the boy’s voice, which, once regained,
belongs, at least in one instance, to a third-person party. While he is afflicted by the
Devil of a nightmare, the possession seems to intervene after the dream crisis, which
is first alleviated by the takeover of the boy’s voice by an other’s voice. Exorcism has
often been analogized with therapeutic breakthrough. Possession, however, already
nine-tenths of this law, takes steps toward recovery, which alternate with the inter-
ventions of exorcism. The person possessed has passed through a crisis and is now
grounded in a delusion or a reality that allows this crisis to settle down for a demonic
spell and thus become legible, audible, or, if you prefer, treatable. Two items in the
original record that Freud leaves out of his sexological interpretation help fill in the
blanks drawn between one voice and the other’s. The boy’s father makes an appear-
ance in the hypothesis that “a past syphilitic infection in his father” (SE V, ) may
have deposited in the boy’s brain a predisposition to mental illness. But the boy also
describes how his nerves were overexcited to the point that he even contemplated the
release of “‘jumping out of the dormitory window’” (SE V, ). The suicidal flight
from or to the Devil is framed by an institutional inference that at age thirteen the
boy was, in some sense, separated from his parents, including the father with the evil
legacy to bear in his son’s mind. The boy, who given time in the country was com-
pletely cured, went with the Devil down the fast lane of self-recovery associated with
a healthy father function.
Serial dreaming stuck in the groove of traumatic impact, evidence presented by
accident and war neurotics, first guided Freud beyond the bottom line of wish fulfill-
ment in his interpretation of dreams. These dreams introduce repetition as that which
lies beyond or before the pleasure principle and represents the first and last, but not
 Sounds of Satan f 

least, entrenched attempt to build up a protective layer against mega-traumatizing

stimuli. The compulsion to repeat opens up a new habitat for Devil reference in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle. When manifestations of the compulsion to repeat act
in strict opposition to the pleasure principle, they assume the aspect of a demonic
force. In other words, whenever the compulsion to repeat comes into focus, is regis-
tered and is recognized as fitting a transitive sentence, it goes to the Devil. This new
focus can be fixed on and in the analytic session: “It may be presumed, too, that when
people unfamiliar with analysis feel an obscure fear—a dread of rousing something
that, so they feel, is better left sleeping—what they are afraid of at bottom is the
emergence of this compulsion with its hint of possession by some ‘demonic’ power.”
Once in analysis, this demonic force pops up within the transference. “In the case of
a person in analysis . . . the compulsion to repeat the events of his childhood in the
transference evidently disregards the pleasure principle in every way” (SE XVIII, ).
Repetition compulsion or the demonic appears as a decontextualized and sealed-off
momentum in the transference, in the in-session doubling of the duo dynamic that
Freud found, at least at first contact, haunting. Transference raises ghosts between the
two of you; repetition compulsion in the transference raises hell in the third person.
The publication date of Freud’s “A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neuro-
sis” sets this case study deep inside the second system that opened up around Beyond
the Pleasure Principle. We’re thus given ears to hear what’s in the name of the
monastery where exorcism was performed not once, but twice. In its name, Mariazell
places Mary, ambiguous figure of immaculate reproduction, alongside the single cell
or Zelle. The subsidized mode of existence the painter finds in the end as alternative
to the Devil pact with the blood-related father still splits its share with the leader
of the pact in relation to the Zelle, the monastery’s social unit, but also in name the
unicellular organism of replication that transmits the fantasy of body-based relations
with father. To sign oneself over to your partner in pact, sich verschreiben, also means,
same words, to make a mistake in writing, to commit a lapsus. It is in the phrasing
of their contract that Freud discerns the fine print of their exchange: the painter vows
to be the Devil’s leibeigener Sohn. This can or should be translated as “bound son,” as
in duty-bound, beholden, or owned, serf-style. Literally the modifier means “of one’s
own body.”
In person the Devil gives us a certain father, a blood-bonded father. In Freud’s
“A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis,” the painter receives no sensational
benefits in exchange for his immortal soul, but instead gets from the Devil a paternal
replacement for the parents he had lost: a bodily father, yes, a father with maternal
attributes, but not subsumable by the mother, not this time, nor by her missing place.
Even when pumped up with breasts, the Devil is still the father who alone can cancel
the painter’s adoption of the deferred obedience plan. The painter’s difficulty in earn-
ing a livelihood following the death of his parents belatedly obeys the father’s veto
of the son’s wish to be an artist or—and it’s never too late—administers punishment
 F Laurence A. Rickels

for the son’s transgression. Exorcism of the Devil’s hold over him, of a holding pattern
that for a time served to stabilize the painter, leads, the second time around and by
doubling as the painter’s initiation into a fraternal church order, to an artist’s life in a
culture of subvention, the maternal care given by the church fathers at the monastery
named Mariazell.
Christianity and the Devil, in it together, also help Wolf Man overcome his desire
to surrender to his big bad but beloved father, the potent corporeal figure and patho-
genic force of sexuality in his immediate family. Little Wolf Man’s seduction by his
sister carries out at one remove the paternal p-unitive trauma, love it or live it. He
took care to breathe in the Holy Spirit, but always to breathe out evil spirits. The
breathing-out exercise was also required whenever he saw any figures he would not
like to be like. These “beggars, or cripples, or ugly, old, or wretched-looking people”
(SE XVII, ) followed the downbeat of how he saw his father. But heavy breathing, hot
off the audio track of the primal scene, was also a resource for positive identification
of or with the father.
But then one day a German tutor changed the frame of the teen’s demonizations
and idealizations when he introduced his charge to the free-thinking stance at atten-
tion. The military thus came to uniform Wolf Man’s teen spirit. But the breathing ritu-
als weren’t stopped in these marching steps. And whenever Wolf Man saw three heaps
of dung he still had to think of the Holy Trinity. A caterpillar dream Freud interprets
recalls the tutor’s influence: he had helped Wolf Man overcome his sadism toward small
animals. But this brings back, at least in Freud’s narrative, recollection of one Devil of
a dream. Even while this dream is assigned to the period before the tutor’s influence,
it is nevertheless brought back in association with the tutor. And it is brought back to
be exorcised within the analysis, and within the analytic and transferential relationship
to Freud. The German tutor’s influence is responsible for Wolf Man’s fond rapport with
all things German and that’s a fact, Freud adds, “which was incidentally of great advan-
tage to the transference during the treatment” (SE XVII, ). In the earlier dream, the
Devil was pointing to a gigantic snail, an image of childhood sexual research. Based
on popularized high-cultural reference to the Devil, Wolf Man’s dream representation
includes the father’s (and his own) idealization of the daughter-sister, whose accom-
plishments were read off the legend of the middlebrow map of high culture. This Devil
father furthermore promises the complete answer withheld from the little boy when
he was witness to the primal scene. The sister in the Devil father is on her role as trans-
mitter of the father’s influence or seduction and as intercessor between father and
son, whereby she took the brunt of the grunting father. “When he heard that Christ
had once cast out some evil spirits into a herd of swine which then rushed down a
precipice, he thought of how his sister in the earliest years of her childhood, before
he could remember, had rolled down on to the beach from the cliff-path above the
harbor” (SE XVII, ). The later caterpillar dream, the one that brought back, by con-
trast and association, the Devil and the snail dream, benefits from the switch from
 Sounds of Satan f 

passivity to activity (in a military setting). But then Wolf Man remembers the wak-
ing experience of riding by a father asleep with his son in the fields. The son wakes
his father, who shouts at Wolf Man as though his look at them was illicit, improper. The
passive, feminine, or homosexual submission to the father had, then, really been only
repressed. His psychoanalysis gave Wolf Man access to this repressed portion of his
libido, each piece of which, upon being set free, sought out some sublimated goal or
concern. But the tutorial in father-and-sonhood taken with Freud is the cover for his
continued service to, for, as his undead sister. The Devil represented the father as
blocked for Wolf Man by his sister. He was the contained, certain father. But the com-
plications in the Wolf Man case, which lie in his relations with his sister, cannot contain
themselves in the father. Daniel Paul Schreber occupies—through his older brother,
who like Wolf Man’s older sister committed suicide—the same uncontained projection
booth of idealization and demonization with regard to his own father, the mad scien-
tist who experimented on his sons. Just the same, the Wolf Man case shows how the
fantasy of the certain father refers to a pre-Oedipal father, the father who holds the pri-
mally abusive monopoly of sexual difference (or, simply, of sex). At the time of the third
person’s first interruption of the dyad, there is only one “difference,” and it belongs to
the father. Little boy, little girl, and mother can only offer a back-end deal to obtain,
sure thing, the father’s penetrating certitude. The Devil father rules every military and
paramilitary outfit in which sexual difference is similarly fantastically contained.

First Circle
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud admits a unicellular immortality that guaran-
tees that we do not die naturally and, equally, that the death and reproduction plan
propels our evolutionary development as a species. Then Freud jumps the gun, death-
drive style, and formulates a tentative conclusion: the goal of life is death. How then
do the self-preservative instincts fit in? They can now be seen as insurance that the
organism will follow its own path to its proper death. The organism wishes to die only
in its own fashion. But then Freud drops his role as devil’s advocate, as he puts it, and,
picking up the ambivalent track of the other, begins again: “But let us pause for a
moment and reflect. It cannot be so. The sexual instincts . . . appear under a very dif-
ferent aspect” (SE XVIII, ). Don’t basic cells “work against the death of the living
substance and succeed in winning for it what we can only regard as potential immor-
tality?” In this way, however, we are only keeping up “the appearance of immortality.”
Even the so-called necessity of death only pays us the price of submission in place of
the unbearable prospect of random chance, which always also represents the outside
chance that the life lost could have been immortal (SE XVIII, ).
As the realm of unlimited possibilities, biology draws Freud’s speculations on-
ward. Certain and conclusive scenarios are stated and then abandoned. The purposive
 F Laurence A. Rickels

statement about life and death, for example, is preceded by Freud’s expression of his
wish: “We seek only for the sober results of research or reflection based on it; and we
have no wish to find in those results any quality other than certainty” (SE XVIII, ).
Before he unfulfills the wish in the main text, the footnote underworld sends up a
warning shout; before  the shout drops right before Freud pushes the “let us
pause” button; after  Freud sounds the alert even earlier and more expansively,
right beneath the “certainty”: “The reader should not overlook the fact that what fol-
lows is the development of an extreme line of thought. Later on, when account is taken
of the sexual instincts, it will be found that the necessary limitations and corrections
are applied to it” (SE XVIII, n). In the wake of these stops and starts, and this move-
ment extends well beyond the rebellion with a “pause,” the disposable scenarios are,
on their own, model Devil fictions. “It is surely possible to throw oneself into a line of
thought and to follow it wherever it leads out of simple scientific curiosity, or, if the
reader prefers, as an advocatus diaboli, who is not on that account himself sold to the
devil” (SE XVIII, ).
The death drive or the demonic is hard for Freud to follow. For all concerned, it’s
certainly hard to perceive in all its purity. It’s like, says Freud, the silence in the back-
ground of the melody of the drives (SE XXI, , and SE XIV, ). A demonic aspect
in music was familiar to Freud early on at that influential remove of a follower’s
research. Max Graf, a music journalist and an academic historian of music, was one of
two nonpractitioner members of the original Wednesday meeting group. Around the
turn of the century Graf had already been publishing on music subjects—on Wagner
in particular. The demonic force that was with Wagner, indeed a “Devilish curse” and
the “curse of Satan,” drove the composer to represent excessive passion and then to
find release, if only by proxy, through renunciation.1 With the exception perhaps
of Graf ’s insistence that all this commotion fit the metabolization of one wound, in
Wagner as in his protagonists, this biographical, intellectual-historical interpretation
of Wagner is hardly psychoanalytic. In these early studies, the focus on the demonic
inside Wagner is shared with the external Devil, the journalist friend of Brahms,
Eduard Hanslick, who used Brahms “with Satanic cleverness” to fight the journalist’s
battles against Wagner, whom Hanslick despised. According to Graf, journalism is its
own “mode of living,” one that lacks religious or metaphysical sensibility, even con-
nection with personal experience, and is thus anti-art, and part or projectile of Graf ’s
fundamentally split position between art or art appreciation and analysis.2
In Composer and Critic, Graf cites the split between Hanslick and Wagner as
the onset of “modern musical criticism in Europe,” which is split-level: at first music
critics targeted Wagner because they “sided with the readers of the papers—who
looked for entertainment in theaters and concert halls of an evening—and in general
opposed the independent artists and fought with all their intelligence and all their
wit—and often with all their narrowness—against the great composers of the time.”3
But Wagner invented the generation gap: he made his cause that of the Teen Age.
 Sounds of Satan f 

Once all those Siegfrieds in the audience had replaced “the elder generation of the
new industrial epoch,” “the whole world turned Wagnerian” ().
This modern splitting origin of criticism fighting music, and then under this
cover together introducing middlebrow culture, repeats the original origin of music
criticism, according to Graf: “It is a strange fact in the history of musical criticism that,
at the moment it first entered the world, the first clash between this new force and
creative power occurred. Similar conflicts have accompanied the whole development
of music, from Bach to Stravinsky and Schoenberg. . . . Perhaps this is an inevitable
and essential part of progress; perhaps it must accompany all great composers, just as
military bands accompany an army into battle.” Graf then performs the double inher-
itance of modern music criticism or modern music culture when he issues his policy
statement for the history of music criticism: “Conflicts between critics and artists can
be profitably analyzed only when they are the necessary result of different outlooks on
the world: conflicts, for example, between generations or periods. These are not per-
sonal matters, but matters of logic; one might say that they are conflicts produced by
the development of historical trends, by God himself, it may be, as He struggles with
his own critic, the devil” ().
Graf leaves himself the devil of a chance that he is neither God, nor the berated
musical genius, but is caught up, just the same, within an inevitable context in which,
in real time, one can’t take sides. This context or contest—which even as it cites the
Old Testament understanding of Satan, commences as social or group-psychological
phenomenon only with the beginning of modern mass-media-music culture in the
Teen Age—is one of testing. The relationship between Graf and Hanslick, which in
Graf ’s historical perspective is the split-off side effect of the generational contest
between critics and composers, was in fact just a reality test that both men were des-
tined to pass, moving right along, transference-style, with the father-son identifica-
tion. Indeed, Hanslick, who died in , was one of Graf ’s mentors at the University
of Vienna. The books Graf published while in the United States, for example, all open
with the author’s listing of his credentials as a music critic and historian, always in-
cluding at the top of the list Hanslick’s mentorship. When Freud gave his case study
of the phobic five-year-old boy, who happened to be Max Graf ’s son, a nickname, he
chose, perhaps in earshot of this father, Little Hans.
Freud’s “Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy” is remarkable in his oeuvre
for being, escapably, not his own. And yet many if not all the coordinates of the open-
and-shut cases that cut to the crypt are pressing here, too. But this time it’s not always
also one big diversion. Little Hans’s first contacts with technologization, for example,
don’t bear undead cargo. He suffers from phobias of transportation or Verkehr, which,
from railway to the street, cover access to the mother’s womb, which the dead father
alone can gain for, while gaining on, the son. For little Hans, this speed race appears
sexologically contained: his saving fantasy of marrying his mother and sending his
father off to marry his own mother relieves the tension building the phobic symptoms
 F Laurence A. Rickels

(SE X, ). Displacement goes around and comes around as a happy ending because
the father’s father (the trans-parent figure) is both missing and at the remote controls:
his more-than-absence guarantees that this farce—in which, while he’s away, all the
sons can play—will call curtains on the incestuous retention of the off-limits body. His
place is represented by “the Professor,” for whom little Hans and his father dictate and
write down the case material. The course of the analysis does not rewind the course
of the neurosis’s development (SE X, ), but constructs out of the material heading
little Hans off at the impasse a transference neurosis and cure along a three-way free-
way. Little Hans pounds this busy street or intersection where his life as a neurotic, the
father’s recording and programming of his associations, and the Professor’s super-
vision are traffic jamming.

[father:] “Once he knocked on the pavement with his stick and said: [little hans:]
‘I say, is there a man underneath?—someone buried?—or is that only in the cemetery?’
[for freud:] So he is occupied not only with the riddle of life but with the riddle of
death.” (SE X, )

Although he knocks at portals of the anal and footnote underworld, where dead
sausage children are internal and eternal occasions for grieving (SE X, n), each
return of the repressed the five-year-old rides out remains always only metaphorically
“like an unlaid ghost” (SE X, ). The three-way association passes from the almost
improperly buried corpse (it can still be readily restored to the cemetery, which is just
a question-to-the-father away) to the box-and-cart theories of birth that little Hans
must apply to the riddle of his sister Hanna’s arrival, the birth or death that he must
metabolize: before Hanna traveled with them in the railway carriage, she was already
with them in the box (SE X, ff ). The conditions for haunting, which were there for
Hans as they are in every development and transference, were nevertheless contained
inside the transference neurosis and cure that the little patient could remember to
forget. This forgetting, which is not repression but analysis, is the vanishing point of
Freud’s  postscript: during his one-time-only follow-up visit, which is on the
record, big Hans assures Freud that he did not recall his life as a neurotic, nor recog-
nize himself in the study, but only began to feel the pull with the references to the fam-
ily outing to Gmunden. This summer resort’s place name is a last resort on the sliding
scale of recall, one that regressively stammers Munden (to taste) and Mund (mouth),
and at the same time thus touches on the retained wound of Freud’s own dismembered
name: -mund. In other words, the boxes and carts that stay, in Hans’s case, on the
one-way assembly line of interpersonal, couplified rapport with mourning through
substitution and reproduction were (inside Freud and his haunted cases) the crypts
crowding out and shutting down easy disposal of the separation or loss.
Graf ’s “Reminiscences” of Freud first appeared in English alongside Freud’s “Psy-
chopathic Characters on the Stage,” the brief essay Freud presented to Graf, presum-
ably in , and which Graf gave to The Psychoanalytic Quarterly for publication (in
 Sounds of Satan f 

translation) in . The editorial note strongly suggests that the inclusion of his
reminiscences was the deal Graf sealed with the offer that couldn’t be refused of a
brand-new Freud text. That the German version of Graf ’s “Reminiscences” insists
on the openness of the invitation to publish gives us some cause to note the split and
conflict running Graf ’s “I was there” histories of original conception. Still in  Graf
was fighting rounds in the Faustian pairing announced in the title of his American
book, Composer and Critic:

Only history could answer the question: Are the mistakes of musical criticism inher-
ent in the system itself, or are they mere accidents, clinging to it like mud to the wheel
of a moving car? Only history could teach me clearly to see the position of criticism
in the musical life of our time, and its proper function within musical society. Musi-
cal criticism is the child of history, and only history, the greatest critic of human
accomplishments could tell whether it is a legitimate child or a changeling. ()

One day in the early days of psychoanalysis, Graf presented a paper to the Wednesday
group on Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman. Freud’s blessing wasn’t in disguise: he asked
for Graf ’s leave to publish it in his series. The resulting  monograph, Graf ’s best
piece of writing and the only piece he made with Freud completely behind or in front
of him, explored, once again, the “demonic” in Wagner’s operas. But this time, this
one time, Graf tracked back the force that was with Wagner to Wagner’s relationship
to his fathers. There was the bookkeeper, Wagner by name, who died when the com-
poser was six months old. But his mother remarried and for the rest of his life and
work Wagner played with, fantasized about the possibility that this man—Geyer was
his name, which in a word, in German, means vulture—could have sired him before
advancing to the official head of the family. Geyer was the only father Wagner ever
knew and then he died, too, when the boy was seven years old. When forging a family
crest for himself, the composer mixed and matched literalized, visualized references
to the vulture and to the wagon or Wagen that the name Wagner mumbles. The wagon
is given as many spokes as there were Wagner children. Thus the composer shared his
special case of being son of Geyer, the family spokesperson, with his older siblings,
too. Graf argues that Wagner had to play with this possibility for keeps on account of
the implicated adulterous act of his mother that opened her up wide to the composer’s
unconscious visitations. “On the very day that Richard Wagner completed ‘The Flying
Dutchman,’ he picked up the pen again to write his mother a letter. For years their
correspondence had been interrupted. Now however the pressure of unconscious
thoughts motivated him, for with ‘The Flying Dutchman’ the composer had returned
to his home where he had once played as a boy and once again he had seen the large
bright eyes of his mother resting upon him. . . .”4 But as is suggested by the treatment
of the names in rendering the fantasy family sign, Wagner also sought his physical
connection with father, a connection that took the form of the demonic. The uncanny
heroes of Wagner’s operas are portraits of Geyer, but also of Wagner in Geyer’s place.
 F Laurence A. Rickels

The Wagner hero is born shortly after the death of the father, whom he therefore never
really knows. But the son’s arrival is associated with the lowering of the doom. If we
include Wagner’s fantasy calculation that Geyer was already siring him before the first
father died, we recognize the two-timing of Wagner’s identification:

Doesn’t the whole situation approximate the central plot of Wagner’s operas and the
topic of our analysis? Geyer would have arrived then as the Dutchman, like Siegmund,
like Tristan. It is as if, while hiking up a mountain, the view suddenly opens wide onto
a deep valley, which we would like to reach, but then with the next step the view
disappears and we must again seek our way among cliffs. The Dutchman, Siegmund,
and Tristan are not portraits of Geyer but rather of Wagner; they share his traits
and his sensibility, there can be no mistake: Wagner speaks in these works of himself,
not of Geyer—or, more precisely, he puts himself in the latter’s place. By taking on the
roles of the Dutchman and other figures, he puts himself into the same situation that
he had conjured up in his fantasies for Geyer. He is now the man who approaches a
union or marriage which his arrival destroys. ()

In his parallel studies, for example Wagner Problems, Graf distinguished Wagner’s rise
to the heights of German culture as the victorious “slave rebellion of all dilettantish
and literary natures, of the shady side of the musical world” (; my translation). Wag-
ner is thus under consideration as the unstoppable advent of the mass media Sensur-
round, which comes complete, split-level style, with the journalistic mediations and
standards of middlebrow culture. In The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche finds the name
to call the composer of the improv nightmare from which he has awakened: Wagner
is an actor.5 Nietzsche calls father Geyer an actor, too; but even if Geyer was a painter,
as Graf tells the story, Wagner’s dressing up in painter’s drag was an acting identifica-
tion. As a recovering Wagnerian, Nietzsche would nevertheless avow that to write and
think in his day it was just as necessary to have fallen for this new middlebrow mascot
culture and its pact psychology, its proxy relationship to so-called mass culture. Only
in this way could Nietzsche conceive writing that risked being misunderstood, thus
raising the stakes of reading and misreading to life or death within middlebrow culture.
If Graf is right about the exchange value of the essay he restored to the archive
in , Freud responded in “Psychopathic Characters on the Stage” to Graf ’s reading
of the dramatic neurosis in Wagner’s musical work with a diagnosis of another drama
trauma, but without all the music. Freud adds to his double reading of Oedipus and
Hamlet, which was rehearsed in the correspondence with Fliess and then repeated in
The Interpretation of Dreams, the corollary notion that Hamlet is not psychological
drama, but rather psychopathological drama and therefore requires a personalized
audience: “Here the precondition of enjoyment is that the spectator should himself
be a neurotic” (SE VII, -). But, if we accept that Freud’s sense of Hamlet’s audience
is party to an exchange with Graf ’s Wagner investigations, then what Freud misses by
not facing the music is the point of contrast. The culture that crawled out from under
Wagner’s “demonic” middlebrow is not the haunt of Hamlet neurotics. In Hamlet the
 Sounds of Satan f 

father is a ghost and not the father; he’s certainly not the father from hell, the unam-
biguous father. The neurotic component is stuck on the evidence of the mother’s
desire in the rush to replace the dead father and circumvent or repress proper mourn-
ing. Then there’s a double background check that can’t be covered: Shakespeare’s
unmournable child Hamlet can be conjured because, in some other secret place,
Freud carried his mother’s undead baby Julius, who made his fraternal orders and
ghost appearances in earshot of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Like the unstoppable
assumption among philosophical and intellectual-historical types that ghost status
must be assigned to father as his exclusive right of passage, the Wagner split between
passion and quiescence, life and death, is the commonplace of an uncomplicated or
healthy mind. Neurotics don’t go to the Devil. You have to be healthy, less inhibited,
with an uncomplicated loss that only needs replacing, to deal with the Devil.
Like Nietzsche, Freud was not psychically constituted for association with the
Devil. But he, too, took up the challenge of lifting the stakes and standards of inter-
pretation within the unstoppable hell-raising of middlebrow culture. The Devil was
the password that allowed Freud to join the big boys, the philosophers and journalists,
and address Death, even one’s own death (or is it father’s?). With Dad certainty Freud
could pass as philosopher. Devil reference is a passing mention in Freud because the
death of the other or the dead other is in the psychoanalytic view, just like primal
repression, one of the nonnegotiable facts of psychic life, based on the inconceiv-
ability of one’s own death and, hence, of Death. It is this inside view that throws self
for a loop through other and keeps us in the vicinity of mourning and unmourning,
while also giving us the techno high of egoic immortality or, in the felt absence of repli-
cation, mass suicide. We saw the future of mass readership, or on a more staggered
installment plan, the future leadership of the masses by the raising of the middlebrow,
when what was legible began appearing as Devil doubles.
The Devil in Ernest Jones’s study On the Nightmare is, by folk etymology or free
association, always also a double, the demonization that fits the all-bad father in con-
trast to the all-good father.6 In the precursor studies Jones dutifully tours, a certain
A. Graf is cited for identifying the Devil’s origin as lying in “the depths of the human
soul” (). Pfister and Silberer join the lineup for interpreting the Devil as, respec-
tively, a throwback to “‘infantile experiences of fear’” and the personification “‘of the
suppressed and unsublimated elements of the instinctual life’” (). Freud can be
found in the midst of this research review via his conjecture in “Character and Anal
Erotism” that “‘the Devil is certainly nothing else than the personification of the
repressed, unconscious instinctual life’” (). But Freud figures more directly outside
this chorus line extolling the Devil’s unconscious depths via another study that inspires
or models Jones’s new working hypothesis: “The belief in the Devil represents in the
main an exteriorization of two sets of repressed wishes, both of which are ultimately
derived from the infantile Oedipus situation: (a) The wish to imitate certain attri-
butes of the father, and (b) the wish to defy the father; in other words, an alternating
 F Laurence A. Rickels

emulation of an hostility against the father” (). The working part of the hypothesis
is owed to Freud: “Since the origin of infantile terror is now known, it naturally sug-
gests itself to one to investigate the descriptions of the belief in the Devil in the light
of this new knowledge” (). The footnote falls open to Freud’s case study of little
Hans (n).

Second Circle
With the onset of the second system, Freud cycles between ultimately demonic repe-
tition as expression of the inertia in organic life and the combo energies of libido.
But then repetition reemerges as the egoic and unicellular prospect of replication: im-
mortality on the spot we’re in with reproduction or death. The cycle of Freud’s specu-
lations in Beyond the Pleasure Principle passes through the metabolism of our worldly
relations with or in the Devil as set out in  by Vilém Flusser, mortal sin by mortal
sin, within a lexicon adapted, for the duration of his Die Geschichte des Teufels (His-
tory of the Devil), to and from psychoanalysis.7
Flusser was born in Prague in . He published what I’ve translated as “His-
tory of the Devil” in Brazil in Portuguese translation. The German original did not
appear until . By the late s, Flusser had more or less established himself in
the makeshift world of art magazine writing—all about the future now of media influ-
ences in theory, on art. But even though the leading international art magazines sup-
ported him, he remained a figure on the margin who was codependent on the notion
of making it big. Published, as usual, by European Photography, a small press that
seemed to exist only to have Flusser’s books on list, his  Ein Gespräch (A Conver-
sation) was based on an interview Klaus Nüchtern conducted with Flusser the year
before at the arts festival in Graz, Austria.8 The subject is Flusser’s account of the
nomadic impulse, as presented in his plenary lecture the night before, and which is
situated in the course of the interview as rivaling many well-known philosophical
investigations in the receiving area of techno media. His collected works address
photography, vampirism, the future of writing in an age of techno visualization, and a
couple of plays.9 His first book, completely out of context with his condensed all-out
effort to be recognized many years later, is his best by far. It is the only work by Flusser
that seeks a fit with Freud, though from a distance of the rationalization that the
deadly sins required consultation with a sex theorist. But to his credit, it is the fit with
Jung that would be noted by most scholars likely to proceed from an inquiry into
the Devil.
The Devil is one immortal figure who also has a history, however. Human history,
as progress, as evolution, is the history of the Devil. The Devil’s job or purpose is to
keep the world in this time, in time we keep with history’s progress. The complete de-
feat of the Devil means the world would cease to exist. We would be one with God and
 Sounds of Satan f 

nothing would be left of human existence. We are therefore more closely related to the
Devil than to God. From the witch’s flying broomstick to magic elixirs, the Devil’s way
has been one of technological enhancement or extension of our bodily existence.
Relations with the Devil begin or begin again in Lust, already inside the proto-
plasm from which life first evolved. The cell is immortal: it takes in life, moves in time
and then divides or doubles itself, replicates itself. The multicellular organism, by con-
trast, is mortal, not by accident, which is the relationship of protozoa to death, but by
plan, by law. Soul or psyche arises out of inhibitions, limitations, frustrations of our
lustful striving to develop, to evolve, to rise to every occasion. To be more or less free
of inhibition, either in the mode of great health or in the conscience-free condition of
sociopathy, is to be in a position to part with soul or psyche and stand closer to the
Devil than to God and His soul strain of inhibited, neurotic followers. Humans are,
after all, essentially erotically uninhibited since human sexuality is not limited to the
purpose of reproduction. This is the bottom line of human sinfulness. Our desires—
self-sex, same-sex, unisex, fetish sex, self play, and foreplay—are perverse, not a repro-
ductive part of society. However, if free love could be realized on this polymorphous
basis it would be the end of human being. But when it’s time for an example, Flusser
points to the unlimited passion of nationalism, particularly in Europe, where each
brand comes with its own underlying love of the mother tongue.
The second deadly sin, Anger, breaks limits and inhibitions and thus frees up
passion. Laws, rules, and regulations breed Anger. In other words, the law transforms
the world of the senses into the world or word of Anger, of power. In Lust and Anger
we desire reality, we want our desires realized. But we end up—for example in the de-
velopment of science out of lustful curiosity and angry transgression—in danger of
losing our sense of reality.
As essential as lustful propagation, for example, is number three, the sin of Glut-
tony, of identificatory ingestion and digestion. We live in the excrement of human
spirit. Shit rather than earth or clay is the Devil’s creative medium. By passing through
creature and creation first, shit is in a sense artificial, a repetition and a production,
and as product it is moreover a blended mass of sameness. Shit stands for the equal-
ity of mothers and children of both sexes before the one and only difference, the one
and only sexual difference, embodied by the Devil father. It is this world, at one irre-
versible remove from nature, that protects us against the natural world of accident and
against God. The digested and excreted world has a purpose, that of serving mankind.
The world thus becomes real again, believable. But what then finally is the difference
between the undigested world of nature and the digested world of technology? We
know as little about the future evolution of our machines as we know about the future
development of any animal. What we do know is that machines develop or evolve
more quickly than animals or plants. That’s what makes our world so horrific. We eat
the world to excrete the machines that devour us. We will die out and be replaced by
technology just as we replaced our missing-link connection with the primates.
 F Laurence A. Rickels

Envy and Greed are two deadly sins that are in it together, as the Devil’s backup
plan. In place of a phenomenal world that we see as unreal, we fall for the reality of the
socius—and the power of language. Greed conserves the progressive work of Envy and
thus fortifies the social hierarchies in the wake-up call of social upheaval. What’s real,
where the Devil grabs us, is what we thus take so interpersonally, namely the social
relation. The bottom line is assigned to the world power of words, words as historic
inheritance of generations, syntax as the tall glass from which we drink the wisdom of
sentences. It is only within this perspective, which thus pulled up way short of the
grammar or logic of relations and symbols (of symbols), that we can love language and
yearn to preserve, greedily, language’s purity, and look with envy at other speakers who
would engage or enrich language. Language is a treasure haunt.
At bottom we find words, the doubly opened gateway, through which society
penetrates us and we in turn enter society. Society is the gridlock of avenues composed
of victory arches made up of words through which words move onward. That mankind
is endowed with fundamental social being means that human life is nothing but an
inner buzzing of words.
Language stands apart from all other aspects of the sensual world by all accounts
of its hierarchical organization. Words have assigned places in the sentences in which
they march. Whatever changes are introduced word by word, the principle of hierar-
chy is preserved. When Anger and Gluttony in seeking incorporation of the world in
the word fail to convince us of this reality, in a word, of the phenomenal world, then
it’s up to Envy and Greed to affirm instead the reality of language and its manifesta-
tions, with society at the front of the line.
Language, as the only means of spiritualization that does not first subscribe
to belief in God, is the crusade of the living and the dead against the Divinity. In
this formation every word is a flaming sword in the Devil’s service, and language as a
whole is one big protest against the corporeality of humankind, an articulated cry
of Envy against God. Creation thus becomes the gigantic attempt by the Devil to
articulate himself—and to this end human society serves the Devil as mouthpiece
and tongue.
Envy and Greed together generate society, its organizing principle as hierarchy,
vengeance, and, with the same organizer, history. Vengeance is not beyond good and
evil: it is good and evil at once. That’s why, relatively speaking, vengeance requires no
judge, and, therefore, the socio-historico-linguistic order (that vengeance fills out) no
God. Envy is avenged by Greed, while Envy gets even with Greed. For each historical
epoch, you can substitute for Envy and Greed one of the two defining antipodes
or, anytime at all, you can fill them in, respectively, as son and father. Greed is the
momentary success of Envy; Envy is Greed that has not yet realized itself. The Devil
catches us in the choice to be made between hypocritical standards of self-betrayal
(Envy and Greed idealized) and the enlightened opportunism that looks through the
social and historical principle of vengeance onto a chessboard of manipulations.
 Sounds of Satan f 

With Pride we see through all of it, the whole world together with the Devil
and God, all of the above, as our own egoic creation. This is the triumph of the will,
the ego’s motility. It is the ego’s nature to go out of itself, to cast itself out and about,
to realize itself, to make itself material, to project itself on the outside. The pressure
is on, in the ego, to express oneself. Language is the net, the web, through which the
ego exceeds its boundaries. The ego is like a spider: it collects its secretions, its
thoughts, and keeps them crossing, back and forth, affixing them to the branches of
trees, to our senses, and thus it weaves its web out of words and sentences. You can
stretch language until it encompasses the infinitude of what’s out there. Even the
ego weaving it can be subsumed in language. But when it’s too much of a stretch—as
in the networking of logic and mathematics—then nothing can in fact be caught up
in it, only covered like a shroud. This stretch belongs to the sorrow of the heart,
apathy, depression, the deadly sin otherwise named acedia, popularly known as Sloth.
But there are also moments of condensation or density—literally, of poetry or Dich-
tung—that capture what they encompass by holding the ego, reality, prisoner in this
condensed form. Will can remove from this linguistic density all knots, connections,
concepts. Then without any meaning we would still have a language, but one of rela-
tions only, one that no longer speaks but instead buzzes, hums. It’s the sounds of
music. Music can thus be seen as the highest and densest of art forms, of poetry or
Dichtung. Music realizes the ego in a pure form: a meaningless song in praise of the
will by the will.
It is a defect in the ego that in its role as creator it gives forth illusion, the illu-
sions of good and evil, of wrong and right, and produces logic and ethics. Music grabs
us because it is the final argument, the last stand or understanding—after music
there’s nothing left to say. God and the Devil are annihilated, dissolved in music. When
the music plays we want only to submit to the glorious humming of language. The
meaningless language of relations is reality, because it is ego. Music is the goal of
human will. It is the ego’s goal to transform all its works into music.
Music and mathematics could also be seen as two sides of language. On one
side, one can award density to music and, in contrast, view mathematics as the stretch
of language that covers everything but captures or holds not one thing. If math helps
man control the world, this is only a by-product, a side effect. Indeed math has for
its own sake the purpose of reducing all sentences to zero. The goal of human thought
and speech is to be translated into math. Math realizes the complete silence that
music realized in the ego’s great pride of will. Music does not redeem us, deliver us
from our sins, but only from ourselves. Music is thus a demon, a means of possession.
Ego, if you must know, is a dissonance, a grammatical error that arises when math,
the highest knowledge, and music, the most creative inspiration, connect, intersect,
rather than merge with one another. With the music math loses the character of being
for its own sake and becomes a means of delivering the ego, becomes an instrument
of dissolution.
 F Laurence A. Rickels

But mournfulness, apathy, laziness must renounce reality, because it is nothing.

We have, in facing the music, delivered ourselves from God and the Devil—but also
from every piece of the ego, from every shred of self-consciousness.
Between Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Flusser’s History of the Devil
there’s Arthur Clarke’s Childhood’s End, another station in the crossing over or out
that gives Death and the Devil direct address, whether by exception or as the rule. In
Childhood’s End, aliens, who are Devil lookalikes or were once upon a time taken by
us for Devils, represent the highest development of consciousness, ego, reason. The
future that comes toward the human species is an evolutionary version of reunion
with God. It is a future that the alien Devil egos will never encounter. The Devils are
ordered by the God-like Overmind to protect the human species from its innate mass
suicide drive. The alien Devils come to earth as a way more advanced techno culture
that can dictate its terms of peace on earth. But it turns out that all this protection was
paid to maintain the conditions for the mutation that will end the human species, but
send its dematerialized sequel into the Overmind.
Even though humankind appears, on the scale of its self-entitlement to intel-
lectual and scientific penetration, evolutionarily inferior to the Devil aliens, there is
something else in the human makeup that exceeds the understanding that came from
outer space. This excess can be found on the margins of our own rational culture
in the form of occult inquiry, in particular as evident in the study of telepathy. Alan
Turing, one of the World War Two fathers of modern computing, advanced the thesis
that it was possible to conceive of a form of artificial intelligence that would be indis-
tinguishable from human intelligence.10 The one exception to this equation of machine
and man, Turing conceded, was the phenomenon of telepathy. Freud, too, after care-
fully including the role of the unconscious and wish fulfillment in his understanding
of cases of alleged telepathy, concluded that telepathy did transmit, and that we could
receive its frequency at the intersection between technology and the unconscious.
Turing made explicit that if one accepted telepathy, the possibility of communication
with the departed could no longer be pushed back as mere belief in ghosts. But this
excess or access was the threat the Devil aliens were ultimately sent by the Overmind
to contain. The lasting or last legacy of humankind is the relationship to our dead, the
relationship of unmourning. It accompanies and exceeds the mass suicide along for
the nuclear drive, the Oedipally complex realization of the primal scene between earth
and sun. It is, in time, without God and the Devil, without the renewal through lazy
thinking, without evolutionary jumping to conclusions, precisely un-containable.
Clarke resettled the Devil in  within a science fiction about the proper tim-
ing of evolution beyond all links with the missing. In so many Faustian fictions and
science fictions we see the Devil give time, in exchange for soul, specifically more time,
more-of-the-same time, but at the same time more focused time, quality time. But the
Devil cannot reverse time. The paraphysics of relative time—like the fantasy combi-
natorics of family identifications—remain accessible only to the human psyche or soul.
 Sounds of Satan f 

Owing perhaps to the novel’s Jungian background and the opening shutting of its
recent past, all that is relative or relational is annihilated or reborn as evolutionary
progress marching as to God. One flashback comes up only to be dismissed as false
analogy: “Somewhere long ago, he had seen a century-old newsreel of such an exodus.
It must have been at the beginning of the First World War—or the Second. There had
been long lines of trains, crowded with children, pulling slowly out of the threatened
cities.” But: “these who were leaving now were no longer children, whatever they might
be. And this time, there would be no reunion.”11 The striving for union with God or
Overmind, which leaves life as we know it behind, no longer misses the link that makes
evolutionary change, a change that comes across like a break or a leap because the
continuity shot with the stage of development that came right before is a lost loss in
generation. But at the same time, what survives this break on the upbeat is lazy think-
ing that can’t make out the big difference between Overmind Nirvana and the mass
suicidal embrace of nothingness on death drive. And so an annihilating equation is the
something for nothing that starts it all up again.
When you’re not involved in the creative dynamic of excrement, when you
swing low and lazy, you’re frozen. But even the deep freeze reverses itself, doubles as
turning point, as re-starter. Before (or after) you hit the icy bottom of your bottom’s-
up relationship to the world, to creation, to the Devil, you’re in the start-up posi-
tion (once again) of Lust and Anger, the two passions of self-sacrifice or soul sacrifice
that are therefore tragic in dimension. Don Juan is driven by Lust to deal with the
Devil, while Faust is inspired by Anger—at himself, his father, at his own limitations,
at the limiting role of the mere word, his father’s legacy. Anger (which can flip through
internalized anger to deep depression) is our lasting relationship to the law. Trans-
gressing against the law gets us off. We welcome the law’s transformation of our
world into the world of Anger because this new world order is also that of power.
Then you pass on through ingestion and digestion of the world of our techno media-
tion. Greed and envy transmute this media metabolization into power-hungry, pos-
sessive, mixed-metaphorical relations of controlling the world through others. But
then there’s always our Pride, which drops us to the final position of sorrow and Sloth
of the heart.
And, says Flusser, there is no way out of lazy thinking, out of the sadness of res-
ignation, of being resigned to unreality. We’re at the end and back at the beginning.
The world is the Devil’s instrument for dominating the world. Nothingness came from
nothing and was annihilated by nothingness.
Flusser informs us at the end of his history, which is now our history, that all
along the Devil has been only amusing himself, playing with himself. Whatever we
do, say, write it’s all about the Devil. And what we try to say about the Devil concerns
the mirror image or doubling of the Devil. But we are neither satisfied, nor silenced
by this realization. We are driven to transform into grammar and articulate word for
word that which is hard to conceive, namely the lassitude and sorrow of the heart.
 F Laurence A. Rickels

God created the Devil as his adversary and ally: the Devil was to create a world
that could be redeemed for the timeless reality that would join God. But the Devil’s
world dissolved not into this reality, but rather into nothingness, death, which only
the philosophical calm of lazy thinking and sorrow of the heart can contemplate. God
and the Devil are there so the death we get—it is its only redemption value—is our
own. One more last time: repetition or the Devil is all it can be within and with the
exception of the pause we are given for lazy thought.

Third Circle
In his “Reminiscences,” Graf turns to religion to characterize the ups and downs of the
early years inside Freud’s inner circle of application and submissions:

I have compared the gatherings in Freud’s home with the founding of a religion. How-
ever, after the first dreamy period and the unquestioning faith of the first group of
apostles, the time came when the church was founded. Freud began to organize his
church with great energy. He was serious and strict in the demands he made of his
pupils; he permitted no deviations from his orthodox teaching.12

The distance of Graf ’s withdrawal from the Freud group after Adler was excom-
municated nevertheless remained compatible for the father of little Hans with unin-
terrupted respect, perhaps even idealization, the right conditions, in any event, for his
preservation of Freud’s text and of his own “Reminiscences” of its author. That the pro-
jection onto Freud of an unidentified influence upon coming events slips in between
the lines of his reminiscences remains within the boundaries of the healthy. While
Graf does not make the little Hans connection public, still for those of us by now in the
know, the anecdote that most rocks the note to their historical collaboration concerns
a gift Freud made to Graf ’s son, two years to countdown of the phobia: “On the occa-
sion of my son’s third birthday, Freud brought him a rocking horse which he himself
carried up the four flights of steps leading to my house” ().
The other side of the same distance dynamic, demonization, attended last and
lasting words of resistance. In his Freud obituary, Jung, for example, wrote that he had
been “permitted a deep glimpse into the mind of this remarkable man . . . possessed
by a demon—a man who had been vouchsafed an overwhelming revelation that took
possession of his soul and never let him go.” When Freud died, Jung was the interna-
tional leader of the German association of psychotherapy, which was being retrofitted
to many of the specifics of National Socialism. However, given his negative transfer-
ence, Jung could nevertheless count his willingness to serve as a concession and trib-
ute to Freud since Freudians shared equally with Adlerians and Jungians in the new
order’s central institute in Berlin.
The demon that Jung refers to here can be good or evil, depending, for example,
 Sounds of Satan f 

in what archetype the real father is set. Jung’s  updating revisions of his 
essay, “The Significance of the Father in the Destiny of the Individual,” show the ten-
sion between this more neutral or historical notion of demon or genius and the earlier
setting of God and the Devil. In  Jung extends the findings drawn from the cases
he presents—and the case of the bed-wetting boy Jung expressly offers as complement
to Freud’s study of Little Hans—to address his more-or-less normal public. The saga
of demonic possession by the father is not restricted to the neurotic zone: “If we
normal people examine our lives from the psychoanalytic perspective, we too per-
ceive how a mighty hand guides us without fail to our destiny, and not always is this
hand a kindly one. Often we call it the hand of God or of the Devil.”13 In  Jung
dropped “from the psychoanalytic perspective,” thus, unwittingly perhaps, underscor-
ing the consent of middlebrow normalcy to his destinal claims while at the same time
marking the spot of overlap between Freud’s alleged demon and Jung’s certain Devil
father, the one that gave a kind of order to Jung’s life and corpus following the nervous
breakup of idealizing relations with Freud, the good or God father. A second reference
to the God or the Devil frame, which Jung deleted from his  updating revisionism,
reinforces the more-or-less healthy (or psychopathic) stereotype in which the Devil is
set. We need only subtract the outer-limits stretch marks from the neurosis diagnosis
to find our medium setting on the psychopathology continuum: “As soon as we enter
the field of neurosis, this antithesis is stretched to the limit. God becomes the symbol
of the most complete sexual repression, the Devil the symbol of sexual lust.”14
Based on the many ready-made examples of Devil reference and fiction that have
accrued to and within psychoanalysis, it is possible, in closing, to list a couple of con-
ditions and distinctions. You need a neurotic-to-psychotic psyche, one that’s inhib-
ited, as in stuck on missing objects, to take the leap of faith called God or to cultivate
more personalized occult relations with undeath. The psyche that signs up with the
Devil is uninhibited and nonneurotic (or psychopathic passing as nonneurotic). For
once and future reference: the psy-fi gadget lover or fetishist occupies yet another
place of exception, one displaced with regard to the question of mourning or not
mourning, which is not covered by this specific divide between faith and certainty.
The Devil, remember, never grants immortality. Instead he grants quality time, which
is really more-of-the-same time, but with the big difference that the Devil adds a dead-
line, an on-schedule certain death date. In other words, the Devil’s powers, in person
or by proxy, are linked and limited to this world. (In Civilization and Its Discontents
and The Future of an Illusion, Freud considers whole epochs of religious belief in other
worlds as “neurotic” [SE XXI,  and ].) Even when the Devil extends or defers
limits for a certain amount of time, the time will come when the limit or limitation
must be observed.
What operates inside psychoanalysis in the Devil’s name is not your usual occult
foreign body. The Devil or the demonic or the Death Drive (in Archive Fever Derrida
also argues for their interchangeability15) responds for psychoanalysis in the diplomatic
 F Laurence A. Rickels

context or contest in which Freud’s science can find itself with philosophy or journal-
ism. What psychoanalysis needed was a way to address what’s strictly inconceivable
according to psychoanalytic theory, but which remains the leading password across
these disciplines, namely Death. At the same time, Freud was able to attend to the
specific conditions of Devil fantasy or delusion, and under the rule of the exception to
the overriding melancholic significance of all other occult relations give us ears to hear
a case like that which Aleister Crowley makes for himself.
As chronicled in his Confessions, Crowley made it to Dad certainty through the
perfect fit he threw between his death wish and his father’s death. At first writing
down his early years in the third person, Crowley identifies himself as his father’s son.
“In the case of Alick, he was the only son of a father who was naturally a leader of men.
In him, therefore, this spirit grew unchecked. He knew no superior but his father.”16
But this continuity shot could only come about after the fact of the father’s death. “In
looking back over his life up to May , he can find little consecution and practically
no coherence in his recollections. But from that month onwards there is a change. It
is as if the event which occurred at that time created a new faculty in his mind. A new
factor had arisen and its name was death.” This death was doubled and contained in
line with the son’s wish. On the night of the father’s death, he dreamed this same death.
To fix the quality of this connection he turns up the contrast with his mother’s
death. He keeps on dreaming that she’s dead but she’s still there. Eventually a dream
death coincides with her passing. It’s one hell of a coincidence. And this time, Crow-
ley recalls, the dream had that special quality control he had sensed the one and only
time he dreamt up the dead father. The mother’s life or death position is uncontain-
able within the dream series; until, that is, the father’s death is finally built up out of
the repetition and catches up with the traumatic uncontrollability of the maternal body’s
presence and absence. But this maternal, material resistance, described, spectacularly
without any identification whatsoever on Crowley’s part, as the bouncing, escaping
fallout from his wishes, which he followed relentlessly until one day the mother, over
and out, was liquidated with Dad certainty, is not subsumable, via repression, denial,
or displacement, by the early duo dynamic superintended by Mother to which all
the other occult figures (vampire, mummy, werewolf, ghost, you name it) can in fact
be seen to return with a haunting vengeance. With Dad certainty Crowley entered
up-close and first-personal relations with his own life, which would henceforward be
deadicated and dadicated to worship of the Devil in the pantheon of paganism.

From the moment of the funeral the boy’s life entered on an entirely new phase. The
change was radical. Within three weeks of his return to school he got into trouble
for the first time. . . . Previous to the death of Edward Crowley, the recollections of
his son . . . appear to him strangely impersonal. . . . It is only from this point that he
begins to think of himself in the first person. From this point, however, he does so;
and is able to continue this autohagiography in a more conventional style by speaking
of himself as I.17
 Sounds of Satan f 

Notes
1. Max Graf, Wagner-Probleme und andere Studien (Vienna: Wiener Verlag, ), –.
2. Ibid., , .
3. Max Graf, Composer and Critic. Two Hundred Years of Musical Criticism (Port Wash-
ington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, ), –.
4. Max Graf, “Richard Wagner im ‘Fliegenden Holländer.’” In Ein Beitrag zur Psycholo-
gie künstlerischen Schaffens (Leipzig and Vienna: Franz Deuticke, ), .
5. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner: The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of
Wagner (; New York: Random House, ), –.
6. Ernest Jones, On the Nightmare (–; London: Liveright Paperbound Edition,
), .
7. Vilém Flusser, Die Geschichte des Teufels (; Göttingen: European Photography,
).
8. Vilém Flusser, with Klaus Nüchtern, Ein Gespräch (Göttingen: European Photogra-
phy, ).
9. Vilém Flusser, Die Schrift. Hat Schreiben Zukunft? (; Göttingen: European Pho-
tography, ); Vampyroteuthis infernalis. Eine Abhandlung samt Befund des Institut Scien-
tifique de Recherche Paranaturaliste (; Göttingen: European Photography, ); Deutsche
Musik im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (Berlin: Verlag Siegfried Cronback, ); From Beethoven
to Shostakovich. The Psychology of the Composing Process (New York: Philosophical Library,
); Die innere Werkstatt des Musikers (Stuttgart: Verlag von Ferdinand Enke, ).
10. A. M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind , no.  (October
): –. For the more extended treaments of Turing test, telepathy, haunting, sexual dif-
ference, and Clarke’s Childhood’s End, see Laurence A. Rickels, “Satan and Golem, Inc.,” paral-
lax  (): –.
11. Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End (: New York: Ballantine Books, ) .
12. Max Graf, “Reminiscences of Professor Sigmund Freud,” trans. Gregory Zilboorg,
Psychoanalytic Quarterly , no.  (October ): –.
13. C. G. Jung, “The Significance of the Father in the Destiny of the Individual,” in The
Collected Works of C.G. Jung, ed. William Mcguire, Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, and Ger-
hard Adler, trans. R. F. C. Hull. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), :–.
14. Ibid., n.
15. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chi-
cago and London: University of Chicago Press, ).
16. Aleister Crowley, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley. An Autohagiography, ed. John
Symonds and Kenneth Grant (London: Arkana, ), .
17. Ibid., –.
This page intentionally left blank
 R . Heteros Autos
Freud’s Fatherhood
Silke-Maria Weineck R
Die Liebe zu den Kindern ist immer eine unglückliche.
[Love of children is always unhappy/unrequited.]
—Arthur Schnitzler

I
n the first sentence of what must be the most famous subchapter of The Inter-
pretation of Dreams, Freud writes: “Another series of dreams that may be
called typical are those with the content that a dear relative, parents or siblings,
children etc. has died.”1 The odd grammatical structure of the sentence, with
its singular verb following multiple subjects, announces that it is really only one
dear relative whose dreamed death will matter to psychoanalysis: the father, whose
death, according to Freud’s widely accepted autobiographical narrative, gave rise
to his self-analysis and hence to psychoanalysis as we know it. In his later writings
Freud will repeatedly stress that psychoanalysis stands—and falls—with the Oedi-
pus Complex, an assertion echoed in the literature over and over again. Very recently,
Slavoj Žižek wrote, “Whenever we talk about myths in psychoanalysis, we really talk
about one myth, the Oedipus myth—all other Freudian myths (the myth of the primal
father, Freud’s version of the Moses myth) are variations thereof, albeit necessary
variations.”2 Shortly thereafter he claims that “the Oedipus ‘myth,’ and possibly myth-
ical naivete itself, serves to veil a forbidden knowledge, namely the knowledge of the
father’s obscenity.”3
In the wake of psychoanalysis, to say that masculinity (or even becoming-human
itself ) emerges as Oedipal implies that it becomes defined and marked by the name of
the quintessential son, whose mask even the most patriarchal of twentieth-century
grand theorists could don without raising too many questions. While Freud, father of
six, presents himself, in The Interpretation of Dreams, as the son reflecting on his father’s


 F Silke-Maria Weineck

death, he will still have much to say about dreams concerning the death of siblings and
of parents of both sexes. But there is one of those typical dreams he will never explore:
the father’s dream of his son’s death, what we may call King Laius’s dream.4
I will argue that The Interpretation of Dreams, and the discipline that grew out
of it, are characterized by an elision of far-reaching ramifications: the elision of father-
hood. Seeing the prominence of the very word “father” in psychoanalysis, this claim
may sound counterintuitive, even absurd. Of course, I am suggesting neither that psy-
choanalysis does not reflect on fatherhood as an institution, nor that it does not reflect
on fathers; it obviously has done both, to a great extent and to tremendous effect. At
the same time, however, it fails to theorize the position of the father from within; we
see him through the son’s eyes only, as if fatherhood were a symbolic and phantas-
matic extension of filiality, but not a distinct realm of masculine experience producing
a subject position of its own.
In this light, the intense analytic preoccupation with the (name of the) father
paradoxically blocks him from view. Like Laius, he is always already offstage, signifi-
cant only after his death, to which he must consent in order to gain the power ascribed
to the function he is called upon to embody.5 If Freud’s version of the Oedipus legend
functions like a veil, what is veiled is indeed the father—perhaps in his obscenity, but,
more important, in his impossibility. In , Otto Weininger puts the matter in all
bluntness: “[F]atherhood is a miserable delusion.”6 Miserable and necessary, of course,
and everywhere at work, like God, that other grand and miserable delusion that does
and does not come to an end at the same time, and for similar reasons.

The Name of the Child

Concerning his children, Freud writes in a well-known passage in chapter  of The
Interpretation of Dreams:

I held to it that their names ought not to be chosen according to the fashion of the
day but be determined in memory of dear persons. Their names make the children
into “revenants.” And in the end, are children not for all of us the only access to
immortality? 7

If children are “‘revenants’” (we will have to come back to this term later), who is re-
turning in their name? The first sentence above suggests that it is “dear persons,” teure
Personen; the last suggests that it is the naming father. In isolation, neither claim—
naming as commemoration of loved or admired others, children as a path to immor-
tality—is especially striking or original, but the combination sets up a tension worth
exploring. Freud names his oldest son Jean Martin, after Charcot; his second son,
Oliver, after Cromwell; his third son, Ernst, after Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke. The
encounter with Charcot and his work, needless to say, was a milestone in Freud’s
 Heteros Autos f 

professional life, and in , he writes of the physiologist von Brücke as “the greatest
authority that ever has influenced me” (der größten Autorität, die je auf mich gewirkt
hat).8 Cromwell does not quite seem to fit in, but in the Dream Book itself, Freud notes
that this “great historical personality . . . had attracted me mightily in my boyhood
years, especially since my stay in England” (), and he comments: “It is easily noted
how the suppressed megalomania of the father is transferred to his children in his
mind; yes, one will gladly believe that this is one of the ways in which the suppressions
of the same, which has [sic] become necessary in life, takes place.”9
To the extent that Charcot, Cromwell, and Brücke appear in this context as men
with whom Freud identified to a greater or lesser degree (this is not all they are, of
course), children provide access to immortality by returning as their father’s ideal
selves. Their names honor admired men and create a benign outlet for the mega-
lomania that life has forced the father to suppress. Reading just a little more closely,
however, it appears that the naming of the child is not only a mere consolation for an
already suppressed megalomania, as might be expected, but constitutes one of the
very avenues of such suppressions. Not unlike the fetish, the naming of the child thus
marks an identification as well as its loss. When Oliver Cromwell returns as Oliver
Freud, the effect is one of great satisfaction: “I had the resolve to use precisely this
name if it were to be a son and, deeply satisfied, saluted with it the one just born.”10
But Freud’s subsequent comment makes it clear that this satisfaction comes at a
certain price: declaring the son to be Oliver is tantamount to the admission that his
father is not.
At the same time, the loss of the fantasy of being Oliver (Jean-Martin, Ernst) may
be compensated for or outweighed by the both symbolic and quite real power involved
in making him return as one’s child. Oliver Freud shows up with a curious delay; in the
passage cited above, Freud returns to a dream he had already analyzed roughly twenty
pages earlier, a dream concerning his father:

After his death, the father played a political role with the Hungarians, he unified
them politically, whereby I see a small, indistinct image: a crowd as in the Reichstag,
a person standing on one or two chairs, others around him. I remember that on his
deathbed he resembled Garibaldi so much, and I’m glad that this prophecy has come
true after all.11

In analyzing this dream—and Oliver does not yet make an appearance in this sec-
tion—Freud plays on the (etymologically metonymic) homonymy of the German
words for chair and for excrement, Stuhl, analogous to English “stool,” and interprets
his father as “Stuhlrichter,” judge of excrement. He remembers that “the most tor-
turous of his sufferings was the total paralysis of his colon (Obstruction) over the
last weeks” (), an obstruction that, as we will learn only later, led to Jakob Freud
defecating in his bed several times. Interestingly enough, Freud does not mention his
father soiling his bed at this point, but makes the association to a fellow student:
 F Silke-Maria Weineck

One of my contemporaries, who lost his father while he was still in high school, on
which occasion I, deeply moved, offered him my friendship, once told me with deri-
sion of the pain of a relative whose father had died on the street and had been taken
home, where it was found, while undressing the corpse, that during the moment of
death or post mortem a defecation [Stuhlentleerung] had taken place.12

Through this double detour—the father of the friend’s relative—Freud introduces the
image of the defecating father, and the child’s mortification at such a sight. One might
expect Freud to read his own dream as fulfilling the wish to see his father’s lost honor
vindicated; but his final interpretation performs a curious displacement: “Now we
have penetrated to the wish which embodies itself in this dream: After one’s death to
stand before one’s children pure [also clean] and great, who would not wish for that?”13
Who is dreaming this dream, Jakob or Sigmund Freud? Both? The one as the other’s
revenant?
It is only in the second telling of the dream that Freud explicitly acknowledges
his own father’s defecation. He repeats the last sentence of the first telling, and adds
(some repetition is necessary here):
(To this, a forgotten sequel.) From the analysis I can now insert what belongs in this
dream-gap. It is the mention of my second boy, to whom I gave the first name of
a great historical personality which mightily attracted me during my boyhood years,
especially after my stay in England. I had the resolve to use precisely this name if it
were to be a son and, deeply satisfied, saluted with it the one just born. It is easily
noted how the suppressed megalomania of the father is transferred to his chil-
dren in his mind; yes, one will gladly believe that this is one of the ways in which
the suppressions of the same, which have become necessary in life, takes place. The
little one gained his right to be included in the context of this dream through the
fact that he had been subjected to the same—easily forgiveable in the child and
the dying man—accident of soiling his linens. Compare here the allusion “Stuhl-
richter” (judge of excrement) and the wish of the dream: To stand before one’s chil-
dren great and pure.

It is, of course, Freud himself who is the judge of excrement, standing on the chair, the
stool, one or two of them. It is he who forgives both his father and his son for defecat-
ing, while dreaming himself first as son, second as father, but always in control of his
own stool, clean-pure and great. While the dead Jakob Freud returns as the Garibaldi
of the Hungarians, the new-born Oliver now appears as a revenant of Jakob in his
excrement, in an association that places the child on the deathbed while he’s still in his
diapers. And while Cromwell may not qualify as a father figure, Charcot and Brücke
surely do.
If Cromwell (Brücke, Charcot) returns as Freud’s incontinent little infant, how-
ever, megalomania has hardly been suppressed; it has merely taken a little detour. The
act of naming is, after all, an exercise of power. And so is the evocation of the dead that
makes revenants of Freud’s own children. The context of the passage is rather clear
 Heteros Autos f 

on this. The section that ends with the passage on the naming of his children follows
his third reading of the famous self-dissection dream, in which Ernst von Brücke him-
self had told Freud to “prepare” anatomically his own lower body, an activity Freud
understands to symbolize his self-analysis (). The section itself presents his second
reading of a double dream involving first the appearance of the dead Professor Ernst
Fleischl in Ernst von Brücke’s laboratory, and then his (dead) friend P., who joins Freud
and Fliess for dinner. During the meal P. dissolves into nothing, after Freud, realizing
that P. is already dead, pronounces, while penetrating him with his gaze, “non vixit,”
“he did not live,” an error in tense that Freud realizes within the dream itself. The last
affect Freud relates is again one of great satisfaction: “I am tremendously pleased
about [P’s disintegration], understand now that Ernst Fleischl as well was only an
appearance, a revenant, and find it quite well possible that such a person exists only
for as long as one wishes, and that it can be removed by the wish of the other.”14
In the first telling, Freud had added a few mysterious sentences in which he
notes that he would love to tell his audience the “full solution of these riddles,” i.e., “the
meaning of the dream which is well-known to me,” but claims that he cannot “sacrifice
consideration for such dear persons to my ambition, as I do in my dream” (). “Dear
persons” (teure Personen) reappear later as the namesakes of Freud’s children. But
even without this repetition, it is obvious that the dream concerns Ernst von Brücke
rather than Ernst Fleischl, and that the dissolution of the “greatest authority” of his life
is at stake. Freud himself feels reminded of his own disintegration at Brücke’s gaze. His
former teacher had once reprimanded him for coming late to the lab: “What he said
was scant and firm; however, the words did not really matter. What overwhelmed me
were the terrible blue eyes with which he gazed at me and before which I faded—like
P. in the dream, who, to my relief, reversed the roles.”15 Revenants return as reversals,
and, like dreams or the fairies of old, they appear to fulfill wishes, inverting the father’s
gaze, granting to the dreamer the imaginary power of the father he will never hold in
his waking life—for the father’s power is, and I will elaborate on this later, real only in
its effects: it cannot be experienced.
When Freud returns to the dream later on, and once again mentions the satis-
faction it gave him, he reflects on the “difficult self-overcoming involved in interpret-
ing and communicating one’s dreams. One has to uncover oneself as the only villain
among all the noble ones with which one shares life.” He continues, rather cryptically:

Hence, I find it entirely understandable that the revenants exist only as long as one
likes them, and that they can be removed by a wish. The revenants, however, are the
successive incarnations of my childhood friend; hence I am also satisfied that I have
replaced this person again and again, and a replacement for the one I am now in the
process of losing [i.e., Fliess] will find itself. Nobody is irreplaceable.16

The passages cited thus far establish a number of equations concerning children. They
are figures of return as well as replacement, repositories of selves that are and are
 F Silke-Maria Weineck

not sacrificed to the demands of the reality principle, compensation for the death of
beloved friends. Naming them is akin to an identity deposit. Similar to the logic by
which the fetish allows the fetishist to both acknowledge and deny castration, the son
allows his father to both acknowledge and deny death and replaceability: in other
words, time. The son does not merely return as his father, but, perhaps as important,
as his father’s father, inverting a relationship of submission into one of power through
the act of naming. The most troubling and perhaps the most extraordinary metonymi-
cal equation, however, is that of the child as revenant and the revenant as the figure
who can be “removed by a wish.” The passage that, in isolation, appeared as a benign
and perhaps mildly self-ironical assessment of a father’s ambition for his children, thus
acquires a sinister filicidal undertone. To an extent, naming the son after another is
always already a process of erasing the son’s identity; of withholding him from his
own time; of smothering his separateness in layers and layers of identities already
established and meaningful; and, in its most benign intentions, a violent inscription on
the softest of flesh. Questioning Levinas’s conception of fatherhood, Luce Irigaray
writes: “The child should be for himself, not for the parent. When one intends to cre-
ate a child, giving the child to himself appears as an ethical necessity. The son should
not be the place where the father confers being or existence on himself, the place
where he finds the resources to return to himself in relation to this same as and other
than himself constituted by the son.”17 Irigaray is right, but she perhaps underestimates
the difficulty of “giving the child to himself ” in a culture where father-son succession
and substitution organize all foundational narratives.

Non Vixit
There is nothing new, of course, in drawing attention to paternal violence in its many
forms and guises. Especially in the wake of Freud, such violence has been taken for
granted as fatherhood’s defining feature, thus engendering and legitimizing patricidal
fantasies and acts. The prohibitions against these fantasies and acts are, in fact, rather
weak as soon as we enter metaphoric or symbolic realms. If anything, violent rebellion
against all fathers has been the norm and, often enough, the ideal in cultural pro-
duction (at least) since the Enlightenment, and it surely serves as a privileged (and not
necessarily tragic) model of history. What remains underexplored in this familiar
narrative is the position of the father himself, as well as the moment of transition, of
becoming-father. Seen as the end of sonhood, patricide is the process by which the
murderer usurps the place of the victim along with the seat of power. As Laius learns,
gaining the woman means begetting the son, and begetting the son manifests more
than potency and possession. The logic of fatherhood is bound to engender filicidal
impulses in the father that are just as inevitable (and equally ambivalent) as the patri-
cidal impulses of the prototypical son. This is not to deny that fatherhood is also
 Heteros Autos f 

marked by pride and by love, by the urge to protect and the (fantasmatic) pleasure at
having extended the self into the future. The dilemma of fatherhood is precisely the
simultaneity of encountering the rival one cannot destroy without destroying oneself.
Fatherhood, in other words, is Laiusian, and the legend of Laius and Oedipus speaks
as much to the sexuality of the adult male as to that of the child.
While Freud reads the Oedipal plot as a child’s fantasy, we may want to read
Freud’s plot of the subordinate son, who displaces his desire in the interest of the patri-
archal family, as the Laiusian fantasy par excellence, especially when it focuses on
the six-year-old, the most reassuring rival a man could have. Except for the infant, the
young child is no longer allied with the mother’s body, whose womb and breasts he
had usurped (providing her with a phallus that he in some regard has stolen from the
father); and, unlike the young adult, he is socially dependent, physically weak, and
sexually insignificant. By contrast, the Greek myth marks the two moments in which
the promise of fatherhood is most critically threatened by the outbreak of filicidal
violence: the birth of the son, which turns the man from lover into father (the moment
in which Donald Hall addresses his newborn as “My Son, my Executioner”), and his
transition to adulthood, in which he gains the very real power to challenge the father
physically, sexually, and socially.
Two of Freud’s own (filicidal) dreams mark these two moments very clearly:

An elevation, on it something like an open-air privy [Abort], a very long bench, at its
end a large privy hole. The edge at the very back densely occupied with little piles
of excrement of all sizes and stages of freshness. Behind the bench, bushes [ein
Gebüsch]. I urinate onto the bench; a long stream of urine rinses everything clean
[rein], the pieces of excrement come loose easily and fall into the opening. As if some-
thing were left over at the end. . . .18

Freud happily receives his unconscious’s assertion that he is “der Übermensch”: Her-
cules, Gulliver, and Gargantua wrapped into one. And to the extent that he acknowl-
edges the presence of his children in this dream, he comments: “I have discovered
the childhood etiology of the neuroses and thus have saved my own children from
falling ill.”19 It is difficult, however, not to at least speculate about a quite different read-
ing. At the time of writing, Freud had six children, born in , , , ,
, and , “of all sizes and stages of freshness,” so to speak. Even if the equation
of defecation and birthing mostly belongs to a slightly later stage in Freud’s work (he
touches upon it in the section of birthing dreams, but in fact only develops the theme
in the analysis of Little Hans), the equation of feces and gold and of children and
wealth belongs to the Interpretation of Dreams, and so does the association of bushes
and the female pubes.20 The word Freud uses for “privy,” Abort, is also the medical
term for abortion, and finally, Freud himself characterizes the location of the dream as
follows: “The elevation and the bushes belong to Aussee, where my children are stay-
ing at this point” (gehören nach Aussee, wo jetzt meine Kinder weilen) ().
 F Silke-Maria Weineck

Freud, of course, does not interpret the little piles of feces as his children, whom
or which he can rinse away with a powerful stream of urine—a penile act of abortion
inverting the act of begetting—just as he does not draw a connection between the
revenants he can dissolve with his gaze and the revenants he declares his children to
be. In general, when Freud talks about himself as father in the Dream Book, he pres-
ents himself as especially benign rather than as the villain as whom he usually delights
to pose. When he dreams of having “to flee my children,” in a somewhat unusual
transitive usage of the German verb flüchten (), he finds in himself only sorrow
at the prospect of separation and worry and care for their well-being (). When, in
the same dream, two of his sons appear with a father who is not Freud himself (),
he does not reflect on the appearance of another father as a possible inversion of
the family romance, or as a variation on the ancient theme of paternal uncertainty;21
rather, he realizes only that he, as a Jewish man, cannot provide them with a Vaterland,
that he is barred from the metonymy of pater and patria that sustains fatherhood and
the state alike.22 When he dreams that his children’s physician falls ill, he does not
wonder whether he may be wishing for their illness as well. When he dreams of “my
son the myop” (), he does not ask what there may be to be gained in a son who does
not see. The theme of filicide does surface in a passing joke—“A little bit later, a shin-
gle hit my eye: Dr. Herodes, Practice Hours . . . I said, ‘I hope the colleague isn’t a pedi-
atrician’”23—but the allusion is safely contained in the history of Jewish persecution;
it is always the other father who kills. Only once in The Interpretation of Dreams does
Freud come close to acknowledging in himself the Laiusian wish to destroy the child,
and that is a passage added in , concerning a son who has entered the privileged
arena of masculine power, war:
I tell my wife I have news for her, something very special. She is afraid and wants
to hear nothing. I assure her that, on the contrary, it is something that will make
her very happy, and begin to tell that our son’s officer corps has sent a sum of money
( K?) . . . something about acknowledgment . . . distribution . . .

Freud enters a pantry, and suddenly

I see my son appear. . . . He mounts a basket next to a cupboard as if to place something
on top of this cupboard. I call to him; no response. It seems to me that he has his face
or his forehead bandaged, he arranges something in his mouth, pushes something in.
I think: Should he be so exhausted? And does he have false teeth?24

Freud, dreaming during World War I, realizes that this is a dream about his son’s
death: “It is easy to see that the conviction that he has been wounded or killed finds
expression in the content of the dream,” but when he begins to talk about the element
of wish fulfillment which, by his own account, pervades all dreams, he takes a detour:
the location of a pantry, the cupboard . . . these are unmistakable allusions to an acci-
dent of my own. . . . The deepening of the analysis then lets me find the hidden impulse
that could find satisfaction in the feared accident of the son. It is the envy against youth,
 Heteros Autos f 

which the older man believes to have stifled thoroughly in his life, and it is unmistakable
that, should such a calamity actually occur, precisely the strength of the painful emotion
discovers such a repressed wish fulfillment as its solace.25

To consider the dream as a wish fulfillment, Freud must soften death to accident,
murderous fantasy to envy; and, in yet another double inversion of paternal and filial
position, the accident repeats his own while his son appears as an old man with gray
hair and false teeth.26
Such slides pervade Freud’s writing on fatherhood, and it would be tempting to
conclude that fatherhood and sonhood are so intimately bound up with each other
that they cannot be kept apart. Under the influence of Lacan and others, it is certainly
the case that Freud’s concept of the Oedipal has become generalized to such a degree
that the position of any given father (in contrast to “the” father, the symbolic one)
appears to be subsumed under it. Claude LeGuen suggests as much when he writes: “I
would say unequivocally that there is only an Oedipus Complex, the Laius complex
being only an appendage. But what an appendage!”27 To be sure, the citations from the
Dream Book give strong evidence of the fact that father is always also son, and that he
is more ready to present himself as son than as father. Moreover, it is difficult to decide
whether sonhood precedes fatherhood or vice versa. Unlike fatherhood, sonhood is
not optional, and thus (for all historical, cultural, individual differences) amounts to a
universal situation. Every father has once been a son; for this reason alone his self-
image will be contaminated by the remnants of his earlier, filial perspective. At the
same time, in any given life, the father precedes the son, and the newborn, no matter
how deeply embedded in the symbolic his life may already be, will have to come into
awareness of his sonhood in encountering a father who is already there (or will be
fantasized as always already having been there). Perhaps it is fair to say that to the son,
the father as father comes first, and to the father, the son (both as a recuperation of his
own sonhood and its phantasms and as the other, who, by his very appearance, moves
him one generation closer to death and appeals to him to assent to this death).
Given these complications, as well as the mutual contamination or conceptual
interdependence of terms, teasing out those elements of the father-son relation that
belong to fatherhood alone is a challenge. As mentioned above, to us Laius is always
already offstage; and his death is so constitutive of the myth as we read it that he is not
merely dead, but appears as if he has never lived, that death is his existence: non vixit.28
At the same time, the asymmetrical yet reciprocal entanglement of father and son does
not imply that fatherhood and sonhood cannot be distinguished in important ways,
just as the chicken-egg dilemma has never led anybody to claim that a chicken is the
same as an egg. In a fascinating reading of the extant Greek sources, Marie Balmary
has shown in great detail the extent to which Oedipus repeats his father Laius’s trans-
gressions, and she has suggested that Freud’s disregard of Laius in his reading of the
myth is a symptom of his failure to see “the fault of the father.”29 In a different revival
of the figure of Laius, John Munder Ross has insisted that traditional psychoanalysis
 F Silke-Maria Weineck

has overlooked or seriously downplayed the “pederastic and filicidal inclinations that
I believe to be universal among fathers.”30 Both readings, while insightful and impor-
tant, retain the original Freudian gesture of looking at the father through the son,
reducing Laius to his transgressions (not just his attempted filicide, but also the rape
of his adoptive father’s favorite son, Chrysippus, a crime that according to at least
some of the sources led to the curse that he would have to refrain from consummat-
ing his marriage or beget the son who would kill him). If, however, Oedipus is more
than a patricidal motherfucker, Laius may well be more than a filicidal child rapist.
And while Oedipus repeats, he also deviates in ways that shed light on precisely the
specificity of the Laius position within the Oedipal dyad.
In a transgressive grab for immortality that is perhaps a more serious offense
against the gods than patricide or incest, both Laius and Oedipus rebel against time.
Laius, in attempting to bring about his son’s death, refuses to accept his own substi-
tutability. In fathering his siblings, Oedipus, within the generational structure that
establishes kinship identity, aims to father himself and thus to take himself out of
time in a different way.31 Right before the anagnorisis of Sophocles’ drama, Oedipus
declares himself the son of mother fortune and the brother of the moons, with no
father in sight. Right afterward, the chorus will tell him that he has been caught not
by the law, not by the gods, not by truth, but by time, who sees all (ho panth’ horõn
chronos).32 His downfall is intimately linked to his fatherhood. In the first line, he
addresses his people in a markedly paternal gesture (“ô tekna,” “oh children”); and the
last scene shows Creon removing his children from him. His movement through the
play is thus both one of ascending knowledge and one of diminishing fatherhood, of
being forced to assume the filiality he had denied. It is fatherhood, then, that is linked
with ignorance; and it suits this reading that, in his reascendancy, at Colonus, Oedi-
pus is once again accompanied by his daugher, Antigone.
The task at which both Laius and Oedipus fail is a complex negotiation between
simultaneity and succession: paternity is to incarnate—in one body and one identity—
sonhood and fatherhood, but also to distinguish between them as relations to another,
or rather to two others who, in turn, will fight for their individuation at the same time
as they lay claim to their, our, and your identity. But while the father sees in his son
both the enemy and an extension of his self, the son sees in his father the one who—
benignly or maliciously—holds the place that is to be his. To repeat: this relationship
is hardly symmetrical. While the child, as Aristotle argues in the Nicomachean Ethics,
is heteros autos to the man (ta gar ex autôn hoion heteroi autoi tôi kechôristhai), both
self and other, no son thinks of his father as another self in that way. Hence, fathers
love their children more than children love their fathers (as Aristotle notes again with
certainty, in the Eudemian Ethics).33
Freud’s identification of children as multiple revenants adds one more compli-
cation: the child, as the self ’s extension into the future after death, is not merely other
in his own right, but also incorporates a number of yet different others—the father’s
 Heteros Autos f 

actual and symbolic fathers, as well as repressed phantasms of his own self. As if the
ensuing multitude of simultaneous but irreconcilable relations were not enough, the
most difficult tension fatherhood has to bear is the discrepancy between symbolic
and actual that makes the experience of fatherhood one of incurable inadequacy. It is
here that Freud’s historical position as one who is thinking in the age of the death of
god bears most decisively on his unwriting of fatherhood. In a footnote in The Inter-
pretation of Dreams, he writes that “the father is the oldest, the first, and for the child
the only authority out of whose omnipotence all other social authorities have devel-
oped over the course of human cultural history,” but nonetheless it is also true that
those “other authorities” have long served to produce the very paternal authority in
which they purportedly ground themselves.34 Fatherhood is the primal institution, but
precisely as the first effect of pure signification, it is also inherently dependent on the
feedback of power along the very metaphorical and metonymic chains it is said to
anchor. More specifically, in monotheistic cultures, it is no longer the father who lends
his authority to God, but God who lends his authority to the father, as the very prin-
ciple of disembodied paternity. Precisely because paternity, Joyce’s “legal fiction,” is, in
its distinction from material maternity, always disembodied in principle, incorporat-
ing it is thus a process of destabilization. The father may be the figure of omnipotence
to his son, but never to himself, and least of all, perhaps, in gazing at his child.35

Heteros Autos
The subjectivity of embodied fatherhood—as an experience of uncertainty, mortality,
and, ultimately, castration—is in stark contrast to the concept of (symbolic) father-
hood in which psychoanalysis has so heavily invested itself.36 If and when it surfaces,
however, it comes with a strong flavor of lack and insufficiency. In the Rome Dis-
course, Lacan writes that “even when in fact represented by a single person, the pater-
nal function concentrates in itself both imaginary and real relations, always more or
less inadequate to the symbolic relation that essentially constitutes it.”37 And Jean-
Michel Rabaté writes: “Who can be sure to be the father, who can be so self-confident
as to utter without faltering, ‘I am a fa . . .’ and not crash down into the frozen lakes of
doubt and incest that have nonetheless been safely crossed?”38
While the doubt is old, the faltering of the father’s voice has a historical dimen-
sion as well. Around , the stammering of the father is everywhere. We can hear it
in a passage from Hofmannsthal’s Chandos Letter (), a text that has been read as
emblematic of the epoch at issue here:
[T]he abstract words of which the tongue must by nature make use in order to bring
any judgment to light fell apart in my mouth like mouldy mushrooms. It happened
to me that I wanted to rebuke my four-year old daughter Catarina Pompilia for a
childish lie of which she had become guilty and to lead her to the necessity to always
 F Silke-Maria Weineck

be true, and in this act the concepts that flowed to me in my mouth suddenly
acquired such a glittering coloration and flowed into each other to such a degree
that, stammeringly finishing the sentence as well as I could, as if I had become un-
well, and indeed pale in the face and with a heavy pressure on my forehead, I left the
child alone.39

Hofmannsthal acknowledges both the father’s function to speak for the law—“to
bring . . . judgment to light”—and the impossibility of embodying this function, pre-
cisely at a time when fatherhood is no longer grounded by a monotheistic father-god
who can serve as the ultimate moral instance guarding the distinction between truth
and lie. Incapable of meeting the task of abstraction—i.e., the task of masculinity in
the semiotic gender system that still organizes Hofmannsthal’s writing—the father
abdicates a discourse that has become purely external to him. The words “flow to him”
as if of their own accord and disintegrate in his mouth, losing color, shape, and texture.
Having to embody the function of the symbolic father, the real father’s experience is
one of an inadequacy that makes the voice falter in a mouth full of mush. True, this
loss is recollected in some of the most exquisite German prose in existence, but the
eloquence belongs to the gesture of abdication, and it cannot blind us to the fact that
no voice can answer Kafka’s Letter to his Father, a text that, like no other, demonstrates
how the very gesture of acknowledging the father’s superior power condemns him
to silence.40
Kafka is simply the most audible and the most eloquent of sons. When Freud
writes the Traumdeutung, the voice of the son has already begun to colonize literature,
and the crisis of fatherhood manifests itself in a variety of (overdetermined) phenom-
ena: the discovery of bachelorhood, to which Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has drawn atten-
tion; the cult of male youth; the late nineteenth-century horror of procreation that
goes hand in hand and, to my mind, is an important constitutive element of the well-
documented fear of the feminine marking the period;41 the anti-organic themes of
Huysmans’s À Rebours; the fascination with dead children in the same author’s Là-
Bas; the pervasive anxiety concerning heredity (which always spells degeneration) in
the wake of Darwin, to name just a few. Aesthetic innovation had been securely tied
to patricide for quite a while, and the anxiety of influence may well be outweighed by
the anxiety of being an influence. On the stylistic level, the most pertinent feature
may be the famous catalogues of decadence, the endless enumerations and descrip-
tions of the inanimate, that stall and undermine organic aesthetics, as well as narrative
contracts built on the expectation of an integrating plot. These stalling narratives
are indicative of the crisis of fathering, since father-son succession is the master plot
of myth and every patriarchal culture’s founding narrative, a succession that often
enough is staged as the failure of filicide. (While their stories are very different, Zeus,
Isaac, Oedipus, and Jesus are all sons who survive filicidal assaults.)
In centering his enterprise on the name of the son, Freud formalizes and final-
izes a crisis and makes it productive. While the dilemma of fatherhood is both ancient
 Heteros Autos f 

and overdetermined, I think there is little doubt that Freud’s voice—so paternal, so
patriarchal, so Laiusian in his lifelong struggle with the psychoanalytic progeny—has,
more than any other, generated the cultural space in which the sons will talk (and talk
and talk and talk) about their fathers, in tones of derision and regret, fear and love—
but hardly ever about their sons.42 Since so many of these sons are fathers as well, both
biologically and symbolically speaking, the son’s son becomes the twentieth century’s
most repressed figure. Quite appropriately, he makes a barely veiled appearance in
Freud’s essay on “The Uncanny”:

The most prominent among the motifs that have an uncanny effect . . . [is] the doppel-
gängerdom in all its gradations and forms . . . [so] that one is led astray in contemplat-
ing one’s I [daß man an seinem Ich irre wird] or puts [versetzt] the alien I in the place
of the own, ergo I-doubling, I-splitting, I-substitution—and finally the eternal return
of the same, the repetition of the same [nämlichen] facial features, characters, fates,
criminal deeds, yes, of the same names through several successive generations.43

This Doppelgänger is the son. He is Oedipus as seen by Laius—familiar and alien,

springing from the domestic uncanny of the lover’s womb (heimlich-unheimlich),
repressed but always returning, doubling the father, repeating his features, his crimes,
his name, splitting his I, usurping his place, and at the same time, demanding to be
loved without reserve.
Do fathers love their children? Of course they do. The love of the father, however,
most prominently articulates itself upon the child’s loss or death: Jacob mourns Joseph;
David laments Absalom; Aegeus throws himself into the sea when Theseus’s ship
nears the harbor decked in black sails; Ben Jonson writes poems on his dead children;
David paints Brutus watching the lictors bringing home the bodies of the sons exe-
cuted at his command; Odoardo Galotti adores and stabs Emilia; Lessing writes the
most moving letter after his son dies shortly after birth; Goethe’s father rides on to the
whispers of the Earlking while his son is dying in his arms—and there are Mallarmé’s
Anatole, Yeats’s On Baile’s Strand, and, more recently, Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time.
Only the death of the child makes fatherhood speakable, because this death re-
solves fatherhood’s profound ambivalence, or releases the tension, especially of father-
ing sons. Sons signify, simultaneously, a father’s mortality and his immortality. Echoing
the vicissitudes of biology, the father-son-relationship balances (or fails to balance)
identity and difference. The logic between them is supplemental, echoing that of the
Doppelgänger, and might in fact be the very model of the logic of the double itself.
The son is both promise and threat, beloved and feared, continuity and disrup-
tion, a gift and a monstrous imposition, another self and the worst possible rival, iden-
tity’s futurity and its termination—and he is the one only because he is also the other.
Precisely to the extent that paternity belongs to the public realm of order, law, and
tradition, the son is unheimlich, the figure of the repressed other-self that comes from
the home; and his death—real or fantasized—is the condition of love, or at least its
 F Silke-Maria Weineck

articulation. Only the written child—written and hence both dead and alive—is the
perfect child, or, as Ben Jonson has it, “his best piece of poetrie.”
The son is intimately linked to writing itself. That writing erases the writer, that
the author dies in every work he produces, are insights we owe to the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries; we also owe them, I think, to the unacknowledged expe-
rience of fatherhood, which has so long functioned as creativity’s ambivalent master
metaphor.44 Like writing, fatherhood is a form of suicide in the service of immortality,
and every son is an executioner. Of course, this is never the whole story; but to begin
telling that story, we have to begin to imagine Laius, and to finally imagine him from
within, as a desiring subject, as the one who is called upon to say yes rather than no:
yes to the child, and yes to his own death, thus releasing the son to the full potential of
his otherness.

Notes
1. “Eine andere Reihe von Träumen, die typisch genannt werden dürfen, sind die mit dem
Inhalt, daß ein teurer Verwandter, Eltern oder Geschwister, Kinder usw. gestorben ist.” Sig-
mund Freud, Die Traumdeutung, in Studienausgabe Bd. II (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, ),
. All quotations are from this edition; all translations are my own.
2. “Wenn wir über Mythen in der Psychoanalyse sprechen, dann sprechen wir in Wirk-
lichkeit über einen Mythos, den Ödipusmythos—alle anderen Freudschen Mythen (der Mythos
des Urvaters, Freuds Version des Mosesmythos) sind, wenn auch notwendige, Variationen
davon.” Slavoj Žižek, Die gnadenlose Liebe (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ), .
3. “[D]er Ödipus-’Mythos’, und möglicherweise die mythische ‘Naivität’ selbst, dient
[dazu], ein verbotenes Wissen zu verschleiern, nämlich das Wissen um die Obszönität des
Vaters.” Ibid., .
4. It should be mentioned at the outset that the following remarks concern the father-son
dyad almost exclusively. This is not because daughters or mothers do not matter, but because
father-daughter relationships are a different story, and the elucidation of the role of the mother
in the configurations sketched here would necessitate another article.
5. Discussing Totem and Taboo, Lacan writes, “[I]f this murder is the fruitful moment of
debt through which the subject binds himself for life to the Law, the symbolic father is, in so far
as he signifies this Law, the dead Father.” Jacques Lacan, “On a Question Preliminary to Any
Possible Treatment of Psychosis,” in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Nor-
ton, ), .
6. Otto Weininger, “[D]ie Vaterschaft [ist] eine armselige Täuschung,” in Geschlecht und
Charakter: Eine prinzipielle Untersuchung (München: Matthes & Seitz, ), .
7. “Ich hielt darauf, daß ihre Namen nicht nach der Mode des Tages gewählt, sondern
durch das Andenken an teure Personen bestimmt sein sollten. Ihre Namen machen die Kinder
zu ‘Revenants’. Und schließlich, ist Kinder haben nicht für uns alle der einzige Zugang zur
Unsterblichkeit?” (Freud, Die Traumdeutung, –).
8. Sigmund Freud, “Nachwort zur ‘Frage der Laienanalyse,’” in Studienausgabe Ergän-
zungsband, .
 Heteros Autos f 

9. “Es ist leicht zu merken, wie die unterdrückte Größensucht des Vaters sich in seinen
Gedanken auf die Kinder überträgt; ja man wird gerne glauben, daß dies einer der Wege ist, auf
denen die im Leben notwendig gewordenen Unterdrückungen derselben vor sich geht” (Freud,
Die Traumdeutung, ).
10. “Ich hatte das Jahr der Erwartung über den Vorsatz, gerade diesen Namen zu ver-
wenden, wenn es ein Sohn würde, und begrüßte mit ihm hoch befriedigt den eben Geborenen”
(ibid., ).
11. “Der Vater hat nach seinem Tode eine politische Rolle bei den Magyaren gespielt, sie
politisch geeinigt, wozu ich ein kleines undeutliches Bild sehe: eine Menschenmenge wie im
Reichstag, eine Person, die auf einem oder zwei Stühlen steht, andere um ihn herum. Ich erin-
nere mich daran, daß er auf dem Totenbette Garibaldi so ähnlich gesehen hat, und freue mich,
daß diese Verheißung doch wahr geworden ist” (ibid., ).
12. “Einer meiner Altersgenossen, der seinen Vater noch als Gymnasiast verlor, bei
welchem Anlaß ich ihm dann tief erschüttert meine Freundschaft antrug, erzählte mir einmal
höhnend von dem Schmerz einer Verwandten, deren Vater auf der Straße gestorben und nach
Hause gebracht worden war, wo sich dann bei der Entkleidung der Leiche fand, daß im Moment
des Todes oder postmortal eine Stuhlentleerung stattgefunden hatte” (ibid., –).
13. “Hier sind wir nun zu dem Wunsch vorgedrungen, der sich in diesem Traume verkör-
pert. Nach seinem Tode rein und groß vor seinen Kindern dastehen, wer möchte das nicht wün-
schen?” (ibid., ).
14. “Ich bin ungemein erfreut darüber, verstehe jetzt, daß auch Ernst Fleischl nur eine
Erscheinung, ein Revenant war, und finde es ganz wohl möglich, daß eine solche Person nur so
lange besteht, als man es mag, und daß sie durch den Wunsch des anderen beseitigt werden
kann” (ibid., ).
15. “Was er mir sagte, war karg und bestimmt; es kam aber gar nicht auf die Worte an.
Das Überwältigende waren die fürchterlichen blauen Augen, mit denen er mich ansah und vor
denen ich verging—wie P. im Traum, der zu meiner Erleichterung die Rollen verwechselt hat”
(ibid., ).
16. “Man muß sich als den einzigen Bösewicht enthüllen unter all den Edlen, mit denen
man das Leben teilt. Ich finde es also ganz begreiflich, daß die Revenants nur so lange bestehen,
als man sie mag, und daß sie durch den Wunsch beseitigt werden können. . . . Die Revenants
sind aber die aufeinanderfolgenden Inkarnationen meines Kindheitsfreundes; ich bin also
auch befriedigt darüber, daß ich mir diese Person immer wieder ersetzt habe, und auch für den,
den ich jetzt zu verlieren im Begriffe bin, wird sich der Ersatz schon finden. Es ist niemand
unersetzlich” (ibid., ).
17. Luce Irigaray, “Questions to Emmanuel Levinas,” The Irigaray Reader, ed. Margaret
Whitford (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, ), .
18. “Eine Anhöhe, auf dieser etwas wie ein Abort im Freien, eine sehr lange Bank, an
deren Ende ein großes Abortloch. Die ganz hintere Kante dicht besetzt mit Häufchen Kot von
allen Größen und Stufen der Frische. Hinter der Bank ein Gebüsch. Ich uriniere auf die Bank;
ein langer Harnstrahl spült alles rein, die Kotpatzen lösen sich leicht ab und fallen in die Öff-
nung. Als ob am Ende noch etwas übrigbliebe” (Freud, Die Traumdeutung, ).
19. “Ich habe die Kindheitsaetiologie der Neurosen aufgedeckt und dadurch meine eige-
nen Kinder vor Erkrankung bewahrt” (ibid., ).
20. “‘How many children do you have now?’—‘Six.’—A gesture of respect and precari-
ousness.—‘Girls, boys?’—‘Three and three, that is my pride and my wealth.’” (“‘Wieviele Kinder
 F Silke-Maria Weineck

haben Sie jetzt?’—‘Sechs.’—Eine Gebärde von Respekt und Bedenklichkeit.—‘Mädel, Buben?’—

‘Drei und drei, das ist mein Stolz und mein Reichtum’” [ibid., ]). Also, see ibid., : “The
male genitals symbolized by people, the female ones by a landscape.”
21. On the theme of inverted family romance, see Marie MacLean, “The Heirs of Amphi-
tryon: Social Fathers and Natural Fathers,” New Literary History , no.  (): –.
22. “The Jewish question, the worry about the future of the children to whom one
cannot give a fatherland, the worry to bring them up in such a way that they can become free
to move [ freizügig also carries connotations of cosmopolitan, sexually liberated, loose], are easy
to recognize in the relevant dream thoughts.” (Die Judenfrage, die Sorge um die Zukunft der
Kinder, denen man ein Vaterland nicht geben kann, die Sorge, sie so zu erziehen, daß sie
freizügig werden können, sind in den zugehörigen Traumgedanken leicht zu erkennen” [Freud,
Die Traumdeutung, ]).
23. “Kurz darauf fiel mir ein Schild in die Augen: Dr. Herodes, Sprechstunde . . . . Ich
meinte: ‘Hoffentlich ist der Kollege nicht gerade Kinderarzt’” (ibid., ).
24. “Ich sage meiner Frau, ich habe eine Nachricht für sie, etwas ganz Besonderes. Sie
erschrickt und will nichts hören. Ich versichere ihr, im Gegenteil, etwas, was sie sehr freuen
wird, und beginne zu erzählen, daß das Offizierskorps unseres Sohnes eine Summe Geldes
geschickt hat ( K) . . . etwas von Anerkennung . . . Verteilung . . . Plötzlich sehe ich meinen
Sohn erscheinen . . . Er steigt auf einen Korb, der sich seitlich neben einem Kasten befindet, wie
um etwas auf diesen Kasten zu legen. Ich rufe ihn an: keine Antwort. Mir scheint, er hat das
Gesicht oder die Stirn verbunden, er richtet sich etwas im Munde, schiebt sich etwas ein. Auch
haben seine Haare einen grauen Schimmer. Ich denke: Sollte er so erschöpft sein? Und hat er
falsche Zähne?” (ibid., –).
25. “[D]ie Örtlichkeit, eine Speisekammer, der Kasten . . . das sind unverkennbare
Anspielungen an einen eigenen Unfall . . . . Die Vertiefung der Analyse läßt mich dann die ver-
steckte Regung finden, die sich an dem gefürchteten Unfall des Sohnes befriedigen könnte. Es
ist der Neid gegen die Jugend, den der Gealterte im Leben gründlich erstickt zu haben glaubt,
und es ist unverkennbar, daß gerade die Stärke der schmerzlichen Ergriffenheit, wenn ein
solches Unglück sich wirklich ereignete, zu ihrer Linderung eine solche verdrängte Wunscher-
füllung aufspürt” (ibid., ).
26. When Freud finally does reflect on a father’s dream at length, the son is already dead,
and the only wishes Freud allows us to imagine are that he has come to life again, or that sleep
goes on. It is striking that the dream of the burning child is explicitly framed as the one dream
where the usual dream economy of fantasy, wish, and the outside does not apply. Cathy Caruth
comments: “Unlike in other dreams, Freud remarks, what is striking in this dream is not its
relation to inner wishes, but its direct relation to a catastrophic reality outside” (Unclaimed
Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History [Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
], ).
27. Claude Le Guen, “The Formation of the Transference: Or the Laius Complex in the
Armchair,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis  (), .
28. See note , above.
29. Marie Balmary, Psychoanalyzing Psychoanalysis: Freud and the Hidden Fault of the
Father, trans. Ned Lukacher (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, ).
30. John Munder Ross, “The Darker Side of Fatherhood: Clinical and Developmental
Ramifications of the ‘Laius Motif,’” International Journal of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy 
(): .
 Heteros Autos f 

31. In his brilliant annotations to his translation of Antigone, Hölderlin suggests that the
conflict with “the spirit of time” is at the heart of tragedy: “The boldest moment in the course
of a day or a work of art is the moment when the spirit of time and nature, the divine which
seizes man, stands most wildly against the object he is interested in.” (Der kühnste Moment
eines Taglaufs oder Kunstwerks ist, wo der Geist der Zeit und Natur, das Himmlische, was
den Menschen ergreift, und der Gegenstand, für welchen er sich interessiert, am wildesten
gegeneinander stehen.) Friedrich Hölderlin, Werke, Briefe, Dokumente, Nach der Kleinen Stutt-
garter Hölderlin-Ausgabe, hg. Friedrich Beißner, ausgewählt und mit Nachwort von Pierre
Bertaux (München: Winkler, ), .
32. Sophocles, Works, ed. and trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Loeb Classical Library (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, ), : –, line .
33. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, ed., with an English translation, by Horace Rackham
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ), b; and Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, ed. and
trans. Horace Rackham (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ), b.
34. “[D]er Vater ist die älteste, erste, für das Kind einzige Autorität, aus deren Machtvol-
lkomenheit im Laufe der meschlichen Kulturgeschichte die anderen sozialen Obrigkeiten her-
vorgegangen sind” (Freud, Die Traumdeutung, n).
35. The theme of paternal uncertainty (or its inversion in Oedipus’s filial uncertainty) is
the one red thread in the history of fatherhood: precisely because the bodily link between father
and child is always dubious, paternity relies on and emerges as the archetype of signification.
36. Freud’s blindness to the position of the father is, I think, intimately linked to his
decade-long blindness to the phenomenon of countertransference. While he recognizes early
on that the analyst’s main task is to initiate, sustain, and bear the analysand’s transference,
within this transference he will always figure as the father, even though in a fatherhood he can
construct as fantasized, displaced, not his own. In response, analysis develops the analyst as a
counter-father, benevolent, nurturing, sexually abstinent, and—ideally, or in theory—silent,
without features, present but invisible. Invisible to the analysand, but invisible also to himself,
and that is, perhaps, the greater problem.
37. Emphasis added; see Jacques Lacan, “Function and Field of Speech and Language in
Psychonalysis,” in Lacan, Écrits, .
38. Jean-Michel Rabaté, “A Clown’s Inquest into Paternity: Fathers, Dead or Alive, in
Ulysses and Finnegans Wake,” in The Fictional Father: Lacanian Readings of the Text, ed. Robert
Con Davis (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, ), .
39. “[D]ie abstrakten Worte, deren sich doch die Zunge naturgemäß bedienen muß, um
irgendwelches Urtheil an den Tag zu geben, zerfielen mir im Munde wie modrige Pilze. Es
begegnete mir, daß ich meiner vierjährigen Tochter Catarina Pompilia eine kindische Lüge,
deren sie sich schuldig gemacht hatte, verweisen und sie auf die Notwendigkeit, immer wahr zu
sein, hinführen wollte, und dabei die mir im Munde zuströmenden Begriffe plötzlich eine
solche schillernde Färbung annahmen und so ineinander überflossen, daß ich, den Satz, so
gut es ging, zu Ende haspelnd, so wie wenn mir unwohl geworden wäre und auch tatsächlich
bleich im Gesicht und mit einem heftigen Druck auf der Stirn, das Kind allein ließ” (Hugo von
Hofmannsthal, Ein Brief, in Werke in zehn Bänden: Erfundene Gespräche und Briefe, ed. Lorenz
Jäger [Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, ], ).
40. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “Exaggerated Oedipus,” in Kafka: Toward a
Minor Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ).
41. Here is a (fairly representative) passage from Zola’s The Sin of Father Mouret: “A
 F Silke-Maria Weineck

human smell rose from this heap of quivering houses. And the priest thought he was back in
Desiree’s barnyard, face to face with that endless swarm of multiplying animals. He felt the
same heat of generation, the same continuous labor whose smell had made him sick. All day
he had lived with this pregnancy of Rosalie’s, and he finally thought of it as part of life’s filth, of
the flesh’s drives, of the preordained reproduction of the species which sowed men like grains
of wheat. The Artauds were a flock penned in by the four hills on the horizon, begetting,
spreading out with each new litter from the females” (Emile Zola, The Sin of Father Mouret,
trans. Sandy Petry [Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, ], ).
42. There are some notable exceptions here, of course: the most interesting one may
be Yeats’s work, especially his poems to his children and the Cuchulain plays culminating in
filicide.
43. “[D]ie hervorstechendsten unter jenen unheimlich wirkenden Motiven . . . das Dop-
pelgängertum in all seinen Abstufungen und Ausbildungen . . . so daß man an seinem Ich irre
wird oder das fremde Ich an die Stelle des eigenen versetzt, also Ich-Verdoppplung, Ich-
Teilung, Ich-Vertauschung—und endlich die beständige Wiederkehr des Gleichen, die Wieder-
holung der nämlichen Gesichtszüge, Charaktere, Schicksale, verbrecherischen Taten, ja der
Namen durch mehrere aufeinanderfolgende Generationen,” in Freud, “Das Unheimliche,” Stu-
dienausgabe Bd. IV, .
44. Plato, “Symposium,” trans. Michael Joyce, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed.
Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), a:
“But those whose procreancy is of the spirit rather than of the flesh . . . conceive and bear the
things of the spirit. And what are they? you ask. Wisdom and all her sister virtues; it is the office
of every poet to beget them, and of every artist whom we may call creative.” See also Aristotle,
Nicomachean Ethics, trans. J. E. C. Welldon (New York: Prometheus Books, ), a:
“Every artisan feels greater affection for his own work, than the work, if it were endowed with
life, would feel for him. But nowhere I think is it so true as in the case of poets; they have an
extraordinary affection for their own poems, and are as fond of them as if they were their
children.” Freud, writing to Edoardo Weiss about his anonymous publication of Moses and
Monotheism, says: “My relationship to this work resembles that to a love child . . . . Only much
later did I make this non-analytic child legitimate” (Briefe –, ed. Ernst and Lucie Freud
[Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, ], .
 R . “Non vixit”
Friends Survived
Elke Siegel
R
You guess correctly what Abraham’s death meant to me. But if one is to live so
long, one cannot entirely avoid surviving others. After all, psychoanalysis is not a
personal affair, and will continue to exist even after I have ceased to preside over
its destinies.
—Sigmund Freud, letter to Ludwig Binswanger, May , 

: Year of “Revenants”

“This is the year of ‘revenants,’” Sigmund Freud wrote to his friend Wilhelm Fliess
on July , , in and of the year that we have become accustomed to think of as the
year of The Interpretation of Dreams.1 Freud’s statement refers to the guests he had
been entertaining in Vienna: first, his half-brother Emmanuel from London, and then,
unexpectedly, an old friend, the dermatologist Sigmund Lustgarten, who had emi-
grated to New York. Given that  was overdetermined for Freud, his calling it “the
year of ‘revenants’” cannot be a mere coincidence.2 It is not just a spontaneous erup-
tion, joke, or slip—or better, it is all of these, and therefore carries precisely the weight
that Freud himself attributed to such phenomena.
In the German sentence, the French word “revenant” comes close to being what
it usually signifies: revenants are ghosts, uncanny apparitions, someone or something
that comes back to you, for you. In the French word “revenant,” Freud’s time in Paris
seems to be returning. On the one hand, “revenants” in this sentence merely means a
literal return, a reappearance. But precisely because of Freud’s time in Paris, he prob-
ably knew that the word “revenants” is usually reserved for those shadowy creatures
haunting us from the grave. If Freud uses “revenant” for the living, for those who have
left and return (maybe using the quotation marks to indicate that he was aware of
the unusual use of the word), one still has to note the peculiarity that the living—the


 F Elke Siegel

half-brother and the old friend—are designated by the (at the very least) ambivalent
word “revenants.” By the distancing marks of quotation, they are marked by a death
that cannot be crossed out.3
This “year of ‘revenants’” and of The Interpretation of Dreams also marks the
further decline of the friendship without which the dreambook might never have
been conceived.4 Freud and Fliess met for the last time in August . Much has been
written about this relationship and about what psychoanalysis owes to it: in the first
analysis—that is, in Freud’s self-analysis—Fliess figured as proto/pseudoanalyst (with-
out Fliess’s knowing it).5 As far as The Interpretation of Dreams is concerned, Freud
called Fliess the godfather (“Gevatter”) of this monumental book, the one who gave
Freud “the gift of the Other, a critic and reader” and, substituting for Freud’s lack of
shame, stood in as the censor.6 Freud had to write to somebody, and Fliess was his only
audience, an audience of one.7 He knew that not only self-analysis requires an Other,
a stranger, but so does writing.8
Fliess is to Freud not merely the Other, but the “representative of the Other,” a
chameleon of a friend, the one friend who can stand in for all other people.9 Fliess as
friend is absolute changeability, absolute fluidity (the name “Fliess,” of course, is related
to the verb “fliessen,” to flow). In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (), dedi-
cated to Fliess, Freud tells us about an incident in which he forgot to buy blotting
paper—“Fliesspapier”—and goes on to show how the name of this particular kind of
paper was connected with his friend.10 Fliess becomes not only the one who blots out
by being the censor of Freud’s writing, but also the one who has to blot himself out, who
has to be so much the constant friend (in and through his changeability) that, in the
end, he will also be changed into an adversary, though maybe first of all into a revenant.
Friendships—the friendship with Fliess in particular—played an important role
in Freud’s life, yet he himself had surprisingly little to say about friendship, usually
describing it only as a mode of sublimated sexuality, as in Group Psychology and the
Analysis of the Ego. One should not forget, however, that Freud was acutely aware of
the tension between publicizing the analyses of his own dreams and the responsibility
to protect friends or particular friendships. He owed much to his friends, and he
owed much to the friend, Fliess, regarding his work. And yet he had to pay back the
debt with the risk of betrayal as the extreme limit of analysis and interpretation. It
comes as no surprise that Freud—in a letter to Fliess from November , , thus
after the actual publication of The Interpretation of Dreams—should note: “The book
has just been sent out. The first tangible reaction was the termination of the friend-
ship of a dear friend, who felt hurt by the mention of her husband in the Non vixit
Dream.”11 Freud was referring to Betty Paneth, the wife of his—dead—friend and col-
league, Josef Paneth, who figured prominently and in an utterly unflattering way in the
dream mentioned. It is in this dream that Freud makes the most explicit remarks about
friendship found in his published works. And it is precisely the figure of the “revenant”
that is closely connected to Freud’s explications about friendship.
 “Non vixit” f 

Klaus Theweleit, writing about Hilda Doolittle and elaborating on the figure of
the female revenant, compares the revenant to a structural element in Freud’s writing.
This figure, says Theweleit, is
a leading character in [Freud’s] literary work since the Interpretation of Dreams.
Freud learned from experience that not only did people from his childhood reappear
(in dreams; then outside the dream), but also all the important people in his life had
the inherent property of not disappearing from his life once they had entered it; the
property of returning in other people, in another form, but clearly, all too clearly as
the reappearance of past, abandoned, even forgotten or dead people; a figure whom
he named the revenant, the one who returns, the never-ending doppelganger of all the
important people who had entered his life.12

The figure of the “revenant” comes to stand in for the process of repetition, of return,
for the importance of the past for the present. Before becoming a generalized name
for this structure, however, the “revenant” is already intrinsically connected with
friendship. In the course of the interpretation of the Non vixit Dream, Freud gives
a summary of the history and meaning of friendship in his life, a remarkably explicit
definition of what friends are and have been for him:
I have already shown how my warm friendships as well as my enmities with contem-
poraries went back to my relations in childhood with a nephew who was a year my
senior; how he was my superior, how I early learned to defend myself against him,
how we were inseparable friends, and how, according to the testimony of our elders,
we sometimes fought with each other—and made complaints to them about each
other. All my friends have in a certain sense been re-incarnations of this first figure
who “früh sich einst dem trüben Blick gezeigt”: they have been revenants.13

Friends—no exception seems to be possible, unless there is a categorical difference

between “all my friends” and the friend—have been “revenants.”14 In every friend, the
first friend—the older nephew, John—returns. The year of The Interpretation of Dreams
and of revenants is the year of friends: the book itself may be viewed as a book about
revenants, friends, the friend, as a book about friendship as well as enmity.

Brother—Cousin—Friend
On October , , reporting to Fliess about the findings of his self-analysis, Freud
writes about the important figures of his childhood. Concerning the latter he points
out:
I greeted my one-year-younger brother (who died after a few months) with adverse
wishes and genuine childhood jealousy; his death left the germ of (self-)reproaches
in me. I have also long known the companion of my misdeeds between the ages of
one and two years; it is my nephew, a year older than myself, who is now living in
Manchester and who visited us in Vienna when I was fourteen years old. The two of
 F Elke Siegel

us seem occasionally to have behaved cruelly to my niece, who was a year younger.
This nephew and this younger brother have determined, then, what is neurotic, but
also what is intense, in all my friendships. You yourself have seen my travel anxiety at
its height.15

In this passage, friendship’s origin is divided between the brother and the nephew
John (whose real name was Johannes16), the son of Freud’s half-brother, Emmanuel.
Julius and John then merge to make up the “model” for friendship. Freud’s relationship
to his younger brother Julius, whose name Freud omits, is marked by the reproach
“that regularly sets in among the survivors,” as Freud put it after the death of his
father.17 The self-reproach he feels after the death of his brother might very well result
from Freud’s wish for the brother to disappear and even die—which he did, as if by
the magic of the adverse wish.18
Julius, though constitutive, with John, in the determination of friendship, is
never mentioned again. During the interpretation of the Non vixit Dream (which he
dreamt in October ) Freud traces all his friendships back to the relationship with
John. This relationship becomes the original model for all friendships, a model that
has to omit Julius. But it might be exactly this death, and its omission in the further
explication of friendship, that will turn out to haunt friendship. One might say: Freud
reduces all of his friends to being the mortal remains in which John can reappear—
or Julius, as the unnamed.
John now stands alone at the beginning of friendship, which for Freud is a rela-
tionship to somebody who is superior; against whom one has to defend himself; with
whom one fights; about whom one complains. Nevertheless Freud and John were
inseparable friends. This closeness seems to be the only friendly aspect of friendship.
Keeping the letter to Fliess cited above in mind, these two were close as conspirators
in crimes against others.19

The Non vixit Dream: Memorial for a Friend

On September , , Freud sends to Fliess what he called his “central accomplish-
ment in interpretation”—the absurd dreams—and states: “It is astonishing how often
you appear in them. In the Non vixit Dream I am delighted to have outlived you; isn’t
it terrible to suggest something like this—that is, to have to make it explicit to every-
one who understands?”20 Freud provides Fliess with an abbreviated interpretation of
the dream, namely, that he (Freud) is delighted to have survived his friend in it. The
statement is proleptic, a projection into a future after the death of the friend. The
death of the Other determines friendship in this logic: even in the present, the Other
is the one who will die first—that is the hope or wish. Since the death of the friend thus
becomes decisive for friendship, even the friend who is still alive is seen from the per-
spective of death. Freud seems less apologetic about the dream-delight in surviving
 “Non vixit” f 

Fliess than about the fact that, even if he does not explicate this interpretation, it is
potentially clear to everyone. This conundrum haunts Freud’s interpretation of the
Non vixit Dream.
Freud gives this dream, which actually consists of a sequence of two dreams,
considerable attention: almost eleven pages total in two rounds of interpretation. Two
events or situations were on Freud’s mind at the time: he had just attended the unveil-
ing of a memorial in honor of Ernst Fleischl von Marxow, his by-then dead friend and
former superior at the Physiological Institute of Ernst Brücke.21 He was also worried
about Fliess, whose relatives in Vienna had just informed Freud about a serious sur-
gery his friend had undergone. The situation was even more troubling because Fliess
had calculated that the age of forty—and he was forty at the time—would be critical
for him. But there is no mention of Fliess until the second round of interpretation.
Freud’s first interpretation takes place against the backdrop of Brücke’s Insti-
tute. The personnel there consisted of four men in hierarchical positions: Brücke
himself, the head of the institute and a veritable father figure, his two assistants, and,
under their supervision, the demonstrator. “Wherever there is rank and promotion
the way lies open for wishes that call for suppression,” Freud writes during the inter-
pretation of the Non vixit Dream, referring to himself and his friend Josef Paneth, who
succeeded him as demonstrator.22 Both Freud and Paneth shared the same ambition,
but Paneth was more explicit about this than Freud. Fleischl, one of the assistants,
inspired friendship and respect in Freud and Paneth, but also professional competi-
tion: the only hope for promotion inside the Institute was for one of the current assis-
tants to make room, that is, to become the head of the Institute, to leave, or—to die.23
In fact, Fleischl was seriously ill, which therefore opened the field for evil wishes in
Paneth and Freud.
Freud introduces the dream as one that he dreamt very clearly. The motif of
clarity will return in the dream itself:
I had a very clear dream. I had gone to Brücke’s laboratory at night, and, in response
to a gentle knock on the door, I opened it to (the late) Professor Fleischl, who came in
with a number of strangers and, after exchanging a few words, sat down at his table.
This was followed by a second dream. My friend Fl. [Fliess] had come to Vienna un-
obtrusively in July. I met him in the street in conversation with my (deceased) friend
P. [Paneth], and went with them to some place where they sat opposite each other as
though they were at a small table. I sat in front at its narrow end. Fl. spoke about his
sister and said that in three-quarters of an hour she was dead, and added some such
words as “that was the threshold.” As P. failed to understand him, Fl. turned to me and
asked me how much I had told P. about his affairs. Whereupon, overcome by strange
emotions, I tried to explain to Fl. that P. (could not understand anything at all, of
course, because he) was not alive. But what I actually said—and I myself noticed the
mistake—was, “non vixit.” I then gave P. a piercing look. Under my gaze he turned
pale; his form grew indistinct and his eyes a sickly blue—and finally he melted away.
I was highly delighted at this and I now realized that Ernst Fleischl, too, had been no
 F Elke Siegel

more than an apparition, a “revenant” [“ghost”: literally, “one who returns”]; and it
seemed to me quite possible that people of that kind only existed as long as one liked
and could be got rid of if someone else wished it.24

The first round of interpretation, which immediately follows Freud’s narration of the
dream, tries to explain the source of his gaze and of the phrase “non vixit,” and is
mainly concerned with the annihilation scene. Freud deduces his hostility toward
Paneth first from the constellation Freud-Fleischl-Paneth and then from the child-
hood relationship with John.
It has already been mentioned that one of the reference points of the dream was
the unveiling, which Freud had attended, of a memorial in honor of Fleischl. Fleischl
received a memorial, Paneth did not. Rightfully so: that is one of the dream thoughts.
Before his own premature death, Paneth was outspoken about his ambition to advance
in the Institute, implying that he would welcome Fleischl’s demise. Freud punishes
Paneth in his dream, but later admits that he, too, had had such ambitious and perhaps
fatal wishes. On the other hand, Freud claims that he built a memorial for Paneth with
his dream. Thus the dream becomes a memorial for the loved and despised friend
Paneth, whose death or disappearance Freud wished (with successful outcome in the
dream), because Paneth himself had wished for the death or disappearance of a third
friend, Fleischl. Maybe this memorial should bear the inscription “non vixit,” a frag-
mentary quote from a memorial for Emperor Josef,25 which would fit the ambiguity of
the memorial for Paneth, and maybe for all of Freud’s friends: on the one hand honor-
ing them, on the other hand not only pronouncing them dead (which would be “non
vivit,” “he is not alive,” “he does not live”) but as always having been dead, as never hav-
ing lived: non vixit.

Brutus: The Parataxis of Friendship and Enmity

Freud enters into a discussion of John through the antithetical, paratactic statement
that encompasses his hostile and affectionate feelings towards Paneth: “Because he did
a lot for science I build him a memorial; but because he was guilty of an evil wish
(which was expressed at the end of the dream) I annihilate him” (). This construc-
tion recalls for Freud the (according to him) only literary example containing a simi-
lar antithetical statement: Brutus’s justification as to why he killed Caesar, whom he
loved, in Shakespeare: “As Caesar loved me, I weep for him; as he was fortunate, I
rejoice at it; as he was valiant, I honour him; but, as he was ambitious, I slew him”
().26 Here Freud assumes the role of Brutus, who kills Caesar for being ambitious.
After ten years of separation, John and Freud were reunited on stage (of all
places):27 John played Caesar and Freud played Brutus in front of an audience of chil-
dren.28 Thus John returns and is immediately killed. Freud does not explain the scene
in this way, but instead defines the returning John as just another revenant: “He had
 “Non vixit” f 

come to us on a visit from England; and he, too, was a revenant, for it was the play-
mate of my earliest years who had returned in him” (). The origin of all revenants
is himself a revenant. The dream, though, sets up the “revenant” as a ghost of the dead
friend. If John also is a revenant, then he is an apparition of himself. “John” can signify
a person on stage, a fifteen-year-old visiting Vienna, and a four-year-old playmate
from ten years before with whom he seems not to be identical and who will have
died. If “John” can in fact be all these personae, one has to ask the question: How is one
to discern between a theatrical figure, a ghost, and a “real” person, between dead and
alive? Non vixit: maybe he did not live, never lived.
Freud proceeds by stating again that the childhood relationship “had a deter-
mining influence on all my subsequent relations with contemporaries. Since that time
my nephew John has had many reincarnations”—including himself, we might add
(). But what, then, is the structure of this first friendship? If Freud puts all his
friends into a series starting with John, we should recall that “John” is actually split into
two moments: the child who disappeared or died (Julius/John) and the revenant. The
reason for this absence/death is implicit in the temporality of the relationship itself,
as well as in the intrinsic split within friendship into both friendship and enmity, or
maybe we should call it: tyranny.29
Narrating a childhood scene that ends the first round of interpretation, Freud
writes that John must have treated him badly and assumes that he, Freud, was coura-
geous “in the face of my tyrant” (). He concludes this from a little retort he had
made and that was later reported to him. His father/John’s grandfather asked: Why
are you hitting John? Freud’s reply: “I hit him cos he hit me” (). John hits first, Freud
hits back. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. His hostility toward Paneth, Freud
concludes, must stem from his childhood hostility toward John: after all, Paneth, being
Freud’s superior, is just another version of the cousin.
It is important to note that this childhood recollection is formed from a sentence
that was reported to Freud by his father. Freud can construct the childhood scene only
because of the indiscretion of complaining to a third, who later will tell him what
he said. Furthermore, the limit of the battle is no less than the removal, the death of
the opponent. In the second round of interpretation, Freud narrates a fantasy or mem-
ory (he does not specify) recalling the first fight scene with John, but with a twist: this
time, the two of them fight over an object, about who came first, and Freud prevails.
John has to make way, whereas Freud remains “in possession of the field” ().30 The
themes of indiscretion and removal in order to possess the field alone are not only
nodal themes of the Non vixit Dream: betrayal or treason and murderous feelings also
constitute the extreme limit of friendship within friendship, since “John” is the origin
of friendship and enmity:
My emotional life has always insisted that I should have an intimate friend and a hated
enemy. I have always been able to provide myself afresh with both, and it has not
infrequently happened that the ideal situation of childhood has been so completely
 F Elke Siegel

reproduced that friend and enemy have come together in a single individual—though
not, of course, both at once or with constant oscillations, as may have been the case
in my early childhood. ()

In John, intimate friend and hated enmity coincide, and this is the “ideal” childhood
situation. “John” stands for the matrix of ambivalence in friendship. One should not
forget that “John” is not only the origin of two opposite feelings (both of which con-
stitute friendship) and the original revenant at once dead and alive; but also that he
bears the mark of the dead, unmentioned, unmentionable brother, Julius. “John” is
friendship’s origin in multiple folds, an unspeakable origin.
Maybe Freud wants to reassure himself and his friends that the reproduction of
the ideal will never occur, that enmity and friendship no longer exist simultaneously,
oscillating in one person, but occur in neatly separable periods or persons. In the
dream Freud is satisfied that he can make the revenants disappear through his gaze
and words. This is also the aim of analysis: to do away with repetition through remem-
bering, to chase away ghosts with clarity.

The Indiscretion of Ambitious Interpretation

I can only express a hope that readers of this book will put themselves in my difficult
situation and treat me with indulgence, and further, that anyone who finds any sort of
reference to himself in my dreams may be willing to grant me the right of freedom of
thought—in my dream-life, if nowhere else. (xxiv)31

The Non vixit Dream is a dream about the interpretation of dreams: about how to
work through the haunting figures of the past. That the first dream is set in Brücke’s
laboratory points to this, as Freud himself explains. The element connecting his
present work and that in Brücke’s laboratory is “analysis.” Both dreams contrast his
present success in psychoanalysis with his past failure in physiological analysis,
thereby humbling him.32 According to Freud’s explanation, dreams set in the labora-
tory are punishment dreams for his ambitions in analyses—at least until he later rein-
tegrates these dreams into the wish-fulfillment theory ().
As has been noted above, Freud counts the Non vixit Dream among those ambi-
tious dreams that constitute his “central accomplishment in interpretation” ().
Although he praises this dream as a “fine specimen” () because it shows many char-
acteristics typical for all dreams, nonetheless he is apparently forced to refrain from
fully interpreting it. Freud writes that he “would give a great deal to be able to present
the complete solution of its conundrums.33 But in point of fact, I am incapable of doing
so—of doing, that is to say, what I did in the dream, of sacrificing to my ambition
people whom I greatly value” (). The dream and its proper interpretation share the
same problem: the sacrifice of “greatly valued people”—friends—to ambition, an act of
 “Non vixit” f 

supreme indiscretion and betrayal. To interpret the dream is to kill a friend. Friend-
ship and interpretation thus seem to be mutually exclusive: to be discreet, to be a good
friend, Freud has to be a bad interpreter, or a less ambitious one.
A full interpretation of the dream would repeat its sacrifice of the friend. On the
other hand, any veiling would destroy “what I know very well to be the dream’s mean-
ing” (). To unveil a memorial for Paneth or his friends, Freud would have to veil
facts and findings of his interpretation. To do this, though, would mean to sacrifice his
ambition. Freud’s answer to this conundrum is to pick out only some elements of the
dream for interpretation: “Any concealment, however, would destroy what I know very
well to be the dream’s meaning; and I shall therefore content myself, both here and
in a later context, with selecting only a few of its elements for interpretation” ().
This solution does not really solve anything. There is no logical connection between
the two parts: Any concealment would have destroyed the meaning—that’s why I
pick only a few elements. The betrayal interpretation always leaves the door open for
revenants to return to their betrayer who, in turn, has to get rid of them again and
again. Revenants haunt dreams as they haunt interpretation. The friend, the revenant,
is therefore decisive for the problem of interpretation itself.34 The Non vixit Dream
is about the interpretation of dreams, which has to come to terms with the revenant,
or with the revenant-like friend, in a way that would foreclose further repetitions
and substitutions.

Substituting Fliess
In the Non vixit Dream, Fliess seems not to be a revenant like Fleischl and Paneth,
both of whom Freud could make disappear. Instead, he is alive and apparently the
recipient of the warm feelings of friendship, whereas Freud seems to save his enmity
for Paneth, who in a way might be sacrificed for the good friend. But in the end, Fliess
is not spared hostile thoughts, either.
Freud’s ambivalence toward Fliess becomes apparent in the last section of the
interpretation, which ends with the theme of survival and substitution: “No one is irre-
placeable” (). Since Paneth and Fleischl have turned out to be revenants, and since
revenants are elements in a chain of substitution beginning with John substituting for
himself and Julius, Freud can be satisfied that he has always “been able to find succes-
sive substitutes for that figure” (). Regarding Fliess he now thinks: “I felt I should be
able to find a substitute for the friend whom I was now on the point of losing” (). This
friend—Fliess—is presumed dead, thereby also becoming a revenant, since no friend
can be spared becoming one. In the logic of the revenant, the loss of a friend never
means simply a loss. Surviving the friend means to go on and substitute for the dead.
At the same time there is also a wish that Fliess be the one who ends the series
of representations and revenants. Since censorship does not ban the thought of Fliess’s
 F Elke Siegel

substitutability, Freud deduces that the thought is not entirely objectionable. Now he
tells the story of the substitutes differently, in a seemingly more humane way:
What a number of valued friends I have lost, some through death, some through
a breach of our friendship! How fortunate that I have found a substitute for them
and that I have gained one who means more to me than ever the others could, and
that, at a time of life when new friendships cannot easily be formed, I shall never
lose his! ()

Fliess would then be the substitute for all previous substitutes, the end of a series: to
put it pointedly, the Messiah.35 But even if Fliess-as-substitute will have been the last
one, he is still a substitute: the logic of the substitute, the questions of life and death,
of possession of the field, will still haunt this last relationship—and interpretation itself.
After having visited Fliess in April , around Easter, Freud wrote about him
in a letter to Minna Bernays:36 “He is a most unusual person, good nature personified:
and I believe, if it came to it, he would for all his genius, be goodness itself. Therefore
his sunlike clarity, his pluck.”37 In the same letter Freud states that if his newborn child
Sophie had been a boy, he would have named it Wilhelm after Fliess. This seems to
allude to a desire to immortalize this particular being by circulating the name, by
inserting the name of the friend into the generational chain.
It is certainly no coincidence that the second section dedicated to the interpre-
tation of the Non vixit Dream should end, on a hopeful note, with the word “immor-
tality,” which is supposedly granted through children. This turn toward children in
the interpretation is based on the fact that Fliess’s daughter, Pauline (also the name of
Freud’s niece/John’s sister), had just been born. In a letter to Fliess, Freud had already
expressed the hope, or the certainty, that Fliess’s daughter could replace, reincarnate
Fliess’s own dead sister, Clara. Freud states that children, by being given names in the
memory of people one has been fond of, are made into revenants. They carry on the
memory of loved ones and bear the reminder of us when we are dead: “And after all,
I reflected, was not having children our only path to immortality?”
Of course, the hope for immortality projected onto the child is in itself highly
unstable. Freud’s daughter Sophie, whom, as I mentioned above, he would have named
after Fliess had she been a boy, died in . On April , , the anniversary of
Sophie’s death, Freud writes to Ludwig Binswanger in reaction to the latter’s loss of his
oldest son, Robert:
Although we know that after such a loss the acute state of mourning will subside, we
also know we shall remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute. No matter
what may fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something
else. And actually this is how it should be. It is the only way of perpetuating that love
which we do not want to relinquish.38

Although this letter was written on the anniversary of Sophie’s death, Freud is not actu-
ally referring to her loss. In a letter dated October , , expressing condolences to
 “Non vixit” f 

Binswanger (who at this time had already lost a first son), Freud notes that he and
his wife had actually coped with Sophie’s death remarkably well. More than Sophie, it
is Sophie’s son, Heinerle, who stands for an irreparable loss in Freud’s life. Heinerle,
who had died in June , “had taken the place of all my children and other grand-
children, and since then, since Heinerle’s death, I don’t care for my grandchildren any
more, but find no joy in life either” (ff ).
In Freud’s interpretation of the Non vixit Dream, substitution was based on a
notion of space allowing only for all or nothing, dead or alive, a substitution seemingly
without memory. In the letter from , there prevails a notion of irreplaceability, a
space of loss that can simultaneously be filled and not filled, of a substitution that is
not substituting for the dead one. The last quotation starts with a radical substitution,
in which Heinerle comes to stand in for all others without himself being replaceable.39
But with his death substitution ends, leaving Freud behind with the empty world of
melancholia and the shattered dream of immortality, of surviving beyond death. The
question will always be: is there a “representative of the Other” who is at once absolute
changeability and yet completely singular?40 And can there be friendship when only
one survives?

Epitaph for an Epigraph: The Gift of Interpretation

We should be interested not only in Freud’s use of the word “revenant” in the sentence:
“All my friends have in a certain sense been re-incarnations of this first figure who
‘früh sich einst dem trüben Blick gezeigt’: they have been revenants” (SE V, ), but
also in the quote that qualifies the “first figure,” i.e., John. It is taken from Goethe’s
“Dedication” (Zueignung), the poem placed at the beginning of Faust. This is neither
the first nor the last time that Freud quotes from this “Dedication.” Lines from this
poem, which itself is marked by a return, keep returning.41
Freud did not always intend to use lines from Virgil’s Aeneid as the epigraph for
The Interpretation of Dreams.42 These lines are in fact a substitute for a motto Freud
apparently had preferred and had suggested to Fliess. His friend, though, left him at a
loss for a motto when Fliess literally—in Freud’s words of July , —killed Freud’s
first choice: “A motto for the dream has not turned up since you killed [umgebracht]
Goethe’s sentimental one. A reference to repression is all that will remain.”43 The
famous motto of The Interpretation of Dreams thus stands in, substitutes for the killed,
“sentimental” Goethe motto. In this sense it is thus a remainder, a reminder of mur-
der, of the friend’s censorship. The quote referring to repression thus refers to a literal
repression. The Virgil epigraph is an epitaph for the killed first one.
As Walter Schönau shows, the sentimental motto by Goethe probably would
have consisted in a quote from the “Dedication.”44 Exactly which verses Freud would
have chosen remains an open question; but Schönau narrows down the possibilities
 F Elke Siegel

by looking into what Freud usually quotes from this text. He suggests that Freud
refers either to lines one to three of the first stanza, or to lines three and four from
the second: “Ihr naht euch wieder, schwankende Gestalten, / Die früh sich einst
dem trüben Blick gezeigt. / Versuch’ ich wohl, euch diesmal festzuhalten? / . . . Gleich
einer alten, halbverklungnen Sage / Kommt erste Lieb’ und Freundschaft mit herauf.”45
Because Freud used the adjective “sentimental” to qualify the murdered Goethe
motto, Schönau proposes that Freud was probably referring to the latter lines.46
Goethe wrote the “Dedication” in , more than twenty years after he had
started working on Faust.47 The poem addresses both the fictitious characters of Faust
and the friends to whom Goethe read the text out loud before it was ever printed. In
the “Dedication,” these figures (the personae from Faust as well as the listeners, some
of whom had since died) appear before the poet: they return as revenants. The Dedi-
cation itself thematizes revenants, addresses revenants, and, as a dedicatory poem,
gives the work to these revenants, to old friends, dead friends, to friends survived. The
“Dedication” makes Faust into a gift, into the property of another.
Quotes from the “Dedication” occur twice in Freud’s letters to Fliess.48 In a letter
dated October , , roughly a year after his father’s death, Freud describes his
state—tied to his self-analysis—as a quick variation of moods resembling a landscape
one might see from a moving train. Given Freud’s travel phobia, this is an image laden
with fear. He then quotes lines two to four of the second stanza from Goethe’s poem,
which in a sublimated way express this state.49 For Freud, Goethe’s verses seem to sig-
nify the associative movement of remembering itself, of forgotten things resurfacing:
shadowy creatures, which in turn bring along yet older figures—not only loved ones
or friends, but in their wake, love and friendship, first love and friendship. But after cit-
ing these lines, Freud adds: “And also first fright and discord” (Auch erster Schreck
und Hader). He does not abide by the tender words of the poet, which he chose pre-
cisely for their “sublimated” character: to love and friendship he adds fright and discord.
Two years later, in a letter of October , , Freud again quotes from the “Ded-
ication.” Three months after Freud states that the “sentimental one by Goethe” has been
killed, something returns that might very well bear the traces of this murder. During a
phase of renewed ideas (Einfälle) yet unintelligible for him, Freud compares this flood
of thoughts to the “first epoch of productivity.” 50 We assume that he is indicating the
year . Again he uses Goethe’s poem to describe the surfacing of the past—now
including the immediate past of his discoveries and of the processes of analysis—in a
wavering, indistinct form. This time he quotes the very first line of the “Dedication”:
“You come closer again, you hovering forms.” Like the hovering forms themselves,
Goethe’s poem returns again and again in Freud’s writing, describing the return of the
past, the content of this return, as well as the history of psychoanalysis itself.
The intrinsic relationship that seems to tie Goethe’s “Dedication” to psycho-
analysis culminates in Freud’s “Address at the Goethe-House,” which Anna Freud deliv-
ered in her father’s place when Freud was awarded the Goethe-Prize in . In this
 “Non vixit” f 

speech Freud suggests that Goethe would have approved of psychoanalysis, and that
it is no disgrace for Goethe if he or his texts become objects of it. Goethe’s insights into
psychic processes allow Freud to see in him a forefather and patron of psychoanalysis.
Goethe, Freud says, already knew about the strength of the first affective ties of the
child. It is exactly in the “Dedication,” according to Freud, that Goethe celebrated these
first ties. Freud thereby gives us his explicit reading of this poem as a beginning of
psychoanalysis, insofar as what is acknowledged here is the meaning of the beginning
of one’s life—childhood. Resurrecting the dead Goethe motto, Freud cites lines one to
three from the first stanza and lines three and four from the second. This quotation,
says Freud, could be repeated with every psychoanalysis.51 Goethe’s “Dedication” thus
has become an epigraph for psychoanalysis itself, for each psychoanalysis; a motto that
is itself a revenant, since it had once been “killed.”
The killed Goethe motto was thus not only about revenants; it was the quotation
of a dedication to them. Had it been included, The Interpretation of Dreams would at
least have borne the trace of being dedicated. It would have been a gift. The friend
Fliess, to whom Freud wanted to give The Interpretation of Dreams as a birthday gift
(which arrived too late), censored, cut this gesture, thereby, oddly enough, erasing the
traces of the importance of friendship from The Interpretation of Dreams.52
Maybe then there is no such thing as a book about friendship, precisely because
friendship is what cuts, what imposes limits—to representation and interpretation.
All that survives of friendship’s gift in The Interpretation of Dreams is the following
inscription:
All my friends have in a certain sense been re-incarnations of this first figure who
“früh sich einst dem trüben Blick gezeigt”: they have been revenants. ()

Notes
The epigraph to this chapter is drawn from a letter from Freud to Ludwig Binswanger dated
May , ; it is quoted in Ludwig Binswanger, Sigmund Freud: Reminiscences of a Friend-
ship, trans. Norbert Guterman (New York: Grune and Stratton, ), .
1. In the German original this sentence reads: “Es ist das Jahr der ‘Revenants.’” See Sig-
mund Freud, Briefe an Wilhelm Fliess –, ed. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Frankfurt am
Main: Fischer, ), . The English edition of the Freud-Fliess correspondence renders this
sentence as “This is the year of revenants!” See Sigmund Freud, The Complete Letters of Sig-
mund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess –, ed. and trans. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Cambridge,
Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, ), .
2. As is well known, The Interpretation of Dreams actually appeared in . Freud inten-
tionally postdated its printed year of publication.
3. One is reminded of the other significance Freud gave to the new century: it announces
the dates of his and Fliess’s respective deaths: “The new century, the most interesting thing
about which for us may be that it contains the dates of our deaths, has brought me nothing but
 F Elke Siegel

a stupid review in the Zeit by Burckhardt, the former director of the Burgtheater (not to be con-
fused with our old Jacob)” (Freud, Complete Letters, ).
4. For a discussion of the history and importance of the friendship between Freud
and Fliess, see Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work,  vols. (New York: Basic Books,
–); Didier Anzieu, Freud’s Self-Analysis, trans. Peter Graham, preface by M. Masud R.
Khan (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, ); Max Schur,
Freud: Living and Dying (New York: International Universities Press, Inc., ); Patrick
Mahoney, “Friendship and Its Discontents,” in Contemporary Psychoanalysis  (): –;
M. Masud R. Khan, “The Catalytic Role of Friendship in the Epistemology of Self-Experience in
Montaigne, Rousseau and Freud,” in Dynamische Psychiatrie , no.  (): –; Graham
Little, “Freud, Friendship, and Politics,” in The Dialectics of Friendship, ed. Ray Porter (London
and New York: Routledge, ), –; E. Buxbaum, “Freud’s Dream Interpretation in the
Light of his Letters to Fliess,” in Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic , no.  (): –;
Th. Neyraut-Sutterman, “Le ‘Portrait-De-L’Ami’ de Freud,” in Revue française de psychanalyse
 (): –; and part  of Avital Ronell, Dictations: On Haunted Writing (Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, ) on the constellation Freud-Goethe-Fliess and Freud’s
“haunted” writing.
5. For the problem of transference in the relationship between Freud and Fliess and the
debate as to whether this transference ever ended, see Anzieu, Freud’s Self-Analysis, , ,
, , and particularly ff., where Anzieu argues (against Buxbaum) that Freud tried
to overcome transference toward the end of his friendship with Fliess. Mahoney modifies
Erikson’s statement that the friendship between Freud and Fliess was the first transference in
history, which liquidated or liquified itself through its very discovery. For Mahoney, the trans-
ference was merely modified (“Friendship and Its Discontents,” ff.). Little writes that Freud’s
friendships were marked by a “fundamental ambivalence in which a ‘brother transference’—
an equal partnership—was associated with a ‘father transference’ which would eventually take
over, so that the friend/father had to be repudiated” (“Freud, Friendship, and Politics,” ). See
William J. McGrath on the notion of a layering of father and brother transference in Freud’s life
in his Freud’s Discovery of Psychoanalysis. The Politics of Hysteria (Ithaca and London: Cornell
University Press, ).
6. Freud, Collected Letters, , , .
7. Ibid., .
8. “My self-analysis remains interrupted. I have realized why I can analyze myself only
with the help of knowledge obtained objectively (like an outsider). True self-analysis is impos-
sible; otherwise there would be no [neurotic] illness” (ibid., ).
9. Ibid., .
10. SE VI, .
11. Freud, Collected Letters, .
12. Klaus Theweleit, Object-Choice (All You Need Is Love . . . ): On Mating Strategies and
a Fragment of a Freud Biography, trans. Malcolm Green (London and New York: Verso, ), ff.
13. SE V, . “[F]rüh sich einst dem trüben Blick gezeigt” translates as “Who long since
showed themselves to my clouded gaze” (my translation).
14. On the critical question of the “number” of friends, see Jacques Derrida, Politics of
Friendship, trans. George Collins (London and New York: Verso, ).
15. Freud, Collected Letters, .
16. Incidentally, the name “Johannes” comes up early on in The Interpretation of Dreams.
 “Non vixit” f 

In chapter , Freud discusses the “Moral Sense in Dreams” as it has been seen by other authors.
In this context there appears a quote referring to fratricide from  John [in German, Johannes]
:: “Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer” (SE IV, ).
17. Freud, Collected Letters, , November , . For a discussion of the “guilt of the
survivor,” see Schur, Freud: Living and Dying; and Ronell, Dictations, ff.
18. In his essay on a childhood recollection from Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit
[Poetry and Truth] (), Freud interprets a scene where Goethe throws dishes out the window
as the staging of a magical act with which the writer tries to get rid of his newborn brother.
Freud finds these adverse wishes in other patients, too.
19. The object of Freud’s and his nephew’s actions probably was Pauline, John’s sister. For
this constellation, see Freud’s essay Screen Memories () (SE III, –).
20. Freud, Collected Letters, . The Non vixit Dream is actually not placed among the
“Absurd Dreams,” but in the subchapter “Calculations and Speeches in Dreams” in the chapter
“The Dream-Work.” The interpretation, which follows Freud’s account of the dream itself, is
interrupted by the subchapter on “Absurd Dreams” (which Freud begins with dreams about
dead fathers) and is taken up again in “Affects in Dreams.”
21. This ceremony had taken place on October , , which thus allows for the
approximate dating of this dream.
22. Freud, Collected Letters, .
23. In a letter to his fiancée, Martha Bernays, on June , , Freud expresses his deep
admiration for Fleischl and even plays with the thought that Martha actually would have
deserved a man like him. Fleischl haunts many dreams in The Interpretation of Dreams, such
as the Dream of Irma’s Injection. It seems that Freud reproached himself for the fact that he
gave Fleischl cocaine to alleviate his pain, not knowing that in the long run the use of cocaine
would worsen his condition.
24. Due to limits of space I will not be able to discuss this dream comprehensively. Anzieu
includes in his list of the dream’s themes: lateness, indiscretion, immortality, and the rivalry
with one’s elders (Freud’s Self-Analysis, ff.). For other interpretations of the dream and
Freud’s interpretation thereof, see Alexander Grinstein, Sigmund Freud’s Dreams (New York:
International Universities Press, ), –; McGrath, Freud’s Discovery of Psychoanalysis,
–; and Schur, Freud: Living and Dying, –.
25. Freud, Collected Letters, . The Latin Freud provides as the source of “Non vixit”
actually contains a mistake Freud only corrected in : It is not “Saluti patriae vixit/ non diu
sed totus” (For the well-being of his country he lived not long but wholly), but “Saluti publicae
vixit/ non diu sed totus” ().
26. Freud finds another proof for this association in the fact that in the dream Fliess came
to Vienna in July, which was named after Julius Caesar. Freud never mentions Julius, the brother
he survived.
27. It should be noted that The Interpretation of Dreams refers to the Non vixit Dream a
third time, namely in the beginning of chapter . Freud here underscores the importance of an
apparently trivial detail of the dream (the passage: “As P. failed to understand him . . . ,” ),
which nonetheless eventually led him back to its underlying childhood memory: his affection-
ate yet stormy relationship with John. This association came about by way of a stanza from
Heinrich Heine’s poem “The Homecoming” from his Book of Songs, : “Rarely have you under-
stood me, and rarely too have I understood you. Not until we both found ourselves in the mud
[“Kot”: excrement or dirt] did we promptly understand each other” ().
 F Elke Siegel

28. Actually the scene acted out by Freud and his nephew was a song from Friedrich
Schiller’s drama The Robbers, a play about two rival brothers. For a short summary of this play
as well as the implications of this text for the Non vixit Dream (namely, a text about brother-
rivalry containing a song about the patricidal story of Brutus killing Caesar), see Grinstein,
Sigmund Freud’s Dreams, –.
29. In his speech “On the Friend,” Zarathustra asks: “Are you a slave? Then you cannot
be a friend. Are you a tyrant? Then you cannot have friends.” See Nietzsche, The Portable
Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, ), . McGrath sees the political
theme of (psychoanalytic) freedom/freedom of expression versus tyranny taken up in the Non
vixit Dream: “[T]he dream suggested the possibility that psychoanalysis could open the way to
freedom from the tyranny of the revenants” (; see also  and  on the relationship
between the issue of freedom versus tyranny in the Schiller play).
30. In a sense the fiasco in which the friendship between Freud and Fliess ended con-
sisted in the dispute about who is in possession of the field, namely who can claim to have first
discovered the importance of the notion of bisexuality.
31. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, “Preface to the First Edition” (SE IV). This sen-
tence contains a hidden quotation of the famous imperative of the Marquis de Posa, expressed
to the Spanish king in Schiller’s Don Carlos (III, x): “Geben Sie Gedankenfreiheit” (Give free-
dom of thought).
32. The problem arising from these dream examples is, of course, how they align with
Freud’s thesis that all dreams represent a wish-fulfillment: these dreams do not express the
pride or vanity of the “parvenu,” but self-criticism. Freud concedes that he would have no
objections to classifying these dreams as “punishment dreams,” separate from wish-fulfillment
dreams. The punishment is the consequence of the fact that (as Freud hypothesizes) “the foun-
dation of the dream was formed in the first instance by an exaggeratedly ambitious phantasy”
(Freud, Complete Letters, ).
33. In the German original, Freud would not only “give a great deal,” but rather uses the
idiomatic expression “für mein Leben gern”: read literally, this means he would give his life for
being able to present a complete interpretation.
34. There is still another way in which friendship imposes a limit on Freud’s interpreta-
tion: friends should not be interpreted. In the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud tells us
how he once saw fit “to reproach a loyal and deserving friend on no other grounds than the
interpretation I placed on certain indications coming from his unconscious. He was offended
and wrote me a letter asking me not to treat my friends psycho-analytically. I had to admit he
was in the right, and wrote him a reply to pacify him” (SE VI, ). While writing this letter,
Freud broke a newly acquired Egyptian figure with his pen-holder. This, for him, is another
instance of a “sacrifice” taking the form of breaking something, apparently by accident. This
sacrifice, Freud goes on to write, was necessary to avert a greater evil that (we assume) would
have been the loss of the friend. But: “Luckily it was possible to cement both of them together—
the friendship as well as the figure—so that the break would not be noticed” (SE VI, ff.).
35. Freud called Fliess his “Messiah” in a letter of July , , in regard to problems that
Freud himself felt incapable of solving, but which he hoped Fliess would be able to solve.
36. Unpublished letter, quoted by Masson in the introduction to the Freud-Fliess corre-
spondence (Freud, Complete Letters, ). The date given for this letter is April , , in the
German edition, and April , , in the English edition.
37. Freud, Complete Letters, .
 “Non vixit” f 

38. Quoted in Binswanger, Sigmund Freud: Reminiscences, .

39. This structure reminds us of Freud’s wish for Fliess to be the last in the series of
substitutions.
40. The answer to this question might hinge on a different notion of space. In addition to
using the French word “revenant,” Freud also makes use of another French expression in the con-
text of the Non vixit Dream: “Ôte-toi que je m’y mette!” (literally, “Get out of the way so I can
get there”) (). In the second round of interpretation, Freud states that his attitude toward
John and Paneth’s attitude toward Fleischl are of the same reproachable kind and describes it
by way of this French saying, alluding to the notion of space underlying the principle of substi-
tution in Freud’s interpretation. An extensive and critical discussion of precisely this “Ôte-toi
que je m’y mette” can be found in a book by Freud’s friend, the Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Bin-
swanger. His seminal work, Grundformen und Erkenntnis menschlichen Daseins, published in
, undertakes in its first part a phenomenological, ontological, and anthropological explo-
ration of love. The book starts out with a section on Die Räumlichkeit des liebenden Miteinan-
derseins (The spatiality of loving-being-together). Binswanger reads “Ôte-toi que je m’y mette”
as the imperative ruling everyday interaction (Verkehr). Ludwig Binswanger, Ausgewählte Werke
, ed. Max Herzog (Heidelberg: Roland Asanger Verlag, ), . Tied to this imperative, the
common notion of spatiality is that of “Körperdinge”—res extensa, things—being next to each
other. According to this conception, “a thing cannot take the place of the other without the other
changing its place” (Das räumliche Verhältnis zwischen den einzelnen Körperdingen ist das
Nebeneinandervorhandensein, demzufolge nicht ein Ding den Platz des andern einnehmen kann,
ohne daß das andere seinen Ort wechselt) (Binswanger, Ausgewählte Werke ), . Binswanger
contrasts this imperative with the absolutely different interaction found in loving-being-together.
This loving-being-together is based on a spatiality that precisely does not involve having to
make room or violently remove the other from his/her/its place. For Binswanger, love and
friendship “show the same anthropological fundamental structure” (Ausgewählte Werke , ).
41. For the significance of Goethe for Freud’s writing, see Ronell, Dictations, part .
42. Mottoes mattered to Freud. Regarding a book he was working on at the time, he
wrote to Fliess that he could only give him the mottoes that would precede the different chap-
ters. (December , , Complete Letters, ). These mottoes seem to contain in a nutshell,
so to speak, his not-yet-written work. Freud also treated mottoes as entities, as properties. The
motto for the Psychopathology he humbly wanted to “borrow” from Fliess, who must have men-
tioned the particular Goethe poem once (October , , Complete Letters, ). He later
writes that this motto was a gift from Fliess (August , , Complete Letters, ).
43. Freud, Complete Letters, .
44. Walter Schönau, Sigmund Freuds Prosa. Literarische Elemente seines Stils (Stuttgart:
J. B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, ), ff.
45. “You come closer again, you hovering forms, / Who long since have showed them-
selves to my clouded gaze. / Shall I attempt to capture you this time? // And many beloved
shades rise up / Like an old, half faded legend / First love and friendship rise up together with
them” (my translation).
46. Schönau, Sigmund Freuds Prosa, .
47. It is not certain when exactly Goethe started working on Faust, but one assumes it
was probably –.
48. One has to remember that Freud’s father died in October , and the month
October might, even if Freud does not say so, be seen as the anniversary of this death.
 F Elke Siegel

49. “I am gripped and pulled through ancient times in quick association of thoughts; my
moods change like the landscapes seen by a traveler from a train; and as the great poet, using
his privilege to ennoble (sublimate), puts it: “Und manche liebe Schatten steigen auf; / Gleich
einer alten, halbverklungnen Sage, / Kommt erste Lieb’ und Freundschaft mit herauf ” (Freud,
Complete Letters, ).
50. Ibid., .
51. SE XXI, .
52. See Freud’s letter to Fliess of October , , in Freud, Complete Letters, .
R
Other
Desires
R
This page intentionally left blank
R . The Dream between
Drive and Desire
A Question of Representability
Paul Verhaeghe
R

O
ne of the major conclusions of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams is, of
course, that every dream comes down to the fulfillment of a secret wish.
This is the main message of Freud’s book, the one that has been kept
intact for the last hundred years. The latent dream thoughts contain a
forbidden unconscious desire, which finds its expression in the manifest dream con-
tent, albeit in a distorted way due to the dream-work. Every analysis has to follow
the opposite road, meaning that the dream-work has to be countered by the analytic
work. At the end of the analytic day, the patient will be consciously aware of his un-
conscious wishes; that is, he will be cured, because the dynamics of repression have
been undone. This idea explains another well-known saying from Freud’s Dream
Book: that the dream provides us with the royal road to the unconscious, in this case
the repressed desire and the latent dream thoughts.
I want to argue that such a reading of Freud is incomplete, to say the least.
The way in which such a reading considers the dream, the unconscious, and the ends
and goals of the analytic practice is rather naïve. First of all, I’d like to discuss this
threefold naïvete.
Let us start with the central idea of wish fulfillment. Based on my clinical prac-
tice, I can say that this idea of a hidden wish in the dream is not all that clear. In a
number of cases, it is rather difficult to find any wish whatsoever. In an even larger
number of cases, there is a wish, but this wish is not hidden, or even, to the contrary,
it appears as such in the manifest dream content, and the patient is fully aware of
his desire during waking life. Freud mentioned this possibility when he discussed the
dreams of small children, dreams in which the distortion owing to the repression has


 F Paul Verhaeghe

not taken place. Today, probably because of major changes in society, the process
of repression seems to fail more and more, and our contemporary patients are con-
fronted in their dreams with something beyond repression. This reminds me of a joke.
A patient consults his analyst because of a recurrent dream: “Doctor, doctor, every
night this last week I dreamt that I entered the bedroom of my new neighbor and
that I fucked her like hell. I don’t understand this, what does it mean?” Answers the
analyst: “It means that you want to ride a white horse through your neighbor’s front
garden, armed with a long black spear.”
So the idea of a hidden, repressed wish has to be abandoned in a large number
of cases. Instead, I want to stress something else that is quite central in Freud’s book:
the main goal of every dream is to keep the dreamer asleep. And this wish to sleep is
the central wish: dreams are the guardians of sleep (SE IV, –; SE V, ). This
function is all the more interesting if we study the point where dreams fail to fulfill it—
the nightmare. We’ll come back to this.
My next point of discussion concerns the unconscious. The dream is the royal
road to the unconscious, but the question is: to which unconscious? At the time of
The Interpretation of Dreams, this unconscious came down to a number of repressed
wishes, which are not too difficult to analyze. But when we study Freud’s other works
from the same period, things become a bit more complicated. Even in The Interpre-
tation of Dreams itself, there is a remarkable idea that will persist through Freud’s
entire work. Every dream, says Freud, contains a nucleus that cannot be analyzed (SE
IV, n; SE V, –), and this has to do with the kernel of our being (SE V, ).
This kernel or nucleus is the mycelium from which the dream wish springs, just like a
mushroom (SE V, ). So, this royal road to the unconscious is not that easy, and must
necessarily lead to some kind of deadlock. As we will see, this deadlock has to be stud-
ied together with the failure of the dream’s main function, that is, the wish to sleep.
My third point of discussion here is the most difficult one: it is the idea that
the therapeutic goals of analysis can be restricted to the undoing of the process of re-
pression. Even in Freud’s time, the making conscious of the awareness of formerly
repressed desires was something that did not work; hence his plea for the analysis of
transference and for working through. Today, because of the lack of repression in our
patients, we are obliged to redefine the goals of analysis in general and dream analysis
in particular.
We have to leave this threefold naïveté behind us. Instead I wish to put forth
three propositions. These propositions are based on my reading of Lacan, but as
we will see, their core is already present in Freud: () Every dream contains a double
level. On the one hand we have the level of desire, and on the other we have the
level of jouissance. () These two levels correspond to two different layers in the
unconscious, first those of the unconscious contents of repression, second the origi-
nal or system Ucs. () This double level obliges us to reconsider the therapeutic goals
of analysis.
 The Dream between Drive and Desire f 

Let us start with the first proposition, the one about desire and jouissance. To
understand this we must study Freud’s theory of the drive. The concept itself is coined
after The Interpretation of Dreams, but the idea is very well present right from the
start in his writings. I would go so far as to say it is one of Freud’s main preoccupations.
Every time he discusses the so-called Q-factor or quantitative energy, he is discussing
the main character of the drive, that is, its very aspect of and as energetic.1 And quite
soon, he understands this Q-factor as something central, both in matters of sexu-
ality and in matters of anxiety; hence his discussion about the transformation of
sexual libido into anxiety. From his correspondence with Fliess, it is obvious that this
Q-factor is something that needs representation, because without representation, the
subject cannot cope with it in a normal psychological way. Once it has entered the
realm of representation, all kinds of coping mechanisms can be applied to it, and
these are summarized and gathered together by Freud in his idea of “defense.” These
mechanisms will find their first elaborate description in The Interpretation of Dreams,
most particularly in the chapter on the dream-work, starting with the mechanisms of
condensation and displacement. These mechanisms are fascinating. They are even so
fascinating that we tend to forget the main thing: that they go back to an original infan-
tile wish that needs to find a representation in one way or another, hence the first pre-
occupation of the dreamwork, the “considerations of representability.”
From my point of view, this infantile wish is nothing but the original drive,
although the concept is lacking in Freud’s Dream Book. (I could argue this at length,
but here, because of considerations of space, I cannot.) Thus considered, the dream
is, first of all, a means of representing and expressing the drive in such a way that the
dreamer can go on sleeping. Freud’s further work on the drive will attest to the diffi-
culty of this job. Indeed, being a concept on the border between the psyche and the
soma, the drive is something that can never be fully represented. Hence that most
beautiful Freudian definition: “[T]he drive is to be regarded as a measure of the
demand made upon the mind for work” (SE VII, ). Our dream life is one of the
products of this demand.
Indeed, the dream-work starts from the drive, and proceeds in such a way that
this drive becomes translated, that is, represented in a desire. Freud stressed the for-
bidden part of this desire, which was quite obvious in the Victorian era. Today, with
Lacan, we can stress another clinical characteristic, also quite easy to recognize
already in the Freudian examples. Every desire goes back to a desire of or for the
Other, be it in the positive or the negative sense. In itself, this is already a very inter-
esting thesis, because today it is more useful in clinical practice than the idea that
every dream contains a hidden wish fulfillment. Moreover, it has the advantage of
bringing dream interpretation right into the interpretation of transference, because
sooner or later (usually sooner), the analyst is placed in the position of the Other. In
itself, this last statement has some serious implications for interpretation, because it is
not always clear who is interpreting whom.
 F Paul Verhaeghe

Interesting as this might be, it nevertheless is not my main point here. What I
want to stress is that desire and representability are to a certain extent synonymous.
My desire is the desire of the Other, yes; but who or what is this Other? Following
Lacan, the Other comes down to the representational unit from whom I draw all my
identifications (remember that even for Freud, an identification is based on an object
choice) or, to put it in Lacanian terms, all my alienations.2 So, the upper level of the
drive, in the dream, is the level of phallic desire, meaning the level of the Other, mean-
ing the level of representability. These representational elements of the drive can be
repressed, rejected, condensed, displaced—whatever. It is this phallic level that can
be fully analyzed, because it is the very stuff upon which the model of free association
is based. As I have already noted, such a full analysis implies the analysis of transfer-
ence as well.
But what about the other level? As we have to deal with the drive, this other level
concerns the unrepresented part of the drive, the Q-factor, the energy that has not
entered the realm of the ever-phallic representation. I consider this to be Freud’s
kernel or nucleus, the mycelium that in itself is impossible to analyze. The reason for
this impossibility is easy: as there is no representation available, this factor cannot
enter into the associative material. It is this point Freud will encounter with traumatic
neurosis, and he will baptize it as being “beyond the pleasure principle.” It is this same
point every one of us meets during a nightmare. Indeed, the nightmare is the most
common example of traumatic neurosis: the dreamer meets with something he can-
not put into words and which is impossible to represent, something from the Real. The
dream fails in its attempt to represent this part of the Real; hence it fails in its func-
tion to keep us asleep, and we wake up in full anxiety. From a Lacanian point of view,
this kernel or nucleus of the real is the object a or jouissance, that strange mixture of
pleasure and anxiety beyond desire. In his later work, Lacan will call this jouissance the
not-all—we shall return to this. To summarize: The dream is one way of coping with
the drive by representing it through the desire of the Other. Where the mechanism of
the phallic pleasure principle fails, we are confronted with the real of jouissance.
This brings us to my second statement: The dream is the royal road to the
unconscious, but the question is, which unconscious? It is fairly well known that Freud
distinguished three: () the unconscious in the descriptive meaning; () the uncon-
scious in its dynamic meaning; () the unconscious as permanently unconscious sys-
tem—the system Ucs.
The descriptive meaning is the least interesting, as it describes merely a state of
mind. As such it has been assimilated by most contemporary psychological theories.
The core problem resides in the dynamic unconscious and in the system Ucs. In
his clinical work, Freud encountered the dynamic unconscious when he was faced
with the split between energetic investment and representations. It appeared that
the words, belonging to certain affects, disappeared from consciousness, and that
the original cathexis became displaced onto other representations. The “forgotten”—
 The Dream between Drive and Desire f 

repressed—representations had been inscribed in another psychic system, from which

they operated in a pathogenic way. This is the theory of repression, which explains the
existence of the dynamic unconscious.
Based on this part of the theory, one might presume that the unconscious is
the sole effect of such repression. This would imply that all the repressed contents can
be made conscious again, as they first belonged to consciousness. This is not the case.
In Freud’s theory, repression proper is based on a primary form of defense, namely pri-
mal repression (“Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of
Paranoia [Dementia Paranoides],” SE XII). For Freud, this primal repression concerns
the somatic component of the drive, which is not so much repressed as left behind
during psychological development. Primal repression must be considered as a primal
fixation.3 This process creates the kernel of the system Ucs by isolating it from any
further development. This kernel will attract the material coming from repression
proper, and thus it operates in a causal, albeit silent, way.4
Since Freud, all stress has been placed on the dynamic unconscious and on
repressed thoughts. This is the core of most psychotherapies. The genuinely psycho-
analytical question, the one concerning the nature of the “non-repressed unconscious”
(The Ego and the Id, SE XIX; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, SE XX),
came to the fore with Lacan. In Lacan’s first theorization, the repressed unconscious
will be explicitly linked to language and to the speaking Other. Until  he identifies
this repressed unconscious with the unconscious as such, hence his saying: “The
Unconscious is the discourse of the Other.” The subject acquires its identity through
the process of alienation, through the identification with the signifiers of the (m)other
based on the desire of this Other. Repression proper operates on these signifiers,
and is always related to the relationship with this Other. During the treatment, the rep-
etition of this process in the transference implies both resistance and the possibility
of the undoing of the repression, thus arriving at “full speech.”5 This expression of
Lacan—“full speech”—indicates his conviction at that time that everything could be
fully analyzed.
After  Lacan will concentrate his theory on the system Ucs. His controversy
with Ricoeur at the Bonneval Conference of , and later the one with Laplanche
and Leclaire, led him to a more distinct formulation of his theory in this respect.
Ricoeur had defined primal repression as the process of translation, which turns the
instinctual into the core of what could later become language.6 In their joint paper
presented at Bonneval, Laplanche and Leclaire voiced a different opinion. According
to Leclaire, as a result of the analytic cure, the kernel of the system Ucs can be sum-
marized in phonemes. According to Laplanche, this kernel consists of imagos, by
which he means here sensory images without signifiers. With this idea, Laplanche
reinterprets Freud’s theory of thing-presentations and of the system Ucs.7
Such a reading is not without effect on the aim of the psychoanalytic cure. If, in
one way or another, the kernel of the system Ucs is of a representational nature, then
 F Paul Verhaeghe

it can be verbalized and interpreted during the treatment. If not, then the final aim of
the cure has to be redefined.
As long as Lacan stressed the linguistic aspect of the Ucs, the former position
could be considered his. But from  onward, his focus on the drive and the Real
will oblige him to the latter position, and this will entail a new theory of them. In this
respect, we have to acknowledge fully Lacan’s ideas on determinism and causality.8
From a Lacanian point of view, the “Gothic” interpretation of the unconscious
is totally wrong. In this romantic conception, the unconscious is viewed as the base-
ment of the psyche, in which all ancient dreads and desires lay buried until the
unavoidable day of their resuscitation. Freud’s theory, which includes concepts such as
“the return of the repressed,” “repetition compulsion,” and so on would be nothing
more than the scientific elaboration of this inevitability. Obviously such a reading
implies total determinism, inasmuch as a human being can only become what she or
he already was. This tallies with the mechanistic-deterministic conviction of early
twentieth-century science, but it does not leave much room for therapeutic hope.
Lacan not only distances himself from this substantialized interpretation of the
unconscious, he even subverts it: the unconscious is of the order of the “not-realised,”
the “unborn.”9 As a process, it is always situated at the border; in itself, it is a void,
an abyss: “For what the unconscious does is to show us the gap through which neuro-
sis associates with a real—a real that may well not be determined.”10 And even when
this unconscious becomes realized, this always happens in a bungled, failed way. The
unconscious formations are “impediments” (achoppements), “failures” (defaillances),
the most typical characteristic of which is their temporal scansion: the unconscious
opens and at once closes.11
With this theory, Lacan rewords the Freudian opposition between the uncon-
scious as dynamic and the unconscious as the system Ucs. On the one hand, we have
the unconscious formations, including the dream; on the other hand, we are facing the
drive nucleus, the object a. His reworking stresses the peculiar relationship between
these two: the unconscious formations are failures because they fail to grasp, to cover
the drive in a complete way. They manage to signify the phallic part of the drive, but
they fail with the nonphallic other part. That is the point at which Lacan introduces
his famous theory of the not-all, which must necessarily escape classical analysis.
Indeed, only the repressed part of the unconscious is strictly determined and can be
analyzed. Lacan explains this idea of determination in his theory on the so-called
automaton. The drive kernel is not determined. On the contrary, even—it belongs
to tuchè, to chance, and operates in a causal way. These two levels are in continuous
interaction with each other.
The automaton is the level easiest to understand. It concerns the network or
chain of signifiers, in which the “pulsational function of the unconscious” is at work.
The barred subject pops up and disappears under these signifiers, hence “the sig-
nifier represents a subject for another signifier.”12 At this level the subject is indeed
 The Dream between Drive and Desire f 

determined by the Other, as Lacan demonstrates time and again with his theory of
the unconscious as being structured like a language.13 The automatic character of this
determinism was masterfully demonstrated in his seminar on “The Purloined Letter,”
where he shows how the chain of signifiers is just that, a chain.14 This is the level of the
lawful prediction at which mechanistic science aims, and here one may be convinced
of the omnipresence of determinism.15 This brings us to the second level. The unwind-
ing of the associative chain succeeds only to a certain point, something that Freud ex-
perienced repeatedly in his therapeutic work, from the “Studies on Hysteria” onward.
The process of remembering succeeds only to a certain limit, at which point the chain
stalls and reveals an abyss, a gap (SE XII, –, –). This is what Freud termed
the “primal repressed,” and what he also called the navel of the dream and the core of
our being (SE V, ; SE XIV, –). It is at this point that the real ex-sists outside
the phallic order, the real in the sense of that part of the drive that cannot be assimi-
lated by the phallic chain of signifiers. Hence the always-missed encounter, which is
due to the lack of a signifier as meeting point. It is Lacan who conceptualizes this rad-
ical lack with his theory of the object a and the not-all. This is also the level of pure
causality, where determinism and predictability fail.
Thus considered, it becomes clear that the unconscious operates on two lev-
els. On the one hand, there is the chain of signifiers with the lack between them (in
Freudian terms, the repressed or dynamic unconscious). This is the level of the auto-
maton, and concerns the ever-predictable phallic desire. Underlying this chain, we find
a more fundamental lack, which concerns the real, beyond any signifier (in Freudian
terms, the primal repressed or system Ucs).16 This is the level of the tuchè, of causal-
ity, where we are confronted with the other jouissance or the object a.
What is evident is that this opens up completely different perspectives on the
subject of determinism. On the whole, Lacan is much more optimistic than Freud in
this respect.17 And this brings us to the last question: the aims and goals of the psy-
choanalytic treatment. My previous arguments have demonstrated that the core of
the unconscious is itself not capable of being analyzed; it is only the repressed contents
of the unconscious that lend themselves to the analytic process. The same reasoning
can be applied on the level of the symptom. After Freud, symptoms were explained on
the basis of defense, in which repression takes the prominent place. What is forgotten
here is that repression in itself is already a secondary moment in the dynamics of
pathogenesis. Indeed, repression is nothing but a coping mechanism that makes use
of representational signifiers of the drive. Freud himself recognized a twofold struc-
ture within the symptom: on the one hand the drive, and on the other hand the sym-
bolic.18 The same reasoning goes for the dream as well—which is no surprise, since the
dream itself is a symptom.
In the light of this twofold structure, every symptom has to be studied and
treated in a double way. Following Lacan, dreams, phobic symptoms, even conversion
symptoms come down to the formal envelope of the symptom; that is, they are the
 F Paul Verhaeghe

representational expressions of the real of the drive.19 Thus considered, the symptom
is a symbolic construction built around a real kernel of jouissance. The Real of jouis-
sance is the ground or root of the symptom, while the symbolic concerns its phallic
upper structure.
Both Freud and Lacan discovered that it is precisely this root of the symptom in
the Real that obstructs therapeutic effectivity.20 Analysis aims at the repressed part of the
unconscious—the representational phallic system—and is powerless when confronted
with the other jouissance. The very fact that today we are confronted with patients in
whom repression is barely present implies a totally new challenge for psychoanalysis.
It is important to understand that these two levels are not separate in the man-
ner of being opposed—in a binary opposition, for example. On the contrary: here
we face a kind of fusion, with a situation that obliged Lacan to develop a whole new
topology. This is expressed by his idea of the not-all, as elaborated in his Seminar XX.
Freud expressed this beautifully in his metaphor concerning the impact of the somatic
aspect: “[I]t is like the grain of sand around which an oyster forms its pearl” (SE VII,
). Lacan speaks about the not-all and uses the metaphor of the jar, which illustrates
the reasons why one can’t spare oneself the trouble of an analysis. According to Lacan,
the essence of making pottery does not reside in the raising of the sides of the jar,
but in the hollow space that is created by these sides. The jar localizes the real within
the symbolic. The resemblance to both the formation of a dream and the analysis of
it resides in the fact that it is only through the elaboration and the analysis of the rep-
resentational constellation that the Real of the drive appears. Or, to put it in Lacanian
algebra, that the object a appears.
This object cannot be analyzed as such, nor can it be changed. Freud was rather
pessimistic in this respect; he considered this level to be biological bedrock and spoke
about interminable analysis. Lacan presents us with another solution. His theory on
the object a acknowledges the impossibility of a final “full speech.” The system Ucs
remains unconscious and thus remains operative. Henceforth the aim of the treatment
is not a final interpretation. The object a as such cannot be changed, but the position
of the subject toward this object a can be revised.
In this way, Lacan presents us with the idea of a certain kind of identification,
one based on a decision of the subject. Instead of the usual identification—the set of
identifications with the Other—here the identification concerns the Real part of the
drive, the part beyond phallic signification, and thus the identification here is identifi-
cation with the symptom or the sinthome.21
Lacan describes this new subject, or this finally analyzed subject, as the subject
that has made a choice for identification with the real kernel of its symptom or object
a. To cite Lacan: “In what consists the sounding that is an analysis? Would it be—
or not—to identify with one’s symptom, albeit taking all the guarantees of a kind of
distance?” “To know how to handle, to take care of, to manipulate . . . to know what to
do with his symptom, that is the end of the analysis.”22
 The Dream between Drive and Desire f 

Notes
1. “The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence” (SE III, ). It must be noted that Freud uses sev-
eral denominations (energetic investment, instinctual power, pressure, quantitative factor, and,
of course, libido). This impossibility of finding one denomination and one only testifies already
to the fundamental difficulty of, to the impossible relation between, drive and representability.
2. For further discussion, see Paul Verhaeghe, “The Lacanian Subject: Causation and
Destitution of a pre-Ontological non-Entity,” in Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, ed.
D. Nobus (London: Rebus Press), –.
3. This idea of fixation does not solve the problem. On the contrary: closer study of
the concept of “fixation” reveals that it contains both a somatic and a representational element,
so the problem remains. Even in his most explicit discussion, Freud uses a strange word to
denominate the psychological component of the drive: Vorstellungsrepräsentanz, “ideational
representative” (SE XIV , –). Lacan will meet the same difficulty. In the final part of his
work he will develop a new theory on the “letter” as his way of understanding the primal fixa-
tion of the drive on the body.
4. I have discussed this evolution in Freud extensively in “Does the Woman Exist?” (New
York: The Other Press, ), –.
5. J. Lacan, “Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage en psychanalyse,” in Ecrits
(Paris: Seuil, ), translated by Alan Sheridan as “Function and Field of Speech and Language
in Psychoanalysis,” in Ecrits: A Selection (New York and London: Norton, ); Le Séminaire,
Livre XI, Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, ed. J. A. Miller (Paris: Seuil,
 [Seminar of ]), translated by Alan Sheridan as The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ); Le Séminaire, Livre XXII: R.S.I., ed. J. A.
Miller, in Ornicar?  (), – (see sessions of January  and February ).
6. Paul Ricoeur, De l’Interprétation (Paris: Seuil, ), translated by Denis Savage as
Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, ).
7. J. Laplanche and S. Leclaire, “L’Inconscient: une étude psychanalytique,” in L’incon-
scient, ed. H. Ey (VIme Colloque de Bonneval) (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, ), –,
translated by Patrick Coleman as “The Unconscious: A Psychoanalytic Study,” Yale French
Studies  (): – .
8. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, –.
9. Ibid., –, .
10. Ibid., , my translation. In the published translation, the French “la béance par où la
névrose se raccorde à un réel” is translated as “the gap through which neurosis recreates a har-
mony with the real.” The whole point of Seminar XI comes down to the demonstration that any
harmony with the real is lost forever, so the official translation is wrong. With this idea, Lacan
associates himself with an almost forgotten part of Freudian theory, namely the fixation of the
drive, which implies that the body is decision-making instance. See Paul Verhaeghe and Fréd-
eric Declerck, “Lacan’s Analytic Goal: Le Sinthome or the Feminine Way,” in Luke Thurston,
ed., The Symptom (London: Rebus Press, ).
11. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, . It is important to understand that this always
failing realization does not take place against a hidden (because unconscious) background of
totality or unity. On the contrary, the background is never there. Lacan summarizes this sub-
version with a pun on the “un” of unconscious: “Let us say that the limit of the ‘Unbewusste’ is
the ‘Unbegriff’—not the non-concept, but the concept of lack” (). I remember having read
 F Paul Verhaeghe

somewhere in Freud the uttering of the question about whether the latent dream thoughts do
really exist, or if we have to consider them as essentially absent, meaning that the dream analy-
sis is an attempt to construct an originally failed process.
12. Ibid., .
13. See Lacan, The Seminar, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Seminar of -),
ed. J. A. Miller, trans. D. Porter (New York and London: Norton, ), , –.
14. See Lacan’s “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’” of , trans. J. Mehlman, Yale French
Studies  (): –. This translation does not contain Lacan’s three appendices to his orig-
inal paper: “Presentation of the sequel,” “Introduction,” and “Parenthesis of parentheses.” For
these texts, see Lacan, “Le séminaire sur ‘la lettre volée,’” in Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, ), –.
15. For “efficient cause,” see Aristotle, Physics, trans. W. Charlton (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, ), a.
16. What is this real all about? Seminar XI is quite clear on this point. The real beyond
the signifier, functioning as cause, is drive-ridden, and this is why Lacan took the drive as his
starting point. With this aspect of the real any meeting is always a failed one, because there
is no signifier. In the course of his teaching, Lacan enumerated the various imaginary elabora-
tions of the real: The Other of the Other, the Sexual Relationship, The Woman, all of which are
summarized in the notation of the barred Other. For “the Other of the Other ,” see Lacan, “The
Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” Ecrits: A
Selection, ; for the “Sexual Relationship” and “The Woman,” see Lacan, Le Séminaire livre
XX: Encore, , .
17. “It is always a question of the subject qua indeterminate” (Lacan, Four Fundamental
Concepts, ).
18. This is clearly present in Freud’s first case study, of “Dora.” Here Freud does not add
to his theory on defense, which had already been elaborated in his two papers on the psy-
choneuroses of defense (SE III). It can be said that the core of this case study is precisely a mat-
ter of this twofold structure, as Freud here focuses on the real, drive-related element, what
he denominates as the “Somatisches Entgegenkommen.” Later, in Three Essays, this will be
called fixation of the drive. From this point of view, Dora’s conversion symptoms can be stud-
ied from two sides: a symbolic one, which concerns the signifiers or psychical representations
that are repressed; and a real one, related to the drive, here the oral drive.
19. Lacan, “De nos antécédents,” Ecrits, .
20. Thus it is not a matter of surprise that Lacan considers the drive to be central in what
he calls Freud’s will. Indeed, after fifty years of clinical practice, Freud’s conclusion can be
summarized as follows: It is the drive that decides on the lasting success of the treatment, and
this is precisely the reason for his pessimism. See “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” SE
XXIII, ff. The same evolution can be discovered in Lacan’s work. The early Lacan will focus
on the Symbolic and the Imaginary, but from Seminar XI onward, the Real and the drive come
to the fore of his attention. Nevertheless, Lacan will present us with another solution, beyond
Freud’s pessimism.
21. The fixations, considered by Freud as primary symptoms, are for Lacan of a general
nature. It is the symptom that defines mankind, and, as symptom, this cannot be rectified or
cured. That is Lacan’s final conclusion: there is no subject without a symptom. In his last con-
ceptualizations, the idea of the symptom receives a new meaning. What is at issue is a purified
symptom, one stripped of its symbolic component parts. This is precisely the part of the symp-
tom that ex-sists outside the unconscious considered as structured as a language. Here what is
 The Dream between Drive and Desire f 

at issue is the object a or the drive in its pure form. See Lacan, Seminar of –, “R.S.I.,”
Ornicar?  (), –. The real of the symptom, or the object a, demonstrates the partic-
ular jouissance of the real body of this particular subject. Lacan prefers the idea of symptom
to that of the object a because of his thesis that there is no sexual relationship. If there is no nor-
mal sexual relationship as such, every relationship between sexual partners is a symptomatic
one. As a result, the analytic treatment, in its final phase, has to focus on this analyzed, denuded
version of the symptom. We must stress the fact that this identification with the symptom does
not come down to surrender. On the contrary, surrender is an expression of impotence, and
thus would qualify the attitude toward the symptom as one of belief. Thus the failure would be
considered as isolated and individual, and the conviction would persist that other people—that
the Other has succeeded in installing such a sexual relation. This is not the case for the subject
that has identified with its symptom and who has verified—during his analysis—that the failure
of the sexual relationship is not a matter of individual impotence, but of structural impossibil-
ity. The analysis has made clear that the essence of the subject—“son être de sujet”—is situated
at the place of the lack of the Other, at that place where the Other does not provide us with an
answer. The analysand has experienced the fact that the subject is “an answer of the Real,” and
not “an answer of the Other.” See Lacan, “L’étourdit,” Scilicet  (), .
22. “En quoi consiste ce repérage qu’est l’analyse? Est-ce que ce serait, ou non, s’identifier,
tout en prenant ses garanties d’une espèce de distance, à son symptôme?” “Savoir faire avec, savoir
le débrouiller, le manipuler . . . savoir y faire avec son symptôme, c’est là la fin de l’analyse.” Lacan,
Le Séminaire : “L’insu que sait de l’une bévue, s’aile a mourre,” Ornicar? / (), –.
This page intentionally left blank
 R . Is Lacan
Borderline?
Judith Feher-Gurewich R

O
ne hundred years after The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud’s discovery of
the unconscious continues to sap the comfort of our received notions on
love, desire, reproduction, violence, and death. Freud’s unconscious is
a seductive delinquent, always on the go, tracking down desire and its
infinite partial objects. Oblivious to debts, to logic and justice, it moves steadily
toward death in search of the intervention of a father figure in front of whom it refuses
to yield. No wonder that, among Freud’s epigones, Lacan stands quasi-alone to plead
for that which defies the proper functioning of the law of social and economic ex-
change. But if Lacan defends the motivations of the unconscious and has fought long
and hard for the probation of the Oedipal fantasy and its representation in the dream-
work, many of his fellow psychoanalysts, especially colleagues on the other side of the
Atlantic, have declared the Oedipal complex a quasi-obsolete historical phenomenon.
Consequently, they have reverted to a pre-Freudian vision of psychic functioning,
according to which the dream-work must necessarily be reduced to mere affective
states, referring more to anxiety and narcissistic wounds than to the complex relation
between the incestuous wish and its prohibition. The effect of this shift brings to
the fore either the real of neuro-psychiatry or the imaginary relation between analyst
and analysand.
It is as if the unconscious would only speak of the vicissitudes of desire in French,
while the pathologies of psychic life have found, in the official language of science
or pseudo-science, the means to circumvent the return of the repressed. If I single out
American psychoanalysis, it is mainly because it appears to have rejected Freud’s
discovery, while at the same time keeping the psychoanalytic institution alive. In this


 F Judith Feher-Gurewich

sense, Lacan and American psychoanalysis are at opposite extremes: on the one hand,
the ethics of desire and an unshakable allegiance to the name of the father, and on the
other hand a rejection of the Oedipal fantasy, but also a tolerance for social change
matching American psychoanalysis’s call for adaptation.
I would like to believe that attempting a rapprochement between these two
extremes speaks directly to the question that occupies us today, namely the status
of psychoanalysis a hundred years after Freud encountered the psychic reality of the
Oedipal drama in his own dream. Psychoanalysis is not a school of thought—Freudian,
Lacanian, Kleinian, Kohutian—but is rather a practice that permits us to detach the
workings of the unconscious from the intentions and aspirations of the conscious ego.
Since Freud, many psychoanalysts have had ideas about how to revise his original
discovery. All of them have been sincere in their belief that their own approach would
better serve the direction of the cure, and most of them indeed have had something
useful to contribute. But breaking through theoretical divides, or even political and
ideological differences, is rarely at the forefront of analysts’ preoccupations. They are
caught in the comfort zone of their theoretical and institutional framework, and there-
fore offer a deaf ear to any theoretical or clinical approach that contradicts their own.
There are, of course, many good reasons for the present “dialogue de sourds”
that is pervasive in the psychoanalytic milieu. On the one hand, we have the Lacani-
ans, who apparently refuse to think in terms of adaptation, of affects, of parental defi-
ciencies, of good behavior, and therefore appear to themselves as having been saved
from the traps of normativity and the orthopedics of good intentions. These are among
the chosen people, who have successfully broken down the divide between good and
evil. The unconscious speaks directly to them and it is in its name that they will con-
demn whatever social formations seem to contradict the good functioning of the
Oedipus complex and the desire it produces. Because they have the inside story—and
have gone through the Lacanian Seminary on top of that—they set themselves above
their critics and are therefore extremely vexed when they are accused of preaching a
return to what appears to be traditional family values. When they are pushed too far
by radicals of all sorts, whether feminists, queers, or even American therapists, they
pull out their secret weapon, the ultimate proof of their anti-conventionalism, of their
profound allegiance to the truth of desire: the formula of sexuation, or the rather
mysterious and unfathomable feminine jouissance, which only a few, a very happy few,
have been invited to encounter. The conversation then stops, since Lacan’s “not-all” is
neither a proper diagnostic category, nor is it perceived as an effect of postmodernity
on the vicissitudes of psychic life. On the other side of the Atlantic, psychoanalysis,
which sits firmly on the side of a good fit between the individual and his social milieu,
has long since given up on the Oedipus complex and its vicissitudes, and it is therefore
free, to a certain extent, to observe the new psychic effects of postmodernity without
being encumbered by the complexities of Freudian theory. Psychoanalysis in America
started as a medical science and has never left the auspices of psychiatric nosography.
 Is Lacan Borderline? f 

If social change has modified the classical definition of good behavior by including
within it the various effects of the sexual revolution, it nonetheless remains to a cer-
tain extent wedded to the suture of science. In this sense, psychoanalysis only defends
the course of human desire as long as it remains at the service of the social order. But
since the social order has reworked the definition of good and evil, at the end of
the day, American psychoanalysis appears paradoxically more liberal than its Lacan-
ian counterpart, which deplores the effects of social change on the good life. This is
not to say, however, that American psychoanalysis is better equipped to define the
terrain of its transmission. Its contribution seems to consist in having understood
that the psychiatric formulations that have informed its teachings are now obsolete. It
has discovered, for better and for worse, that hysteria and perversion have given way
to borderline and narcissistic disorders because, as Kohut points out, the effects of
shame have replaced the neurotic effects of guilt. Social change has a direct impact on
the formations of new pathologies, and therefore the Freudian model no longer holds.
New therapeutic approaches need to be invented in order to face the new challenges
of the actual.
So, for American psychoanalysis, there has been a shift both in theory and prac-
tice: new diagnoses have forced new therapeutic approaches. The borderline and nar-
cissistic disorders reveal that something in the relation between the subject and its
milieu has changed, and that this transformation affects psychoanalysis and its trans-
mission. The problem with the American approach is that, by focusing on the mal-
adies of the ego, which it considers to be central in the new pathologies, it leaves
behind the relation of the unconscious to the object a or the Oedipal fantasy. On
the other hand, the problem with the Lacanians is that they perceive social change as
detrimental to the symbolic function, and in that sense they refuse to a certain extent
to reevaluate the foundations and applications of their theory.
Yet to assure the transmission of psychoanalysis, it is paramount to define a
terrain that would allow for a dialogue between different schools and different clinical
approaches. Something of our analytic experience must be amenable to translation.
All psychoanalysts will certainly agree that, through the transference, something of
the unconscious is bound to appear so as to allow a psychic shift in the patient to
occur. After all, it is through their own transferential experiences that people such as
Kohut and Kernberg, both originally classical Freudian analysts, have come to decide
that new pathologies are in the making. Yet their suggestions for the treatment of these
patients remain deeply imbedded in a concept of transference that Lacanians would
call imaginary. At the same time, their work is not unproductive and their clinical
results cannot be simply attributed to a simple strengthening of narcissism; something
of the unconscious must have been heard, otherwise they would not have convinced
so many clinicians of the value of their contributions. But from the way Americans
describe their cases, we get the distinct feeling that the Freudian unconscious cannot
breathe under so many resistances, defenses, and aggressions; that the analytic space
 F Judith Feher-Gurewich

is filled by the ego and its deficiencies, placing the analyst either in the slot of the law
(Kernberg) or in the slot of the positive self object (Kohut).
The cleft between American and Lacanian psychoanalysis does not only reveal
a cultural divide between two radically different ideologies or visions of the world.
The unconscious feeds on the super-ego, both maternal and paternal, which in turn
both affirms and undermines the symbolic function, which finds its support in social
ideals, whatever they may be. But to bridge the gap between Lacan’s defense of the
ethics of desire (which seems to exclude social change and its effects on narcissism)
and the American condemnation of the Freudian unconscious (in the name of sci-
ence and social adaptation), one must move beyond this theoretical and ideological
divide and ask a straightforward clinical question: underneath the aggressive defense
mechanisms of the borderline patient, do we not discover a classic structure of desire,
whether hysterical, phobic, obsessional, or perverse? And further: can we acknowl-
edge that social change has indeed affected our classical psychoanalytic models, and
that therefore Lacan’s contribution needs to be revised? Or that these new patholo-
gies, namely the narcissistic and borderline disorders, which have helped cause the
downfall of Freud in the United States (and which contradict the importance of the
Oedipus complex) have shed, paradoxically, a different light on the clinical relevance
of one of Lacan’s most apparently abstract contributions to psychoanalysis, the formula
of sexuation and his strange statement that woman is not-all, regarding her inscription
in the symbolic order?
Such an unlikely rapprochement might, with hope, break down a false dichot-
omy within the psychoanalytic world and thus allow Freud’s revolutionary discovery
to return refreshed onto the psychoanalytic scene. As the talking cure has amply
demonstrated, resistance and obedience are often the flip side of each other. To resist
psychoanalysis may actually be more instructive than to surrender blindly to its teach-
ings, as we see is done every day in our psychoanalytic circles. Wouldn’t the value of
Freud’s ideas best be recognized if Lacan’s insights could be discovered in the very
folds of America’s resistance to the power of the unconscious? What better way to
assure the transmission of psychoanalysis than to let the borderline phenomenon push
American psychoanalysis straight into Lacan’s arms?
Therefore I would like to suggest that borderline and narcissistic disorders might
lose their antisocial characterization so well described by Kernberg—in other words,
their bad reputation—if their peculiar behavior could be understood within the
Lacanian cartography, as a certain inability to rely fully on an unconscious fantasy
thanks to which our neurotic construction of the world can be supported. Hence I
would suggest that patients manifesting such phenomena are not-all inscribed in the
world of phallic signification. In other words, the Oedipal fantasy does not cover over
completely the lack in the symbolic order; and this in turn causes these patients to
confront head-on the arbitrary and therefore nonsensical nature of the social order. So
what appears in the psychiatric nosography as evil behavior is, in fact, an attempt to
 Is Lacan Borderline? f 

fence off the threat of the meaningless nature of social interaction. Such an approach
might also offer us a better understanding of how the world appears when the object-
a-cause-of-desire cannot support the necessary distortions that make life meaningful.
Bringing Lacan’s concept of the “not-all” together with those of borderline and nar-
cissistic disorders not only offers new therapeutic strategies, but also brings Lacan’s
mysterious and quasi-mystical notion of feminine jouissance down to the painful real-
ity of psychic suffering.
For those who are less familiar with Lacan, let me try to explain in a few words
what I understand by his idea of feminine jouissance and his famous dictum that “the
woman is not-all.”1 Basically, Lacan’s crucial contribution to Freud’s discovery lies in
his attempt to break down the fundamental deadlock that led Freud to declare that,
because he could not figure out what a woman wanted, he felt unable to move beyond
the bedrock of castration and therefore could not find the secret formula to resolve the
transference and bring analysis to a close. What Lacan explains is that to a certain
extent Freud himself was trapped in the Oedipal fantasy because he believed an answer
could be given to the enigma of femininity. Thus Freud himself could not see that what
he had thus discovered was in fact the limit of psychoanalytic knowledge. There is no
mystery beyond castration anxiety and penis envy. Instead there is a hole. The system
of phallic signification of language, of science, of social interaction falls short in offer-
ing the ultimate answer to the enigma. The system in which we are inscribed as human
beings does not include an explanation either of its origin or of its function. Beyond
the fantasy we create as desiring subjects, there is no secret meaning to be revealed.
But this fantasy, or object a, is the best we have to assure the good functioning of desire.
But Lacan also says (and I am simplifying to the extreme) that there are some
people—more often women, but not necessarily—who are not-all protected or directed
by this unconscious fantasy, which would plug the hole in the symbolic order. Some-
thing of their drive or their body is left, so to speak, open to receive a peculiar non-
message from the place in the Other that is barred. The way I understand this is that
the “not-all” neurotic self of such beings—because these patients are not psychotic,
which of course is the most interesting characteristic of borderlines—has a way of
being involved in the world that is peculiar: something of the realm of illusion has
been punctured. These people see the world without the glasses of neurotic distor-
tions. Yet this highly metaphysical approach to human existence is not experienced
outside the narcissistic boundaries of the ego. It is the ego that bears the brunt of the
relation of the body to the hole in the symbolic order. In this sense, feminine jouissance
enters into the realm of diagnosis if we agree to say that in psychoanalysis the term
diagnosis can only be read as a name for a certain psychic position appearing within
the transferential relationship. Therefore we can expect (and here I think are the con-
tributions of Kernberg and Kohut) that borderline patients are prone to experience the
transference as particularly taxing on the boundaries of the ego, and therefore that
they present a symptomatology that cannot be qualified as purely neurotic.
 F Judith Feher-Gurewich

As Kernberg points out, these patients have enormous narcissistic issues, even
though they appear on a purely social level to be particularly well adapted—on the
surface—to the demands of their surroundings. This is what Kernberg says about
borderline disorders:

Direct exploitativeness, unreasonable demandingness, manipulation of others with-

out consideration or tact are quite noticeable. These patients may feel superficially
quite insecure, uncertain, and inferior in regard to their capacities or dealings with
others. These feelings of insecurity and inferiority may be in part a reflection of
the more realistic aspects of their evaluation of their relationships to significant
others, work, and life in general, and often reflect a realistic awareness of some of
their shortcomings and failures. Yet on a deeper level feelings of inferiority often
reflect defensive structures. It is striking when one finds so often underneath that
level of insecurity and uncertainties omnipotent fantasies and a kind of blind opti-
mism, based on denial, which represent the patient’s identification with primitive
all good self and object images.2

The narcissistic disorders are not far from this either. Kernberg says, “It is as if they
feel they have the right to control and possess others and to exploit them without
guilt feelings—behind a surface which very often is charming and engaging one senses
coldness and ruthlessness. Very often such patients are considered to be dependent
because they need so much tribute and adoration from others; but on a deeper level
they are completely unable actually to depend on anybody because of their deep dis-
trust and depreciation of others.”3
Let us not be too judgmental of Kernberg’s own judgmental perspective. We
are all susceptible to coming up with similar descriptions of our patients, especially
when we have become the objects of their scorn. But we may also choose to think that,
since Kernberg has not read Lacan, his ignorance of psychoanalysis proper has led him
to confuse classic neurotic structures of desire with narcissistic and borderline dis-
orders. This is precisely the kind of reaction I find counterproductive if the survival
of psychoanalysis remains our principal focus and interest. It may be more productive
to give Kernberg the benefit of the doubt (after all, he was trained in Argentina and
Kohut was trained in Vienna!). It may be more productive to think that the effects of
modernity on the psyche (in which I include the particular effects of American life,
including the vicissitudes of emigration) need to be elaborated further.
Although it was not Lacan’s intent to apply the concept of the “not-all” to a new
psychic position that may be related to the effects of modernity (his own tendency was
more to look on the side of perversion), this does not mean, a generation later and on
a continent once removed, that such a connection cannot be made.
As always, it is my clinical practice that permits forays into theory. Probably
due to the fit between the patient I shall describe and myself, certain circumstances in
the following account do not quite resemble Kernberg’s description. Thus, in my pres-
entation of the following case material, I leave it to your imagination, and to the fact
 Is Lacan Borderline? f 

that this patient had abandoned several previous therapies, to make the connections
between the profile of this patient and those of narcissistic or borderline disorders.
An intelligent and insightful young woman—herself clearly a femme fatale for
men, extremely successful in her work, highly regarded by her male friends, adored by
her husband—came to see me because she felt invisible to others and to herself. It
is not that she was clueless, but that she experienced herself as only partly inscribed
in a world where people appear to know what they want. While she is dimly aware of
the fascination she exercises on men, in turn she is not quite sure whom she desires
and why. While sex is for her a source of pleasure and curiosity, she is not particularly
invested in uncovering the mysteries of erotic desire.
Her jouissance seems located elsewhere—but in an elsewhere that divests her
of any possibility of giving an appropriate libidinal charge to the objects surrounding
her. Everything is the same. Although she is a fairly good judge of character and situ-
ations, she can never tell if she likes one person more than another; if she should adopt
a child or have her own; if she should live in one place or another. Despite her efforts,
she cannot find, in the phallic order, the means to situate herself in relation to others.
By being in part excluded from the phallic order, my patient attempts to discover
its meaning, yet fails to discover the order of things. More remains equal to less. Her
father’s small business, where she worked as a child, is for her of the same magnitude
as the big corporation of which she is a director. In other words, she cannot appropri-
ately translate one situation into another. If she is given a project, and her secretary
forgets to photocopy a document, she does it herself, working late hours as if the ques-
tion of hierarchy in her company had no impact on who does what. Unlike the hys-
teric, who would readily transgress the law, my patient focuses on the task at hand and
does whatever needs to be done, assuming that if she is not heard it is because she is
invisible and therefore there is nothing she can do about it. Because of her intelligence,
efficacy, and charm, she is respected by her superiors, yet she never takes credit for
work well done. Her job is her job: not to do it well is not an option. She can identify
with her project, yet she cannot fully occupy the position of power the project grants
her. Her metaphysical evaluation of the metaphors we live by puts a strange and inter-
esting spin on our own system of values. But she cannot enjoy—in the phallic sense—
the originality of her perspective. For her, society operates according to arbitrary
laws, and the best she can do is to learn them “by heart.” When she encounters a law
she does not recognize, she fills in the gaps with the set of received notions she has
at her disposal—spending hours photocopying papers, for example, since she cannot
figure out why her secretary did not comply with her request. For her to ask the
employee why is not an option.
As the analysis progresses, she discovers slowly that what fascinates her in our
work is my deep interest in the ways her unconscious operates. She discovers that
what she wants is the analytic process itself. The desire of the analyst becomes for her
a space in which this other jouissance—the jouissance of the lack in the other—can be
 F Judith Feher-Gurewich

accepted. The analyst’s desire becomes a support that allows her to discover, bit by
bit, the links between signifiers and the strange beauty they radiate. It is crucial here
to introduce the notion that Lacanian analysis is predicated not on the well-being of
the patient per se, but on the analyst’s desire for the emergence, in the transference, of
the unconscious fantasy that causes the dialectic of desire. Yet because such fantasy
provides the illusion that castration can be avoided, the neurotic classically resists the
analytic process in the sense that he or she believes that the rule of free association is
at the service of the realization of the fantasy, thus refusing to entertain the possibility
that this fantasy is precisely what needs to be disposed of.
For my patient, however, transference is not structured according to the param-
eters of the neurotic. I do not possess the secret combination of her desire, because
her unconscious fantasy is not the predominant cause of her psychic structure. As she
discovers the chain of her unconscious signifiers through my desire for their appear-
ance in the transference, she is given a status she did not experience before. For the
first time she discovers who she is, not at the level of her fragile ego, but at the level
of the signifiers that have constituted her as a subject of language.
Recently she told me that the stewardess on a flight she takes regularly for her
job recognized her, and that when she got to Avis to rent her usual car, instead of get-
ting it herself in the lot, the agent saw her and drove the car to her. She said to me,
“I realize that I am no longer invisible.” The more meaningful recognition she had got-
ten in her life, including a big promotion at work, could not match the beauty of being
recognized by mere strangers. My patient as “not-all” found, through the desire of the
analyst, the means to give a more bearable orientation to her other jouissance. She
reached a psychic position that made more visible those aspects of her life that are
usually indifferent to us common folk, who are trapped in the vicissitudes and rewards
of phallic jouissance.
I was presenting this patient to an American colleague, whose clinical acumen I
trust deeply, and who surprised me when she suggested that this patient was a classic
borderline case. After being somewhat baffled by her reaction, I realized that the turn
the transference had taken had protected me from being the target of her narcissistic
fragility. It is interesting to note, by the way, that Kernberg specifically says that a
good match between a borderline and his analyst is crucial for a positive outcome of
the treatment.4 After all, it would not have been difficult to fail the test, to have entered
into an imaginary deadlock with her. I must have been so intrigued by the ways this
woman described the minute details of the vicissitudes of everyday life that I was able
to keep, without consciously knowing it, a strong symbolic position in the transfer-
ence. I remember that once I made her wait for over ten minutes, and she left and
came back twenty minutes later. She told me that if she was so unimportant to me,
she was not going to stick around because if she was invisible to me, there would be
no point to the analysis. I reacted quite spontaneously by saying that lately I had been
late too often, that I was going to try to make an effort, and that she was right to be
 Is Lacan Borderline? f 

upset. But I also said that we should use my mistake to her advantage, so that she could
come to understand how her perception of the circumstances led her to dismiss my
lack of punctuality and only concentrate on her being unimportant. She was able
then to retrace other circumstances of the same sort. By keeping my lateness as a fact
against which she could test how she lacked the necessary symbolic space to be able
to wait and be angry at the same time (she had actually left, gone for a walk, and come
back) gave her the means to begin to read the world slightly differently. It was after this
episode that she got a raise and a promotion at work. Recently she pushed the exper-
iment further by quitting her job and trying to live for a while without the protective
identity it had provided.
Another aspect of what I realized, after the fact, could be perceived as a border-
line characteristic had to do with the importance of competition in her life. She was
for a while very competitive with a woman friend, a repetition of her childhood expe-
rience when she was jealous of her younger sister’s privileged relation with her mother.
To see this competition as a signifier, rather than as an effect of the mirror stage,
was also helpful because it shed some light on the paradoxical position of the father
in the family. Feeling competitive operates as a border against feeling invisible, yet at
the same time it leaves her confronted with a profound sense of disarray because she
does not want to have or be what the other has or is. It confuses her totally. In fact,
competition with another woman never has a man as an object, but rather the vision
of a woman’s envy. She envies the possibility of feminine envy. In this case, she envied
her friend’s envy of a necklace the friend could not afford. In other words, she envies
hysterical desire, and in this way she is confronted with the fact that she lacks it. She
suffers from lack in the strict sense of the word. The work we have been doing has
been to capitalize on the signifiers that circle around the lack in the symbolic and to
take advantage of the knowledge that her peculiar position provides her, instead of
thinking that this “knowledge” is the proof of her inadequacy. In other words, every
time the space she occupies begins to shrink, the focus of our discussion turns to the
circumstances that lead her to feel that way. Invariably she discovers that a signifier
has been missing in order to make sense of the world around her. In the process, some-
thing of her physical presence is called into question, and she feels she does not have
permission to inquire either within or without so as to figure out what is happening.
Instead she dies inside, feeling herself to be at the mercy of an unknown that is not the
jouissance of the Other, but rather the lack of such a jouissance. There is nothing there.
A story she told me gave me a clue to the origin of this feminine jouissance that
plagues her, and this in turn gave us a better sense of the paradoxical position of her
father in relation to phallic power. When she was seven years old, she went with her
family on a guided tour of an old American village, during which, in front of each
house, she saw a boot scraper. Since she did not know what it was, she asked the male
tour guide, who did not answer. She asked again and again, so eventually someone on
the tour explained to her what a boot scraper was and she was very pleased. When she
 F Judith Feher-Gurewich

came home her father screamed at her for having humiliated the tour guide and ex-
posed his ignorance, which is something she should never do. She was very impressed
by her father’s violent reaction and never forgot the lesson: what is incomprehensible
must remain so, otherwise the man collapses. She never ventured again onto the ter-
rain where phallic knowledge could be questioned. While this experience certainly
helped her in her career, it also prevented her from wanting to plug the unknown with
a fantasy of how to get to that knowledge. For her, the desire to know can only reveal
the fragility of phallic signification. My patient understood too soon that, for her father,
castration was an irreparable wound, and that therefore she could not supplement it
as a classical hysteric would. If she could become the object of a man’s sexual fantasy,
she never felt she could become an object of desire; it was as if she felt instinctively the
Real of the Other, but not the other’s desire of the other. For her to relate to a man
meant to sleep with him and to act out his most secret sexual fantasy. Even if the man
felt in love with her, this never made any sense to her except on the level of sex.
Here we can see the thin line separating the not-all from the hysteric. The “not-
all” “knows,” to a certain extent, that phallic signification is thwarted. Had her father
distinguished the tour guide from other men, no doubt she would have become a
hysteric, but he did not. Every situation that involved her desire brought back to her a
sense that something was impending; that the other is, by definition, always barred;
and that she needed to make do with her own resources, since the Other does not
have the answer. Thus her feeling of being invisible was the best defense against the
hole in the symbolic. Her analysis has brought her to the realization that she was right
all along to doubt the power of the other, and that she did not need to turn upon her-
self what she perceived as an outside truth. This gave her a sense of her own bound-
aries so that she no longer abandons herself to others by doing whatever they want
because she now knows that the narcissistic rewards she got (a short-lived sense of
power) failed to get her in touch with her desire. Yet each time she encounters it, her
desire appears to her almost by surprise: one by one, instance by instance, moment
by moment, and only partially predicated on the Oedipal fantasy or object a. In other
words, the objects of her desire are not obviously connected by a chain of signifiers.
Rather they seem to operate in discrete units, and when her punctual desire is satis-
fied, she does not experience, as we do, a sense of sadness or loss. Each experience
comes with a quota of gratification, but the next step is never readily available.
Of course I consider myself lucky to have found a patient who allowed me to
elaborate a potential link between borderline and “not-all.” I shall never know whether
Kernberg would have perceived my patient as a typical borderline case. But my analyst-
friend’s reaction had been enough to make me wonder if the hypothesis of the “not-
all” cannot help clinicians of all persuasions to think differently of their position in
the transference, given that what this entails is that it is not exclusively the place of
object a that they occupy. It seems to me, rather, that if analysts could understand that
the borderline symptomatology masks the nothing that interrupts the flow of phallic
 Is Lacan Borderline? f 

signification, which in turn is sustained by the Oedipal fantasy, they would not be
so tempted to push through the false self to the narcissistic defenses. Instead they
would be able to explain these defenses not only by exposing the castration of the ana-
lyst, but also in reference to the metaphysical truth, which plagues the existence of the
borderline. In a sense, such persons are right to doubt that the phallic order can pro-
vide all the answers, but they are wrong to believe that there is no knowledge on the
side of castration. That knowledge is desire, yet desire is a dotted line—for them in
particular. Their Oedipal fantasy cannot fully sustain the position they occupy in the
world. Something of the real of their existence remains open, and this may cause a
fundamental bewilderment at the place where the other is powerless to bring solace,
since that other is, by definition, lacking.
While the history of the femme fatale though the ages has given us many exam-
ples of the fascination such borderline figures exercise on men, who find in these
women the incarnation of mystery, the actual providers of such fascination can only
derive limited pleasure from such a position of power. Their only resource is to dis-
cover, in the knowledge of their own castration, enough proofs that it is the Other, and
not they themselves, who does not exist. In other words, the truth of psychoanalysis is
in the symptom of the borderline.

Notes
1. Jacques Lacan, Feminine Sexuality, Jacques Lacan, and the Ecole Freudienne, ed.
Jacqueline Rose and Juliet Mitchell, trans. Jacqueline Rose (New York: Norton, ), .
2. Otto Kernberg, Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism (Northvale: Aron-
son, ), .
3. Ibid., .
4. Ibid., .
This page intentionally left blank
R . Dream Model
and Mirroring Anxiety
Sexuality and Theory
Claire Nahon

Translated from the French with the help of

Alehé Mir-Djalali and Amanda Bay R

F
reud’s Interpretation of Dreams is generally acknowledged to interrogate the
very status of the sexual. Yet it is striking to observe that the psychoanalytic
literature of the past fifty years virulently challenges the Freudian model—
Vorbild—of the dream and the transference. We are actually witnessing a per-
plexing evolution characterized by the always more profound denial of the very essence
of the Freudian discovery and its foundation—namely, the existence of the images
created by autoerotic sexuality, i.e., the unconscious (infantile) images—Bild[er]—that
shape the dream as well as the neurotic symptom, and even psychosis. Already in the
preface to the first edition of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud emphasizes the “the-
oretical value [of dreams] as a paradigm.” Indeed, he writes, “Anyone who has failed
to explain the origin of dream-images [Traumbilder] can scarcely hope to understand
phobias, obsessions or delusions or to bring a therapeutic influence to bear on them”
(SE IV, xxiii; my emphasis). Freud usually indicates the connection between dream
images and all psychopathological formations—those “abnormal psychical phenom-
ena” that interest him—and he clearly highlights their link to psychosis in the section
of The Interpretation of Dreams dealing with “The Relations between Dreams and
Mental Diseases”:

It is quite likely, on the contrary, that a modification of our attitude towards dreams
will at the same time affect our views upon the internal mechanism of mental dis-
orders and that we shall be working towards an explanation of the psychoses while
we are endeavouring to throw some light on the mystery of dreams. (SE IV, ; my
emphasis)


 F Claire Nahon

This is what Freud actually writes, with all due deference to his detractors, who
seem quick to challenge the Freudian heritage, to reduce it hastily to the neurosis
model and to the vicissitudes of the Oedipus complex, and then to a sexuality that,
no longer understood in its unconscious dimension, frequently becomes confused
with genitality.
Yet such an evolution was predictable. Indeed, as far back as , while pre-
paring his “Revision of the Theory of Dreams,” Freud is already compelled to deplore
the striking decrease in references to the dream:
Let us look through the volumes of the Internationale Zeitschrift für (ärztliche)
Psychoanalyse [International Journal of (Medical) Psycho-Analysis], in which, since
, the authoritative writings in our field of work have been brought together.
In the earlier volumes you will find a recurrent sectional heading “On Dream-
Interpretation,” containing numerous contributions on various points in the theory
of dreams. But the further you go the rarer do these contributions become, and
finally the sectional heading disappears completely. The analysts behave as though
they had no more to say about dreams, as though there was nothing more to be added
to the theory of dreams [als wäre die Traumlehre abgeschlossen]. (SE XXII, –;
GW XV, , my emphasis)

This statement is all the more noteworthy because, in this contribution, Freud
precisely confers upon the theory of dreams an almost initiatory virtue, referring to it
as a “shibboleth,” “the use of which decided who could become a follower of psycho-
analysis and to whom it remained forever incomprehensible” (SE XXII, ). Neverthe-
less, the very essence of the Freudian discovery has already begun to fade, whether
due to a gradual dissolution, distancing, or misunderstanding. Thus the true founda-
tion of psychoanalysis is overlooked, and what is preserved instead are its most super-
ficial features, formulas that are, furthermore, truncated, misused, distorted. It is as if
the advent of this inward gaze—so emblematic of the process at work in dreams and
transference, as well as of all imaginative capability—could concern no more than a
privileged few, the initiates of a “science” whose theory of dreams constitutes “what is
most characteristic and peculiar” (SE XXII, ), a true “turning-point,” as Freud puts it,
in the history of psychoanalysis. It is as if this inward gaze, no longer able to contem-
plate the eminently plastic images unfolding on the psychic stage,1 had to drag down
with itself, in its blindness, the sexual, unconscious truth that auto-erotism determines
and which confers on the dream the paradigmatic value that Freud first glimpsed while
watching the astonishing ballet of hysterical bodies.
During his stay in Paris as a fervent admirer and disciple of Charcot, Freud
saw Théodora on stage (), and was, like his contemporaries, captivated by Sarah
Bernhardt.2 She performed with a wide variety of masks and embodied on stage, as
in her own life, some of the most recurrent fantasies of her time: those dealing with
the very essence of the difference between the sexes. Sarah Bernhardt was by turns the
“golden voice” fascinating the crowd and the “great hysteric” exasperating her critics.
 Dream Model and Mirroring Anxiety f 

While performing both female and male parts, she highlighted the very uncertainty of
the relations between sex and gender that Charcot underscored on his own stage at
La Salpêtrière. This is the same uncertainty that the upcoming debate on bisexuality
would attempt to resolve, and that Charcot tried to capture among other hysteri-
cal symptoms through highly visual, even photographic, procedures. Georges Didi-
Huberman develops this idea at length in his Invention de l’hystérie, where he focuses
on the inextricable link between hysteria and the gaze. He emphasizes the visual
essence of the hysterical symptoms and the plasticity of bodies, which take on or lose
shape at will, responding to an observing, suggestive, or demanding gaze. In Freud’s
words, Charcot “was, as he himself said, a ‘visuel,’ a man who sees. . . . He used to look
again and again at the things he did not understand, to deepen his impression of them
day by day, till suddenly an understanding of them dawned on him” (“Charcot,” SE III,
, my emphasis). As an heir to a medical tradition in which faith in observation
is absolute, Charcot bears witness to this ever so exterior gaze, whose violence can
appear extreme. He first pretends to let himself be overtaken by the disorderly and
unworkable material, whereas in fact his gaze tolerates no secret, demanding full sub-
mission to its infinite power of organizing and classifying: “In his mind’s eye the appar-
ent chaos presented by the continual repetition of the same symptoms then gave
way to order: the new nosological pictures emerged, characterized by the constant
combination of certain groups of symptoms” (SE III, ). This is what Freud writes,
thus indicating that the alleged submissiveness to the phenomenon is pure artifice,
that this eye that scrutinizes, hungry for understanding, is actually not willing to give
up its power. Nevertheless Charcot’s knowledge was rooted in seeing. And by means
of photography he made the most out of “the figurative possibility to generalize the
case into a picture,” as Didi-Huberman puts it.3 Indeed as an artist and a collector,
Charcot called up the realistic virtues of photography and its absolute objectivity to
capture the reality of nervous disorders. He could then refer to the “living pathologi-
cal museum” he was creating.4 In “directing” hysteria both theatrically and scientifi-
cally, Charcot was building an entity compelled to exist and move at will through a
gaze: an entity that was to be exposed and exhibited on the stage of “this big optical
machinery of La Salpêtrière,” in Didi-Huberman’s words, until the Master could theo-
retically and immutably frame its slightest (de)formations and transformations.
The narrative of Emmy von N.’s treatment reveals that at the beginning of his
practice, Freud remained attached to a similar perspective. During that time, he was
convinced of the “external” etiology of hysteria, the trauma being considered as a for-
eign body—Fremdkörper—invading the internal space.5 Nevertheless Freud unceas-
ingly emphasizes the primacy of the visual sense, while insisting on the pathogenic
character of the visions assailing his patient. Indeed, these images that haunt Emmy,
far from being considered attributable to her own singular psyche—images emerging
directly from her unconscious, “an autochthonous theory of oneself ” (Pierre Fédida)—
are, on the contrary, dedicated to destruction. For instance, Freud writes: “My therapy
 F Claire Nahon

consists in wiping away these pictures, so that she is no longer able to see them before
her”; “I extinguished her plastic memory of these scenes”; “I made it impossible for her
to see any of these melancholy things again, not only by wiping out her memories of
them in their plastic form but by removing her whole recollection of them, as though
they had never been present in her mind.”6 Freud does not recognize yet, in Emmy’s
hallucinations, what he will conceive, in Elisabeth’s cure, as a “secret”: the return of the
repressed.7 Nonetheless, in its visual dimension the dream model is incipiently pres-
ent. It will not fully appear until Freud takes into account the sexual etiology of hys-
teria, when he begins to cast an inward gaze on specific productions such as dreams
and symptoms. Indeed, in The Interpretation of Dreams, when Freud emphasizes the
regression at work in dreams, as is obviously the case in the inaugural Dream of Irma’s
Injection (and Lacan’s commentary on this dream makes very explicit the paradig-
matic vision of the “informe” [formless] as well as the imaginary “decomposition of the
function of the ego,” in the sense that the latter can no longer allow for the preemi-
nence of consciousness or of the person8), when Freud discovers the eminently sexual
nature of the therapeutic solution, through the trimethylamin formula, he continually
insists on the plasticity of dream images. This plasticity is identical to that of hysteri-
cal symptoms, and transcends the anatomical difference between the sexes. It is the
same plasticity that is ultimately rooted in the highly creative and transgressive nature
of sexuality, a sexuality that is irreducible, in the unconscious, either to the concept of
bisexuality—in the sense in which it is currently used—or to the opposition between
masculinity and femininity. The “dream of dreams,” which plays with unconscious
vision in the extreme and which indeed is driven by it, diffracts viewpoints and sub-
verts conscious optics (“We can see the series of egos appear,” as Lacan declares9),
revealing the unrepresentable itself, this mouth-throat-sex of Irma, terrifying in its
state of decay, comparable to Medusa.10 Thus the Dream of Irma’s Injection not only
represents this critical moment of the mise en abyme concerning the meaning of the
dream on its own stage; it also represents the primacy of a gaze that no longer looks
at an external object but is fundamentally concerned with the internal images it en-
counters. Here is Lacan’s commentary: “Just when the hydra has lost its heads, a voice
which is nothing more than the voice of no one causes the trimethylamine formula to
emerge, as the last word on the matter, the word for everything. And this word means
nothing except that it is a word.”11 This word is nevertheless inextricably connected to
Fliess’s hypotheses concerning human sexuality. Indeed, if the Dream of Irma’s Injec-
tion appears foundational because it reveals the nature of the unconscious as well as
the psychic ability to let mental images occur on the inner stage, the dream also illus-
trates the very nature of the transferential bond and the power of the word. As Lacan
explains: “iS—imagining the symbol, putting the symbolic discourse into a figurative
form, namely the dream. / sI—symbolising the image, making a dream-interpretation.”12
This word, which in itself means nothing, remains, however, what links Freud to Fliess
and what establishes their relationship on the very basis of the sexual at the precise
 Dream Model and Mirroring Anxiety f 

moment when the dream puts on stage the analyst’s anxiety regarding the resistances
of his patient, who is compelled to “open her mouth”!
Hence we realize that the Freudian Vorbild of the dream and of the transference
is eminently sexual, and represents a model or prototype that allows an understand-
ing of the mental images created by auto-erotism. Does not its signifying form—Vor-
bild—as well as its semantic content reveal the primacy of the image on the psychic
stage, and, in this sense, the manifest interweaving of the sexual and the visual, the
eminently visual nature of the sexual? In fact, we need to refer to the chapter of the
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality dealing with “The Manifestations of Infantile
Sexuality.” Taking thumb sucking or sensual sucking—Ludeln or Wonnesaugen—as
an example, Freud examines the nature of auto-erotism and shows to what extent
the latter constitutes the fundamental moment of fantasy’s emergence, the presence-
absence of the nourishing object, the hallucinatory rhythm of the sexual object des-
tined to disappear at the very moment it arises. What is emphasized here is not, as
is often reductively assumed, that auto-erotism occupies the inaugural position upon
which the first object relations are then grafted. Rather, Freud actually defines auto-
erotism as an après-coup in which the sexual drive finds some appeasement through
images: this is a hallucinatory moment par excellence. While attaching itself to the
self-preservative drive, the sexual drive in fact occasions the moment where the nour-
ishing object (milk) is at once lost in its reality and shifted onto, or subsumed by, the
organ from which it comes. The breast, a part-object, thus becomes the sexual object,
the object of an infinite tension—the object a, as Lacan calls it.13 Sexuality appears this
way, through a shift, in the inevitably hallucinatory quest for what is destined never
to satisfy.14 This is the destiny of sexuality that Freud recounts in the chapter of the last
of the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, which deals with “The Finding of An
Object,” in a passage that clearly reveals the Freudian meaning of Vorbild, because
the image of the “child sucking at his mother’s breast” is designated as prototypic—
vorbildlich—of all love relations.15 In this sense, Freud writes, “The finding of an object
is in fact a refinding of it.” Thus the Vorbild works as an idealized model, a preexisting
image, which prefigures the destinies of sexuality: dream, being in love—Verliebtheit—
transference. The verb form—“(sich) vorbilden”—stresses in one of its older senses
the power of representation, of imagination; and it is not surprising that Freud refers
to the Vorbild when he evokes the infantile in the dream or when he highlights the
forthcoming effects of the first love object-choice. Unceasingly he underscores its
visual characteristics, emphasizing the crucial fact that auto-erotism and the model it
engenders—the model of the dream and of the transference—proceed from the nec-
essary diverting of the organ. This is the way the self-preservative function is driven
out by the sexual drive: lips kissing themselves, for instance, through the act of suck-
ing, which “is determined by a search for some pleasure which has already been expe-
rienced and is now remembered” (SE VII, , my emphasis), or the eyes, which, when
overexcited, are blinded to conscious images. That Freud, in a highly striking insight,
 F Claire Nahon

qualifies as “Vorbild” the deformations of “the genital organ in its states of excitation”
(“On Narcissism: An Introduction,” SE XIV, ) should not be surprising. Equivalent
to the mouth-throat-sex of Irma, this organ, “that is in some way changed and that is
yet not diseased in the ordinary sense,” allows us to understand not only the libidinal
cathexis at work in hypochondria, but more specifically the erotogenicity characteris-
tic of every part of the body. And the dynamic, deformed image it offers—the image
of a uniquely animated flesh—can be likened to the kaleidoscope that dream images
make and unmake. Thus a veritable subversion is at work: It is the prerogative of a
sexuality that only bothers with the organ the better to transgress it—flesh and psyche
substituting for each other—and that thrives only by feeding itself the images it cease-
lessly produces, unconscious formations located well beyond the anatomical differ-
ence between the sexes. The strategies of desire of Freud’s “clever woman patient,” the
famous butcher’s wife, are quite revealing. Freud remarks: “I saw that she was obliged
to create an unfulfilled wish for herself in her actual life” (SE IV, ). And the analy-
sis of her dream clearly exposes the plasticity of the sexual identifications at work: “my
patient put herself in her friend’s place in the dream because her friend was taking
my patient’s place with her husband and because she (my patient) wanted to take her
friend’s place in her husband’s high opinion” (SE IV, –). Freud insists on the
sexual community between these two women, while another identification appears—
one that does not escape Lacan—namely the identification with the husband, who,
although he usually “admires a plumper figure” (SE IV, ), finds his wife’s friend
attractive in spite of her inability to satisfy him.16 This “transgressiveness” of sexuality
is pictured in the most explicit manner in the hysterical attack, which obeys the same
rules of distortion and condensation as the dream (cf. “Some General Remarks on
Hysterical Attacks,” SE IX). Indeed it not only allows itself to be deciphered as does
a dream, but it also exhibits the same plasticity that drives it, like the dream, to mock
the anatomical yoke, while the body offers to the eye, without any mediation, the inti-
macy of fantasy. This is quite well illustrated by the hysterical woman mimicking
desire and defense, in a scenography worthy of Charcot (cf. “Hysterical Phantasies and
their Relation to Bisexuality,” SE IX): she tears her dress away with one hand, while
keeping her clothes against her body with the other one. A situation that Freud attrib-
utes to the bisexuality that was so extraordinarily subversive in his time, and could be
qualified today as still too much attached to the representation of a normativity of sex
and gender: “As the woman,” “as the man”—this is the way Freud describes the hesita-
tion of the patient. He thus remains in a fixed dichotomy probably still too far from the
continuum that characterizes the unconscious: a passage, fluid and constant, from one
sex, one gender, to another. This is the sexuality psychoanalysis is based on and deals
with, a sexuality intrinsically linked to the visual. And it is precisely the Bild or the
dream or the symptom that makes the psychic apparatus thinkable, by providing the
Vorbild of its very functioning—this Vorbild being, as we know, paradigmatic not sim-
ply of neurosis, but rather of all psychopathological formations.17 Its misrecognition
 Dream Model and Mirroring Anxiety f 

leads straightaway to therapeutic deadlocks, as in the treatment of Dora and the young
homosexual woman. If we fail to understand that the polymorphously perverse child
of the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and the hysteric are both emblematic of
the fact that sexuality is not only irreducible to the genital sphere, but, on the contrary,
is bound continually to transgress it, we might be heading for a blunder, which, if not
dogmatic, at least ideological or normative, would lead us to think that Dora could not
experience a homosexual love for Frau K., or that the homosexuality of the young
woman was only due to a disappointment that turned her away from men. Hence any
imagination of the sexual gets short-circuited.
The elimination of the sexual and its images in contemporary psychoanalytic
thought seems to constitute a rejection of the visual dimension that characterizes the
unconscious and gives access to its formations; that is a rejection of the singular
dialect to which only regression gives access. In fact, an unfortunate confusion has
spread for the last fifty years: it is as if the emphasis on the “new patients” had radi-
calized the opposition between the ego and the object to the point of making this
opposition seem insurmountable, thus consecrating the idea that narcissism excludes
otherness, whereas, as we know, even auto-erotism does not. Because the psychopath-
ological descriptions of the patients presenting a borderline personality insist on the
weakness of these patients’ ego (with all that such a qualification implies with regard
to manifestations of “lack of anxiety tolerance,” “lack of impulse control,” “lack of
developed sublimatory channels,” “primary-process thinking”), because these descrip-
tions emphasize the poor quality, even the absence, of internalized object relationships,
because they stress the diffusion of their identity and the pregenital level of their func-
tioning,18 these psychopathological descriptions may have contributed to splitting
the field of identity even further from the field of sexuality, assimilating the latter to
sexual behavior and inscribing it in a strictly developmental perspective. As a conse-
quence of such a way of thinking, sexuality is deprived of the unconscious meaning
that is its very essence and that prohibits confusing it with genitality,19 unless the entire
meaning of the Freudian discovery be misconstrued. How are we to understand that
psychoanalysis has developed in such a manner that it virtually excludes from the cure
the idea that the drive is at the very basis of psychic conflict and thus of the analytic
process, that it clearly plays its role in the dynamics of desire? Should the acknowledg-
ment that the “new pathologies” and especially the narcissistic personality disorders
are based on more archaic mechanisms than those met in neurosis lead to the belief
that there are nonconflictual zones in the psyche where no drive energy circulates?
Let us return to the source of these theoretical trends. In Hartmann’s ego psy-
chology, one discovers that the unconscious and its transgressive nature are hardly
of interest. Rather, Freud’s “biologizing” tendency here becomes radicalized, so that
the scientific aspiration prevails over the “mytho-theoretical”—thus sexual—dimen-
sion that forms the essence of psychoanalysis. Here gender seems to proceed naturally
from the anatomical difference between the sexes,20 and the ego finally appears to be
 F Claire Nahon

endowed with a phallic attractiveness. Many of the concepts developed by Hartmann

appear to reject auto-erotic sexuality more and more blatantly, while the reference to
reality is exalted. For Hartmann, indeed, psychoanalysis is expected “to become a gen-
eral developmental psychology” and he holds it as “one of the basic sciences of sociol-
ogy.”21 It is noteworthy that an allegiance to Freud is continually reaffirmed, and yet
leads very subtly to the dismissal, to a kind of eradication of the sexual drives and their
vicissitudes, by way of the magnified reference to the primacy of the ego and its func-
tions. This almost orthopedic vision of psychoanalysis can then praise the “dominance
of the ego,” “ego strength,” “ego control.” In Hartmann’s conceptualization, the pre-
vailing role attributed to the ego is in fact ascribed to the very genesis of the ego,
conceived of as an autonomous agency clearly separated from the id instead of being
differentiated out of the id:

I should rather say that both the ego and the id have developed, as products of differ-
entiation, out of the matrix of animal instinct. From here, by way of differentiation,
not only man’s special “organ” of adaptation, the ego, has developed, but also the id;
and the estrangement with reality, so characteristic of the id of the human, is an out-
come of this differentiation, but by no means a direct continuation of what we know
about the instincts of lower animals.22

Thus from Freud to Hartmann the emphasis has shifted: the human being, far from
being considered as essentially dominated by the unconscious, the id, satisfying its
requirements, as Freud puts it,23 seems on the contrary ever more distant from the
force of the drives, and constantly involved in an effort of mastery over them. And the
exaltation of the ego, “a specific organ of learning and adaptation,”24 goes with a will
for desexualization, something Freud himself treats with more nuance. For Freud, as
we know, “the character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes
and . . . it contains the history of those object-choices” (“The Ego and the Id,” SE XIX,
). And in Lacan’s reading, as his thoughts on the mirror stage make clear, the ego
results from the libidinal cathexis of the image, being thus the product of identifi-
cations. Furthermore, the sublimation to which Hartmann refers consists, in Freud’s
metapsychology, of the abandonment of the sexual aim, but not of the drive pressure,
which remains the leading force of the process. Nevertheless, for ego psychology, sexu-
alization—as well as aggressivization—seems basically conceived as a disturbing force
that dooms neutralization to failure and threatens the autonomous factors of the ego.
We thus understand that regression, far from being considered a privileged access to
the unconscious with which the analyst works, represents, on the contrary, a remote-
ness from reality that implies the necessity of defensive recourse to secondary auton-
omy.25 However, it is in a more subtle manner that ego psychology consecrates the
evacuation of the drives from the psychoanalytic sphere, paving the way for the up-
coming hegemony of narcissism understood as utterly opposed to the object and to
otherness. And this is made possible by dividing the ego into the ego and the self, the
 Dream Model and Mirroring Anxiety f 

self being the one of these entities to be invested with libido.26 While stating that “the
ego’s capacity for neutralization is partly dependent on the degree of a more instinc-
tual cathexis being vested in the self,”27 Hartmann seems de facto to consecrate the
truly narcissistic isolation of the ego—in the sense “narcissism” is currently used—
which is then considered only from an intrasystemic point of view and is therefore
stripped of all that connected it to the drives and to the unconscious.
In other words, we have a phallic narcissistic ego that ultimately corresponds
to the ideal of scientificity so valued by ego psychology, which thus appears in search
of a psychoanalytic technique diametrically opposed to the very meaning of The Inter-
pretation of Dreams. Concern over this is developed by Pierre Fédida when, evoking
“the difficulties inherent in the countertransference of the analyst” and the sense of the
latter’s identity, he wonders, on the basis of the Dream of Irma’s Injection, “whether
the theory of the ‘borderline personality’ grew in the favorable soil of ego psychology
in order to constitute, simultaneously, its critical challenge and its doctrinal confir-
mation.”28 Borderline personalities would then be “fundamentally captives of the ide-
ological crisis of analytic practice and the crisis affecting the theory of the regression
of the ego.”29 Indeed the fragmentation of the ego in the dream reveals precisely what
borderline patients let us see. We thus notice that the psychopathological descriptions
of their being may actually refer to the idealized vision of a “normal” ego which would
be stable and unitary. “We might even dare to conjecture that nothing is closer to
the analyst’s dream than the borderline personality!” as soon as the analyst ceases to
believe in “the integrity of the therapeutic identity of [his] ego,” as Fédida proposes.30
The ego appears somehow phallicized by such a theorization, and this process gives
rise, furthermore, to a “modernist clinical consciousness concerned with empathy”
(Fédida), which refutes ego psychology’s practical implications with a laudable thera-
peutic solicitude, but scorns the drives even more than ego psychology itself. It is as
if this overvaluing of the ego made any imagination of the sexual impossible, while
unconsciously keeping its most superficial feature: the sexual polarity. If Kohut’s em-
phasis on the self indeed corresponds to a radicalization of the rejection of the drives
and intrapsychic conflict;31 if Oedipus is definitively opposed to Narcissus;32 if the self
consists of an asexual entity that emerges through empathic mirroring, in a symbiotic
bond with an identical other, a self-object or idealized imago allowing for self-esteem
to develop; and if the process of sexuation ultimately and magically occurs, shaped
outside of conflict and through empathy;33 then this rejection of unconscious sexuality
has as its corollary the emphasis on the maternal, a clinical and feminized positioning
that exalts the notions of holding and bearing, as well as the notion of receptivity to
the other. Echoing the phallic attractiveness of the ego, this clinical practice highlights
the maternal and feminine, namely self-psychology. In this way psychoanalysis meets
a paradoxical fate: a theorization concerned with excluding the sexual unwittingly
reintroduces it in a return of the repressed. Here it is as if the plasticity of infantile
sexuality, irreverent as it is about sexual difference, had been deflected from its first
 F Claire Nahon

meaning and then given way to a true sexuation of the theory itself! And this is pre-
cisely the imagination of the sexual—the psychic (animistic) ability to create images—
as elaborated in The Interpretation of Dreams, namely the visual capacity to split ad
infinitum and to do so where least expected. In other words, even though the imagi-
nation of the sexual does not explicitly appear in the theorizations aiming to refute it,
it nevertheless emerges in the hallucinatory attempt to reflect on these theorizations,
namely in the “dream of interpretation” this chapter is dealing with.
The ability “to picture”—das Zeichnen—is dear to President Schreber: for him it
means the ability to have voluntary recourse to the soul’s potentialities to imagine—
to shape images—so that they become visible to God’s gaze. At the foundation of this
ability, Schreber refers to the “Einbildungskraft”: The strength and power of creating
images,34 among which is the “picturing” of female attributes on his body.35 And
besides his own subjective sensations, we know that he expects irrefutable proof of his
metamorphosis into a woman through a mirroring reflection. According to Schreber,
his anatomical changes are such that everyone could henceforth confirm by looking
at him that he is indeed a woman, since his breasts have developed: “anybody who sees
me standing in front of a mirror with the upper part of my body naked would get the
undoubted impression of a female trunk—especially when the illusion is strengthened
by some feminine adornments.”36 Thus he appeals to an exterior gaze that would fit
the interiority of his own, like a shared hallucination or like an animistic temptation,
close to Nathaniel’s imaginary capture induced by the doll Olympia in Hoffmann’s
tale. This imaginary capture makes him go mad as soon as he confuses his inner world
and outer reality, as well as the woman in the flesh and the automaton with human
eyes: he is persecuted by an exacerbated visual sense, a vision that splits ad infinitum
(cf. “The Uncanny,” SE XVII). In fact, this gaze upon Schreber’s body, which plays on
the organ and subverts the real of sexual difference, also accounts for “the rapid
sequence of ideas in dreams” to which Freud refers, and which “is paralleled by the
flight of ideas in psychoses” (SE IV, ). Here we approach the mirroring anxiety—
Augenangst—that characterizes the fleeting impression of uncanniness that often occurs
when encountering transsexual patients. There is an unavoidable visual disturbance
affecting anyone who emancipates himself from taxonomies and breaks with accepted
discourse—the sacrosanct splitting between sexuality and identity!—in order to listen
to these patients and be touched by their words. Who would deny that anxiety can
emerge from the inability to attach the words expressing the patient’s pain to the body
that refutes them, from one’s fascination with a suspended, always fleeting identity,
from the palpable sensation, as in a dream vision, of the flickering of the ego evoked
by Lacan in his reading of Freud’s Dream of Irma’s Injection? Schreber’s body (an
object under God’s gaze) and the transsexual’s body (in the process of being trans-
formed, hallucinated, imagined, or just watched) alike demonstrate the vanity of theo-
ries that ignore the extraordinary capacity of the psyche to continue producing unique
forms—unconscious forms subverting the male/female polarity. Such forms induce,
 Dream Model and Mirroring Anxiety f 

ultimately, a mirroring anxiety very similar to what one experiences in an anxiety

dream and to the “informe” at work in dreams. “The possibility of creating composite
structures stands foremost among the characteristics which so often lend dreams a
fantastic appearance” (SE IV, ), as Freud indicates. This is the very basis of psy-
choanalytic practice. It is utterly contradicted in those peremptory statements deny-
ing transsexuals any capacity for working through, since their wish for a sex-change
opposes the traditional psychotherapeutic aim of curing the psychic by means of the
psychic—as if such a fantasy were not typical of the human psyche! This is the model
of the dream and the transference: the patient’s speech touches us and, through re-
gression, elicits unprecedented images in us. We are then compelled to imagine, for
instance, that the transsexual patient illustrates—even more than Schreber does— the
dream-work as soon as (s)he literalizes the dream image, casting the unconscious out
of the enclosed space of the psyche and instead embodying it deeply in his/her flesh.
Imagine, in a total subversion of conscious optics, that the flesh, in its animation,
would substitute itself for the psyche: the better to restore the latter’s plasticity. Such
imagining is a way of not closing oneself to the transsexual’s request, which, far from
being only or merely a matter of identity, as it is so often read, expresses the vicis-
situdes of unconscious sexuality. Working with transsexual patients can inure one to
their “uncanniness.” Rather than suggesting that one has become more receptive to the
other, more tolerant, this loss of the capacity to regress and imagine is perhaps a detri-
mental loss of the interlocutor’s own Einbildungskraft. It may well signify the rejection
of what fundamentally constitutes these patients and their extraordinary capacity to
capture the gaze. In this sense this rejection could amount to the defensive preserva-
tion of the interlocutor’s shaken sense of his/her own cohesion.
In short, gazing at Schreber’s body, as well as at the transsexual’s, would compel
us to further examine the emancipatory and transgressive potentialities of uncon-
scious sexuality—trans-sexuality as such—as well as to seriously consider the danger
threatening psychoanalysis when it praises (masculine, feminine and even ego-based)
imagos so as better to repress its very foundation, namely the dream.

Notes
A first and shorter version of this chapter was presented in  at “The Dreams of Interpreta-
tion/The Interpretation of Dreams” conference held in Minneapolis. The essay was revised and
expanded in  for the present volume. It is based on my prior experience as an in-hospital
clinical psychologist working with transsexual patients who wished to have sex-reassignment
surgery. For further and more recent developments on my understanding of trans-sexuality, see
my article “La trans-sexualité ou l’en-dehors des formes (défiguration, déformation, déchire-
ment)” in Claire Nahon, ed., Cliniques méditerranéennes nº: “La trans-sexualité: défiguration,
déformation, déchirement,” Érès, Autumn .
I also wish to thank John Brenkman for his help with the translation.
 F Claire Nahon

1. Freud clearly reproduces the plastic characteristics of the dream images in his pres-
entation. Beginning with the “technique of dream-interpretation,” he explains his choice as fol-
lows: “[I]t will present a more concrete appearance [es wird plastischer ausfallen] and make a
more vivid impression on you.” And his description of the characteristics of the manifest dream
draws its very fluidity: “It may be coherent, smoothly constructed like a literary composition,
or it may be confused to the point of unintelligibility, almost like a delirium; it may contain
absurd elements or jokes and apparently witty conclusions; it may seem to the dreamer clear
and sharp or obscure and hazy; its pictures may exhibit the complete sensory strength of per-
ceptions or may be shadowy like an indistinct mist; the most diverse characteristics may be
present in the same dream, distributed over various portions of it; the dream, finally, may show
an indifferent emotional tone or be accompanied by feelings of the strongest joy or distress” (SE
XXII, ; GW XV, –).
2. See Freud, Correspondance - (letter to Martha Bernays, November , ),
trans. A. Berman, J.-P. Grossein (Paris: Gallimard, ).
3. G. Didi-Huberman, Invention de l’hystérie—Charcot et l’iconographie photographique
de la Salpêtrière (Paris: Macula, ), .
4. “Nous sommes, en d’autres termes, en possession d’une sorte de musée pathologique
vivant, dont les ressources sont considérables.” J.-M. Charcot, “Leçons sur les maladies du sys-
tème nerveux,” Œuvres complètes III, –, quoted in “Appendice : Le ‘musée pathologique
vivant,’” in Didi-Huberman, Invention de l’hystérie, .
5. “But the causal relation between the determining psychical trauma and the hysterical
phenomenon is not of a kind implying that the trauma merely acts like an agent provocateur in
releasing the symptom, which thereafter leads an independent existence. We must presume
rather that the psychical trauma – or more precisely the memory of the trauma—acts like a for-
eign body which long after its entry must continue to be regarded as an agent that is still at
work” (Studies on Hysteria, SE II, ). Also, see the analysis proposed by Monique Schneider in
her “L’admission du ‘corps étranger’ dans l’espace interne,” in Monographies de psychopatholo-
gie, “Les addictions” (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, ), –.
6. SE II , , and , my emphasis.
7. Here is what Freud writes about Elisabeth’s “knowledge” of her suffering: “From the
beginning it seemed to me probable that Fräulein Elisabeth was conscious of the basis of her ill-
ness, that what she had in her consciousness was only a secret and not a foreign body” (SE II,
–, my emphasis). Such a remark clearly indicates that “foreign body” is actually related to
what does not belong as such to the field of consciousness, that it refers in fact to the source of
psychic conflict.
8. See The Seminar of Jacques Lacan II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique
of Psychoanalysis, ed. J. A. Miller, trans. S. Tomaselli, with notes by J. Forrester (–; Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, ).
9. Ibid., .
10. “The phenomenology of the dream of Irma’s injection led us to distinguish two parts.
The first leads to the apparition of the terrifying anxiety-provoking image, to this real Medusa’s
head, to the revelation of this something which properly speaking is unnameable, the back of
this throat, the complex, unlocatable form, which also makes it into the primitive object par
excellence, the abyss of the feminine organ from which all life emerges, this gulf of the mouth,
in which everything is swallowed up, and no less the image of death in which everything comes
to its end” (ibid., –).
 Dream Model and Mirroring Anxiety f 

11. Ibid., .

12. Ibid., .
13. “You see, the object of desire is the cause of the desire, and this object that is the cause
of desire is the object of the drive—that is to say, the object around which the drive turns.”
J. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. J. A. Miller, trans. A. Sheridan
(New York: Norton, ), .
14. For this whole development, see J. Laplanche, Vie et mort en psychanalyse (;
Paris: Flammarion, ).
15. Here is what Freud writes: “At a time at which the first beginnings of sexual satisfac-
tion are still linked with the taking of nourishment, the sexual instinct has a sexual object out-
side the infant’s own body in the shape of his mother’s breast. It is only later that the instinct
loses that object, just at the time, perhaps, when the child is able to form a total idea of the per-
son to whom the organ that is giving him satisfaction belongs. As a rule the sexual instinct then
becomes auto-erotic, and not until the period of latency has been passed through is the origi-
nal relation restored” (SE VII, ).
16. See J. Lacan, “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power,” in
Ecrits: A Selection, trans. A. Sheridan (London: Tavistock Publications, ).
17. “The model [Vorbild] of the formation of symptom [Symptombildung] remains, in
a certain sense, the dream image [Traumbild] that at once designates images as the behavior
of the dream content, the image as the hallucinatory formation, and also the dream as theory
of the image,” in Pierre Fédida, “The Movement of the Informe,” trans. M. Stone-Richards and
M. Tiampo, Qui Parle , no.  (): . See also P. Fédida and P. Lacoste, “Psychopatholo-
gie/métapsychologie: La fonction des points de vue,” Revue Internationale de Psychopathologie
 (): –.
18. See, for instance, O. Kernberg, Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism
(; New York: Jason Aronson, ).
19. For example, Kernberg writes: “There was a time when a typical misunderstanding of
the implications of psychoanalytic theory and practice was the assumption that sexual activity
in itself was a therapeutic factor. We have advanced a long way from such misunderstandings,
and have learned that often what appears on the surface to be genital activity is actually in the
service of aggressive, pregenital aims. With patients presenting borderline personality organi-
zation the opposite danger of seeing only their pregenital, destructive aims, to the neglect of
acknowledging their efforts to overcome their inhibited sexual orientation, appears to be a
frequent clinical problem” (ibid., ). We can notice here the alleged equivalence between sex-
uality and genitality.
20. About the relationship between the psychological and the biological, Hartmann
writes: “In our opinion the psychological is not an ‘antithesis’ to the biological, but rather an
essential part of it.” In this sense, he further remarks: “Precisely because the psychological is
a part of the biological, under certain conditions our method sheds light on physiological
developments, particularly on those pertaining to instinctual drives. We can trace the course of
these developments, using psychological phenomena as their indicator or symptom. This rela-
tionship has still another aspect: for instance, though we can describe the differences between
masculine and feminine to some extent psychologically, it does not follow that there must be fun-
damental psychological concepts which correspond to masculinity and femininity.” In H. Hart-
mann, Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation (), trans. D. Rapaport (; New
York: International Universities Press, ), – (my emphasis).
 F Claire Nahon

21. Ibid., , .

22. H. Hartmann, “Comments on the Psychoanalytic Theory of the Ego,” The Psychoan-
alytic Study of the Child V ():  (my emphasis). In a preceding passage, Hartmann writes:
“Some aspects of early ego development appear in a different light if we familiarize ourselves
with the thought that the ego may be more—and very likely is more—than a developmental by-
product of the influence of reality on instinctual drives; that it has a partly independent origin—
apart from these formative influences which, of course, no analyst would want to underestimate;
and that we may speak of an autonomous factor in ego development. . . in the same way as we
consider the instinctual drives autonomous agents of development. Of course, this is not to say
that the ego as a definite psychic system is inborn. . . . This statement also implies that not all
the factors of mental development present at birth can be considered part of the id—which is, by
the way, included in what I have said elsewhere in introducing the concept of an undifferenti-
ated phase” (ibid., –, my emphasis).
23. Freud uses an evocative comparison to emphasize to what extent the control of the
ego over motility and action and its submission toward reality may also appear as a compromise
actually satisfying the requirements of the id: “Thus in its relation to the id it is like a man on
horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse; with this difference, that
the rider tries to do so with his own strength while the ego uses borrowed forces. The analogy
may be carried a little further. Often a rider, if he is not to be parted from his horse, is obliged
to guide it where it wants to go; so in the same way the ego is in the habit of transforming the
id’s will into action as if it were its own” (“The Ego and the Id,” SE XIX, ).
24. H. Hartmann, “The Mutual Influences in the Development of Ego and Id,” The Psy-
choanalytic Study of the Child VII (): .
25. Secondary autonomy is defined as “this resistivity of ego functions against regression”
(ibid., ).
26. “It therefore will be clarifying if we define narcissism as the libidinal cathexis not of
the ego but of the self ” (Hartmann, “Comments,” ).
27. Ibid., .
28. P. Fédida, “A Borderline State of Humanity and the Fragmented Ego of the Analyst,”
in The Subject and the Self: Lacan and American Psychoanalysis, ed. J. Feher-Gurewich and
M. Tort, in collaboration with S. Fairfield (Northvale: Jason Aronson, ), .
29. Ibid., .
30. Ibid., , .
31. “For our present purposes I will concentrate on a single issue: the drive concept in
psychoanalysis and its consequences. And I will immediately emphasize once again that it is
not the presence of the drive concept per se, not the isolated inconsistency of the intrusion of a
vague and insipid biological concept into a marvelous system of psychology that would have
spurred me toward scientific action—and the same can be said with regard to my attitude
vis-à-vis the concepts of ‘dependence,’ ‘autonomy,’ ‘identity,’ and ‘adaptation’ imported from
social psychology. It was not theoretical inconsistency that prompted my reflections but
only my conviction that the drive concept (as well as the aforementioned sociological intruders
into depth psychology) has had significant deleterious consequences for psychoanalysis.” In
H. Kohut, “Introspection, Empathy, and the Semi-Circle of Mental Health,” The International
Journal of Psycho-Analysis  ():  (my emphasis). Beyond the clearly expressed rejec-
tion of the drive, we notice Kohut’s scorn toward the aim for objectivity underlying ego psy-
chology’s concepts.
 Dream Model and Mirroring Anxiety f 

Also, “Under normal circumstances we do not encounter drives via introspection and
empathy. We always experience the not-further-reducible psychological unit of a loving self, a
lusting self, an assertive self, a hostile-destructive self. When drives achieve experiential primacy,
we are dealing with disintegration products: in the realm of Eros, the fragmenting self watching
helplessly as it is being replaced by a feverishly intensified pleasure experience, by the ascen-
dancy of a pleasure–giving erotogenic zone, and thus of the drive over the self; or, in the realm
of Thanatos, the fragmenting self watching helplessly as it is being replaced by a feverishly
intensified rage experience, by the ascendancy of a detructive and/or self-destructive orgy, and
thus, again, of the drive over the self ” (Kohut, “Introspection,” , my emphasis).
32. See the opposition Kohut makes between the “guilty man” of “traditional” psycho-
analysis and the “tragic man” of self psychology. “[I]ntergenerational strife, mutual killing
wishes, pathological ‘Oedipus complex’ (as distinguished from the normal ‘Oedipal stage’ of
development) refers not to the essence of man but . . . they are deviations from the normal,
however frequently they may occur” (ibid., ).
33. Kohut writes, for example: “[I]f there is empathic mirroring acceptance of the little
girl’s self, if she can merge with the idealized admired parental imago, then the recognition of
the sexual difference will cause no permanent harm, will not lead to a lasting disturbance of nar-
cissistic equilibrium.” In H. Kohut, “A Note on Female Sexuality” (), in The Search for the
Self: Selected Writings of Heinz Kohut  New York: International Universities Press, ), .
34. See D. P. Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, trans. and ed. by I. Macalpine
and R. A. Hunter (London: Dawson, ), especially – and –. Here we can notice
the distinction Schreber makes between his “mind’s eye” and his “bodily eye”; see for instance
n.
35. “I can also ‘picture’ myself in a different place, for instance while playing the piano I
see myself at the same time standing in front of a mirror in the adjoining room in female attire;
when I am lying in bed at night I can give myself and the rays the impression that my body has
female breasts and a female sexual organ. . . . The picturing of female buttocks on my body—
honni soit qui mal y pense—has become such a habit that I do it almost automatically whenever
I bend down. ‘Picturing’ in this sense may therefore be called a reversed miracle. In the same
way as rays throw on to my nerves pictures they would like to see especially in dreams, I too can
in turn produce pictures for the rays which I want them to see” (ibid., , my emphasis).
36. Ibid., .
This page intentionally left blank
R
Focuses on
the Apparatus
R
This page intentionally left blank
R . Closing and
Opening of the Dream
Must Chapter VII Be Rewritten?
Jean Laplanche

Translated by Mira Reinberg and Thomas Pepper R

I
t is from the point of view of communication that we wish to reexamine the
theory of the dream. But this word takes on two different meanings: commu-
nication of the dream (notably its account in treatment) and communication in
the dream, whether or not there exists a communication in the dream itself. As
to “communication of the dream,” a purely idealist, intersubjective, linguistic concep-
tion of the cure would consider this problem outmoded. Such a view would consider
it nonsense to wish to analyze the dream, since there is never anything but the account
of the dream, which is merely an account like any other, situated solely in the trans-
ference and the hic et nunc of the cure.
All Freud’s thought and technique comes to oppose such a theory. For him
the dream is a formation of the unconscious to be analyzed as such, independent of
its own interference with its enunciation in treatment. The dreamed dream is a real-
ity, and the account we give of it is but the façade (Fassade). Surely we side with this
Freudian realism. But Freud pushes his “objectivism” much further, whence our second
question arises: “Is there communication in the dreamed dream?” Certain formula-
tions are radical: no communication as such would be at the origin of the dream. And
the dream itself would not bear any communicative intention: “The dream doesn’t
mean anything to anyone; it is not a vehicle of communication.”
These two assertions are hard to accept. To discuss them, it is advisable to enter
into the Freudian theory of the dream with its three aspects: wish fulfillment, hallu-
cination, and function of the dream. It is this critique we shall try to sketch. We shall
ask if a conception of the unconscious—one that places at its origin the communica-
tion of enigmatic messages of the other and their partial repression by the subject—


 F Jean Laplanche

would allow us to pose the dilemma in a new way, as that between a narcissistic clos-
ing of the dream on the one side versus a potential opening of the dream to commu-
nication on the other.
For this Freud himself gives us a path in suggesting the rolling (back) up of the
diagram of the psychic apparatus. It is in following this indication that we might arrive
at a new chapter VII, not symmetrical to the first version, but nonetheless opening it
up to the discussion of the primacy of the other.
Thus the theme with which I would like to begin is that of the relation between
the dream and communication. This problem is broader than that of the relation of
the dream and language (langage), a relation to which, notably after Lacan, it would
tend to be reduced. There are communications without language (in the verbal sense
of the word); and, inversely, there are elements of language that have lost all relation
with a communication.
But the question—renewed as it is by the discovery of psychoanalysis and by
the role the dream plays in our practice—is, in fact, much older than Freud. One
can even say that in the case of the human being, interrogation concerning this mat-
ter is coextensive with the enigma posed to such a being by the dream, this fragment
of our life that is so astonishing: something that always has appeared as speaking (par-
lant), and, at the same time, as radically eluding our will to communicate—even our
will, period.
For more clarity, I would like to divide the question in two. On the one hand
there is the communication of (du) the dream, notably in treatment; on the other
hand there is the dream as communication. Or, put more generally and concern-
ing the latter, there is the question of the relation of the phenomenon of the dream
to interhuman communication in general. These two problems are intertwined,
but distinct.

The Problem of the Communication of the Dream

Obviously this problem is to be discussed in relation to the communication analysis
itself is. In effect, our practice has widened what one might call the quantum of ver-
balization of the dreamed dream; and, above all, it has radically widened the manner
of “handling” (traiter) this material.
Today, one hundred years after the Traumdeutung, numerous evolutions have
taken place—voluntary changes, ones justifiable in theory, but also surreptitious
changes in our practice—and we may distinguish two main attitudes among analysts
that we might oppose in a somewhat caricatural manner: the purely subjectivist or
intersubjective attitude, and the objectivist attitude. I say “caricatural,” since in fact we
encounter many more nuanced positions.
 Closing and Opening of the Dream f 

The Intersubjective Attitude

Here everything is taken as what happens in the analytic dialogue itself, in its hic et
nunc. To introduce this attitude, I would like to relate a memory of my own that is, in
fact, rather banal. I had been invited to a certain colloquium or conference as a respon-
dent to the presentation of an analyst in training. In his well-prepared presentation,
he asked the question, precisely, of how to interpret the dream today. Unfortunately,
the answer had come before the question. Scarcely had the young analyst begun the
account of his patient’s dream when my fellow discussants, his elders, began to inter-
rupt him to teach him a thing or two. The young analyst had not understood what the
patient had said in telling him this dream. Transference—indeed countertransfer-
ence—was evident. In short, the problem of the interpretation of the dream had van-
ished at the expense of what is pompously called the intersubjective dynamic.
This is a common attitude: we stick to the manifest content. More precisely:
the manifest content is taken up exclusively in terms of its enunciative value (valeur
d’énonciation), and not in terms of the question: What does the dream mean? And not
even: Why has this analysand dreamed this at this moment of the analysis? But rather:
What is he telling me in recounting this dream?
These on-the-spot interpretations—we all know them in the analytic session.
Most often, they rely on symbolism of a very general nature. The manifest content
is not considered to be dissimulating something fundamentally heterogeneous to
it. It is taken as a whole other discourse, even if it does mean applying certain sim-
ple modifications: transformation of an element into its opposite, denegation, word-
play, puns.
One cannot exaggerate the extent to which the Lacanian path of listening to sig-
nifiers, when followed in an exclusive fashion, has been detrimental. Because here—
and this is to push things to the limit for the sake of clarity—the listening is never
“authorized,” save by the listener himself. It is the listener, and he alone, who decides
that the expression “take it upon oneself” entails an allusion to a sexual relation. It is the
listener, and he alone, who chooses to hear “oh it’s so (que c’est) difficult to say” as “oh
a dick is so difficult to say” (ah queue c’est difficile à dire).1 We cannot endlessly invoke
Freud’s example without precautions, nor his frequent recourse to more or less “good”
jokes in order to support his interpretations. For Freud’s interpretations—and we shall
return to them—are far from claiming the sovereignty so often declared by our master
interpreters. According to this mode of thinking, if we push this so-called sovereignty
to its foundations, the only recourse left is to maintain that it is solely the unconscious
that is hidden within common language, independent of the way in which the individ-
ual believes himself to make use of it, while—as it would be maintained from this posi-
tion—in fact he does nothing but serve it. Hence, a collective unconscious.2
Let us sum up: Within a certain conception of the analytic dialogue, dream
analysis appears to have been definitively superseded. According to this conception,
 F Jean Laplanche

Freud believed—wrongly—that he was speaking of the dream, while in fact he was

only speaking “of the verbal fashion by which the dreamer renders his dream.”3 The
analysis of the dream would allow the bringing to the fore of certain mechanisms,
which would in turn make us aware of their being universal or proper to language:
“Listening to the dream as a discourse has enabled analysts to listen to discourse as
dream, that is to say as obeying the same grammar as that of unconscious discourse.”4
I just mentioned Lacan. But this deserves some nuancing: nowhere, it seems to
me, did Lacan advocate either this sort of reintegration of the dream into discourse in
general, or the neglect of the rules proper to dream interpretation. And furthermore,
this scorn for the famous “royal road” is a phenomenon that, in the analytic world, is
in no way restricted to the Lacanian sphere. It seems to me to go hand in hand with
the decline of the reference to the individual unconscious in the practice and theory
of the cure.
This is not to say that Lacan is a stranger to this drift, particularly by virtue of his
pure and simple assimilation of the mechanisms of the dream-work—displacement
and condensation—to universal modes of functioning of language, that is, metonymy
and metaphor. Although a thousand times criticized, arguments at the ready, this
assimilation has nevertheless reinforced the rumor according to which the dream is a
discourse like any other. 5
To this factor is added yet another: the assimilation of the analytic rule—free
association on the part of the analysand, and equally hovering attention on the part of
the analyst—to a sort of bracketing of reality in the sense of a “phenomenological
reduction,” to a suspension of all referential dimensions of discourse, with which one
should henceforth no longer be concerned. Henceforth it would be completely im-
material to know whether the discourse of the analysand refers to a dream, to a fancy
( fantaisie), to an everyday event, to the words of a third person, and so forth.
Winnicott says somewhere that in the presence of the patient, the analyst must
reasonably not pretend not to know that King George did die on that day. Now, pre-
cisely for those whom Winnicott implicitly criticizes here, the statement (énoncé)
“King George is dead” would only be part of the enunciation of the analysand, and for
the analyst, this psychic asceticism would be such that this enunciation alone should
occupy his own psychic field.
If analysis is suspension of reality, it is certain that the “dream-referent” loses
all privilege. We should, however, think of this little experience, which is not rare, and
which I will call the distraction of the first minute: during the first seconds of a session,
the analyst’s thought process, having been distracted by some external or internal cir-
cumstance, is sometimes belated in its relation to the patient’s discourse. Here then is
the analyst who emerges into attention, and hears these words: “ . . . so the car lightly
struck the cyclist,” etc. I challenge any of our colleagues to claim not at least to have
asked himself: Is this a dream he is telling me, or is it an incident that actually
occurred? And I challenge him to admit to not having attempted, within himself, to
 Closing and Opening of the Dream f 

pick up on the clues that would allow him to catch up with the moving train, so to
speak, of the discourse.
Let us tighten things up. With the subjectivist point of view, which suspends all
reference to anything exterior to the discourse within the session—even reference to
the unconscious and to this privileged phenomenon that is the dream—close to three
quarters of Freud’s work becomes void: not only the interpretation of the dream, but
the works on the psychopathology of everyday life, jokes, humor, and so forth. And his
works on so-called applied psychoanalysis as well, if it is true, as Viderman sometimes
states, that the suspension of reference must, here once again, be the rule: “[L]ittle
does it matter what Leonardo saw . . . little does it matter what Leonardo said . . . what
matters is that the analyst . . . makes it exist in saying it.”6

The Objectivist Attitude

Freud’s point of view concerning the dream will remain objectivist throughout his
lifetime. It is “objectivist” in that it supposes that the “dreamed dream” exists; that
the memory of it is something else; and the account (récit) of it is something else
yet again. It is not without interest that we read a passage such as the one from chap-
ter VII about the forgetting of the dream, and of the further acts of censorship (cen-
sures) the account itself may introduce. To demonstrate this, Freud does not hesitate
to make the dreamer repeat the dream a second time, in order to note the differences
between the two accounts:

But the parts of the dream which he describes in different terms are by that fact
revealed to me as the weak spot in the dream’s disguise. . . . That is the point at which
the interpretation of the dream can be started. My request to the dreamer to repeat
his account of the dream has warned him that I was proposing to take special pains
in solving it; under pressure of the resistance, therefore, he hastily covers the weak
spots in the dream’s disguise by replacing any expressions that threaten to betray its
meaning by other less revealing ones. In this way he draws my attention to the expres-
sion which he has dropped out. (GW II–III, –; SE V, )

Here we see Freud’s realist attitude. The dream exists outside its account (récit), out-
side of what analysis will make of it. And for him, the best proof is that the psychic
phenomenon of the dream globally goes beyond the mere use the analysis has made of
it as “the royal road toward the unconscious.” As late as  Freud is still steadfastly
disputing the objection according to which the analysand’s dreams might be entirely
shaped by the analytic situation and by the suggestion of the analyst. His conclusion
merits citation:

[The patient] recollected some dreams which he had had before starting analysis
and indeed before he had known anything about it; and the analysis of these dreams,
which were free from all suspicion of suggestion, led to the same interpretations as
the later ones. (SE XIX, )
 F Jean Laplanche

And Freud concludes:

I think that in general it is a good plan occasionally to bear in mind the fact that peo-
ple were in the habit of dreaming before there was such a thing as psycho-analysis.
(GW XIII, ; SE XIX, )

To admit that there exists a dream-object, revelatory independent of its inclusion in

the transference, is to admit the possibility of a different attitude regarding it—as there
is regarding any discourse in the cure—an attitude that could be called, following Guy
Rosolato, “technological,” with the following caveat: the term “technique” is not pejo-
rative, it should be associated with that of suppleness, and it implies only that the
activity of listening (écoute) and the intervention are adapted to their particular object.
Despite its prosaic sense, the word “technique” refers to the major discovery of Freud,
namely when he defined analysis foremost as a procedure that allows knowledge of
processes that would otherwise remain pretty much inaccessible.
I shall refer here, very quickly, not only to Freud’s time, but to a contemporary
psychoanalyst, Danielle Margueritat, whose approach seems to me to be marked here
by a genuine fidelity to the Freudian line. 7 But first let us cite Ferenczi, who, concern-
ing the activity of listening to dreams, advocates an entirely different kind of listen-
ing from that of “hovering attention.” In listening to dreams, he says, “we must strive
to note the text of dreams in the smallest detail. I often make the analysand repeat
complicated dreams a second time, even a third if necessary.”8
Let us now cite Danielle Margueritat: “What happens to me when someone
tells me a dream? First something happens to me, since I tend to isolate dreams, not
from the context of the analysis, but from the whole of the discourse of the session.”
And the same theme returns as a leitmotiv, that of the dream-event, that is to say what
in the end Freud calls “the other scene”: “Then, when I am told a dream, the alarm
goes off, my attention is mobilized” (attention and vigilance, not at all a pure and sim-
ple letting it flow [abandon]). “Thus a dream happens, and I am prey to a troubling
of the rhythm of time. . . .”
“Then a dream comes forth, with its associations. . . .” “With its associations”:
I insist on this and it is a second essential aspect. The dream is not assimilable to
its associations. And this to the point that Freud (still in ) enumerates differ-
ent possible rules, different ways (ordres) of approaching and obtaining associations.
And once again, we have this astonishing sequence in Danielle Margueritat, con-
cerning a dream where it is a matter of contact lenses (lentilles de contact):

I no longer knew if we were in the account of the dream or in the associations, and
when I asked her the question, she answered: “it was in the dream, but in the dream
it was contact lenses [lentilles, literally lenses or lentils], and I didn’t feel like saying
that word.”9
 Closing and Opening of the Dream f 

Here yet again is a strictly Freudian approach, one that considers the difference in
formulation between the dreamed dream (lenses, lentils) and its account (contact
glasses)—itself already more censored than the dream—as revelatory. Let me be clear:
analysis since Freud, and even more so after him, cannot do without the dimension
of enunciation, or, to use other terms, address or transference. But inversely it cannot
use this pretext in order to completely dissolve the dream into its “address,” into its
account (récit), that is precisely into what Freud considers as even more misleading or
more disguised than the dream “itself.”
I’m afraid we cannot go much further concerning this matter of the “commu-
nication of the dream” than to stick with the dilemma that exists between Freudian
realism, on the one hand, which admits the existence of material or psychic realities
to which all discourse refers—including in analysis—and on the other hand a kind of
idealism of discourse, first of discourse in analysis, and then of all discourse in general.
This last is an attitude that renews a sophistical position while radicalizing it. Accord-
ing to this tendency, the dream is only the discourse on the dream, in the same way
that love, or paternity, etc., are only the words “love,” “paternity.”

Communication and the Dreamed Dream

Having rallied myself unambiguously to the Freudian position on this point, I feel even
more at ease to freely take on the question of “communication in the dream,” which I
formulate thus: The dream itself, the dreamed dream, does it have something to do
with interhuman communication?
Here we bump up against two unambiguous propositions of Freud, both of
which are shocking and revelatory in their abrupt formulation. From the “efferent”
side, that is, at the exit of the process: “A dream does not want to say anything to
anyone. It is not a vehicle for communication; on the contrary, it is meant to remain
ununderstood” (GW XI, ; SE XV, ). And, from the “afferent” side: “The words
of the analyst . . . act in a way analogous to that of somatic stimuli that exert their
action on the dreamer while sleeping” (GW XI, ; SE XV, ). Taken absolutely, this
last statement signifies that the dream does not take any message into account—or,
which amounts to the same—that it treats all message as purely material stimulus.
The term message, Botschaft (embassy, embassage), is relatively rare in Freud,
and it is all the more instructive to note the passages where it occurs, which are mainly
about telepathy. Let me briefly summarize what this is about. During the s, Freud,
influenced particularly by Ferenczi, was interested in so-called “occult” phenomena,
and these in two forms: prediction of the future and transmission of thought. These
are two phenomena that could be translated notably and eminently into premonitory
dreams on the one hand and telepathic dreams on the other. Freud’s position on this
subject will hardly change.10 Theoretically speaking, premonition is inadmissible simply
 F Jean Laplanche

because it would invert the arrow of time, and has never been demonstrated by exper-
iment (expérience). On the other hand, mostly based on personal experience (expéri-
ences), Freud formally admits the possibility of transmission, or “transference,” of
thoughts, or of memories of strongly affective tonality.
But what interests us here is not to take a stand concerning telepathy itself. It is
rather the relation between this telepathic message and the dream in which we even-
tually pick it up again. Would this not be a case where the dream would be the receiver
of a certain speech, and this in whatever manner it might reach us? Freud is going
to be radical here. The theory of the dream need not change one iota to take account
of this possibility. In fact, in the same way as any other message, the telepathic mes-
sage does not reach the dream as speech; rather it is treated just like any other mate-
rial stimulus:

A telepathic message will be treated as a portion of the material that goes to the
formation of the dream, like any other external or internal stimulus, like a disturb-
ing noise in the street, or an insistent organic sensation in the sleeper’s own body.
(GW XIII, ; SE XVIII, )

This assimilation of the message to a noise is evidently what we shall have to contest.
And to do so, it is indispensable to enter to some extent into the psychic machinery,
“the apparatus of the soul,” as Freud calls it, as it is described in chapter VII of the
Traumdeutung.
Here, then, is the apparatus Freud describes and makes evolve under our eyes:

Pc M

First point: This is not a somatic apparatus. The body, one could say, is represented
by or consists of the two arrows, the afferent and the efferent. Second point: Neither
is it a neurological apparatus. The systems are virtual, psychic. They are perhaps pro-
duced by (the material treated by) neurology, but without any direct correspondence
with it.
 Closing and Opening of the Dream f 

Let us then grant that this is the “psychic apparatus.” And yet another nuance:
This is a one-dimensional section (coupe) of a three-dimensional apparatus, which is
a kind of a parallelepiped bucket containing photographic plates, the memory systems.

Pc M

For our purposes, let us stop at the two ends: perception (the afferent arrow),
and motility (the efferent arrow). There is no communication or message either at
the entry or at the exit. At the entry and at the exit, there are nothing but material
actions. Thus this is a purely behaviorist apparatus, the model for which, says Freud,
is the reflex (arc): “Reflex processes remain the model of every psychical function”
(GW II–III, ; SE V, ).
Now I shall proceed immediately to the state of sleep, in which afferent forces
and efferent forces are—almost—completely cut out.

Pc M

But it is precisely here that a differentiation would be instructive: one that should be
made between, on the one hand, that which is of the order of perception without sig-
nification, and, on the other hand, that which is of the order of the message. It is thus
that Bourguignon gives instances of numerous experiments that show that stimuli that
have meaning (significatifs)—words, for example—are much better perceived by the
sleeper than material stimuli, regardless of whether they awaken him, or whether they
are eventually integrated into the dream thoughts.11
These remarks leave us in perplexity as to the Freudian diagram. If the human
psychic apparatus cannot be lodged between two poles, that of stimulus and that of
reaction, as Freud would wish, but rather between a pole of received messages and a
 F Jean Laplanche

pole of emitted messages, then it would perhaps be wisest to leave the diagram on
hold, even if only to take it up again on the basis of other data.
The Traumdeutung is an immense work. Most of chapters II through VI are con-
secrated to two trajectories, which are considered as reciprocal, even if they are not
identical. On the one hand there is the interpretative trajectory, which goes back from
the account of the dream to its original elements; and, inversely, there is the trajectory
of the dream-work, which is presumed accurately (rééllement) to account for the gen-
esis of the dreamed dream and the told dream. As for chapter VII, it develops two or
even three major theses, which are, moreover, bound together: () that the dream is
the fulfillment of the wish; () that the dream is hallucinatory (which remains to be
explained); and () that the dream is the guardian of sleep.
Concerning the second thesis—hallucination—Freud will remain dissatisfied up
until the end, proposing varying explanations for this recrudescence of dissatisfaction.
In contrast, the thesis of “wish-fulfillment” (accomplissement de souhait) is funda-
mental. In its very statement (énoncé) it gives food for thought: not that the dream
expresses a wish, nor even that it presents a wish as fulfilled, but that the dream is the
fulfillment of wishing, and this with no distance whatsoever between the wish and its
fulfillment. Moreover, Freud says that the dream is expressed in the present, and not
in the optative. (We shall pass over the apparent inexactitude in opposing a tense—the
present—and a mood—the optative. In fact, the dream is expressed in the present
indicative.)
In the last instance, Freud always refers this wish to an archaic one; and, despite
certain denegations, to a sexual one, which is always, according to the well-known
metaphor, the “capitalist” of the dream. Now the basis of this whole demonstration
refers to a theory, to a model of the origin of infantile wish—or desire—namely, “the
experience of satisfaction.” This “Befriedigungserlebnis” (experience of satisfaction)
here is itself taken up from the Project for a Scientific Psychology, and we must linger
upon it for a moment.
The infant is subjected to an internal tension, that of need. Here the need in ques-
tion is explicitly that of hunger, which evidently goes back to the experience of nurs-
ing. The alimentary need for food is conceived, very plausibly, as a continuous increase
of tension from which the organism cannot escape. Despite the triviality of the exam-
ple, let us imagine a kettle on the stove. The water boils, the lid rattles. There are two
possible scenarios here: if no one intervenes, and the caloric energy continues to be
discharged in a disorderly way, then “the starving infant will cry or squirm.” But this
series of actions is not capable of stopping the stimulus. Otherwise what can happen is
what Freud calls specific action: “fremde Hilfeleistung,” “outside help”—a curious word
to designate the mother,12 who, alerted by the crying, will bring food, thus stopping the
excitation for an extended moment (GW II–III, ; SE V, –).
This is how Freud explains the birth of the wish: A psychic connection gets
created, henceforth associating the memory of hunger’s excitation with that of food.
 Closing and Opening of the Dream f 

At the moment of the reappearance of the state of tension, hunger will cause the image
of food to be reborn; and, if real food does not arrive, its image will be invested with
such force that it will acquire a hallucinatory intensity.

An impulse of this kind is what we call a wish; the reappearance of the perception is
the fulfillment of the wish; and the shortest path to the fulfillment of the wish is a path
leading direct from the excitation produced by the need to a complete cathexis of the
perception. . . . [T]hus the wishing ended in hallucinating. (GW II–III, ; SE V, ,
translation modified)

This is a well-known model, even a hackneyed one. In it we might even try to see
the very birth of infantile sexuality. But to do so we should have to go beyond two
major insufficiencies. On the one hand, communication is hardly mentioned here; nor,
a fortiori, is dialogue between mother and child. The child’s message is reduced to
purely mechanical movements. As for the mother’s message, we read in Freud only a
purely material supply of food. What is most important here is that the action unfolds
on the level of a single need, namely the alimentary. The supplied object is food, milk.
And we don’t see how the mnemic trace of the perception could be anything other
than an alimentary image.
This experience of so-called satisfaction is surely a very fecund model, one that
might be developed in the direction of the emergence of the sexual on the basis of a
self-preserving relation. Even then we must give up believing in the illusion Freud pro-
poses to us. From the hat of hunger, from an instinct for self-preservation, Freud
the illusionist pretends to pull out, magically, the rabbit of sexuality: an impossible
thing, unless sexuality had already been hidden there somewhere beforehand. From
the image of milk, by association, that of the breast can be derived. But this is only then
a breast-object, the symbol of alimentary satisfaction, and nothing more. The experi-
ence of satisfaction could only be doubled, or open onto the sexual, if something of
the sexual had been lodged there from the start; thus if the object had already been at
once double, ambiguous, and, in sum, enigmatic.
From then on, to introduce this duality of the sexual and of self-preservation,
there are only two solutions. Either we can suppose from the start that two needs of
internal origin operate in the infant, one alimentary, the other sexual. In its most sim-
plified version, this is the so-called theory of an object choice leaning up (étayé)
against another one.13 Infantile sexuality is thus claimed to be present from the begin-
ning, endogenous; but, in order for it to be asserted, it needs to lean upon the alimen-
tary function. I have said more than once how unsatisfying such a theory is, in its going
back to the positing of an innate oral sexual drive, which nothing in the psychology of
the infant allows us to presuppose.
The second interpretation appears to me much more plausible, and allows us to
preserve the experience of satisfaction as a ground. Yes, this experience is first of all of
the order of self-preservation. It is, moreover, a much more complex experience, more
 F Jean Laplanche

charged with significations and affects than the simplistic model of the boiling kettle:
It is the beginning of a reciprocal communication, one that is instituted from the first
moments of life, probably on the basis of certain innate setups (montages), which
themselves will develop rapidly (“Attachment,” “Bindung”).
But for the psychoanalyst the main thing is not here. Rather it is in the intro-
duction of the sexual element, and this not from the side of the physiology of the child,
but from that of the messages coming from the adult. Very concretely, these messages
are situated on the side of the breast, the sexual breast, the inseparable companion of
the milk of self-preservation.
Thus I have attempted to give a model for what is here a true genesis of the
unconscious and of the drive, of which the unconscious thing-representations are
henceforth the source. I shall not linger on this model, called the translational model
of repression, and which, on the one hand, implies an attempt by the child to translate
the enigmatic double messages of the mother, and on the other hand the partial fail-
ure of this translation, of which the nontranslated remains constitute precisely the ele-
ments of the unconscious. I shall only add, without being able to insist on it, that we
may no longer keep to a conception of the birth of the sexual drive that would be lim-
ited to a single time (such as is precisely the case for the experience of satisfaction). For
it is Freud himself who teaches us that indeed any unconscious inscription at all neces-
sitates at least two times:14 there is both the experience itself as well as its signifying
retake (reprise), which I, for my part, call translation (necessarily an imperfect one).
Thus in order to complete the model of the experience of satisfaction, we must
modify it profoundly. We must substitute the notion of message for that of perception;
we must introduce the duality—that is, the compromise—between the sexual and the
self-conservative on the side of the adult message; and finally, we must set the notion
of afterwardsness fully into play.15
But what I would like to call attention to now is that introducing the notions
of message and signifier does not leave unchanged the problem referred to as that of
“the identity of perception,” and that of hallucination. In the Freudian perspective, it
is the perceptual remains, those of the satisfying object, which are reproduced, and
with such force that they are even hallucinated—indeed to the degree that it may well
be asked how the child might be able to get out of a hallucination that fully satisfies
its need, and why it would seek more food when it possesses it completely in a hallu-
cinatory manner. But if the notion of message is introduced—explicitly that of the
messages of the adult—what will be found rejected in the unconscious are not inert
perceptions, which are fortuitous and without intersubjective signification, but rather
pieces of message, signifiers that, extracted from their context, take on the consistency
of quasi-things. These signifiers divested of meaning (désignifiés) are certainly some-
thing other than memories; having lost their meaning-relations (liaisons de sens), their
contextual relations in time and in space, they impose themselves entirely naturally
as though they have the strength (valeur) of psychic reality. Henceforth it is not a
 Closing and Opening of the Dream f 

question of figuring out how an intensity supplement can be added to a perception so

as to transform it into a hallucination—a problem that will not cease to haunt Freud,
and to which he gives the most diverse and most contradictory solutions, from the
Project for a Scientific Psychology up to the “Metapsychological Supplement to the
Theory of Dreams.” In this latter text, it seems indeed that Freud finally runs aground
over the major difficulty he himself has brought forth: namely that an extreme regres-
sion toward “very clear visual mnemic images” may be produced “though we do not
on that account for a single moment take them for real perceptions” (GW X, –,
SE XIV, ).
Without so much as presuming to resolve the question, I would like to suggest a
path that appears to me to be fertile, namely that the question of the hallucination of
the dream cannot be detached from that of clinical hallucination. Now, here Freud will
stick to a so-called clinical model, that of Meynert’s Amentia, an entity that disap-
peared almost as soon as it was described.16 In contrast, all psychiatrists are in agree-
ment in considering hallucination as primarily of the order of speech, whether heard
or spoken again. In clinical experience, visual hallucinations are relatively rare and,
most important, very localized.
In addition, to go further, the question under discussion is not exactly that of
the “sensorium” (vision or hearing), but whether a message is present. The visual, as
well as the auditory, can be the bearer of a message. Since Clérambault, since Freud
with the Schreber Case, since Lacan and his Seminar on The Psychoses, the old notion
of “perception without object” fades before the much more fertile one of a message
without a sender, or with an indeterminate sender.
With this key in hand, research concerning dream hallucination should be ori-
ented toward a more elaborated or even phenomenological description. For example,
we must delimit what pertains truly to the visual, to the auditory (spoken words), and
particularly to conviction and to internal discourse, to what are called, in clinical expe-
rience, verbal psychic hallucinations, as, for example: “I was saying to myself that my
friend Pierre was in the room.”
On the other hand, it would be necessary to rethink the articulation between
two factors mentioned by Freud, and which are far from equivalent: hallucination
proper on the one hand, and on the other the fact that the dream only possesses the
“present” of the indicative, to the point of leaving no distance between the expression
of the wish and its fulfillment. Moreover the analogy Freud establishes with the gram-
matical tense of the present (“my father dies”) might be the very analogy in need of
reexamination in relation to the infinitive (“my father [to] die”) and the subjunctive
(“that [or lest] my father die”).17
Let us simply note this: If we accept the idea that the unconscious is character-
ized by the disappearance of discursive links, then the diverse modalities of enuncia-
tion (grammatical moods) should therefore be absent. In this way the unconscious
would always be in the “present,” that is, always presenting its contents as “perfected”
 F Jean Laplanche

(accompli: in general usage finished, fulfilled). It would hardly be forcing things to say
that the unconscious, by virtue of its consistency as thing, is in and of itself “halluci-
natory”—except for the fact that it remain(s)—unconscious.
All of this is to make palpable the very idea that the hallucinatory fulfillment of
an unconscious wish bears within it something of the tautological. As actuation, this
fulfillment—that is, the abolition of the distance between signifier and signified—is
in and of itself a hallucinatory presentation, and this precisely when what is at issue is
the unconscious wish.
It is in this sense that I have always considered it superfluous to attribute a psy-
chic, clinical reality to the so-called hallucination of the nursling. This was only a meta-
phor that would allow us to sense the constitution of an atemporal unconscious, one
thus always present and contemporaneous (actuel)—actuated (actué), one might say.
I want to return to my primary question: Is the dream itself a communication?
Yes or no? But before that I will try, briefly, to take up a major problem, which is linked
to the Freudian model referred to in chapter VII as that of the psychic apparatus.18
In the different versions he gives of the model, Freud slightly varies the posi-
tion of the letters on the extreme right-hand side. Thus I give the following two-
dimensional diagram:

Pcpt Ucs Pcs Cs

This diagram has the advantage of posing a problem. Consciousness is to be

found at both ends of the apparatus: to the left, as perceiving consciousness of the
external world, and to the right, immediately after the censorship agency of the pre-
conscious, as consciousness of internal processes. Now for Freud these two types of
consciousness are but one, and are both linked to a perception.
It is here that a note is introduced in . I cite:

The further completion of this diagram, which has been unrolled in a linear way,
should have to reckon with the fact that the system next beyond the Pcs. is the one to
which consciousness must be ascribed—in other words, that Pcpt.= Cs. (GW II–III,
; SE V, , translation modified)
 Closing and Opening of the Dream f 

Despite appearances, this note is clear. It tells us that the diagram of the bucket is only
linear because it has been unrolled. And that therefore it must be rolled back up so as
to make the two extremities—that is the two modalities of consciousness—coincide.

Ucs
Pcs
Pcpt Cs

This is such a model. Despite what he promises in this note, Freud never expli-
cated it afterward. Almost no one has noticed this rolling-[back]-up. Already since
January  (in Problématiques I), and then again in , I have kept referring to it.
It is a model, and as such, we must not hasten to apply it to a single reality. It is
more rich, more multivalent. It is neither () the model of a body, nor () of a neuronal
system, nor even () that of a psychic apparatus, for it lacks everything necessary to
provide for a psychology: emotions, affects, reasoning, and so forth. Nor is it a model
of the unconscious, which constitutes only one part of it. This diagram can be drawn
from above, which has the advantage of bringing out the aspect of the tangency of
two circuits, and about which we cannot help but think that they are language circuits
(circuits langagiers):

Ucs
Pcs
Pc Cs
 F Jean Laplanche

We must note that this idea of tangency corresponds very closely to that of mar-
ginality (such as is the case with the prefix neben), which Freud ceaselessly uses to des-
ignate the surging up of the sexual and/or of the unconscious as byproduct (produit
marginal, Nebenprodukt). This is a multivalent model, but one that works primarily
to explain the surging up of what one might call, after Lacan, the “formations of the
unconscious”—and thus, among other things, as a model of the dream. But we must
also admit that the arrows of the external circuit can be discharged in a more subtle
fashion than the simple “all or nothing” of deep sleep. In all these formations, the
external circuit should be conceived of as the totality of everyday, self-preservative
messages. At the point of tangency, the two circuits touch each other for an instant;
but there and then, the internal circuit, the sexual one, begins to function by itself,
and in the opposite direction from that of the other. These formations of the uncon-
scious—dream, bungled action, etc., and doubtless the analytic session as well—do not
constitute an “other thing,” which would exclude everyday discourse pure and simple;
but rather here something happens, is thus launched, as it were, at the point of tan-
gency, at which it separates off (se marginalise) so as to become autonomous.
Furthermore, with this rolling back up of what had been unfolded in a linear
fashion, something paradoxical has happened. The preceding model, “linearly unrolled,”
was a model of closing; it was a black box functioning according to the behaviorist
principle of stimulus-response. With the rolling back up suggested by Freud, paradox-
ically enough the model becomes a model of opening by means of (par le bias de) the
tangency between the two circuits.
To recall once more the experience referred to as that of satisfaction and the
criticisms we have made of it, we might show that our model would be adequate
enough to give figure to what I would call, henceforth, the experience of seduction. At
the point of contact, the external circuit—itself the enigmatic message of the adult,
self-preservative but contaminated by the sexual—comes to be inscribed and then to
be submitted to repression. What we are witnessing here is the real neogenesis of the
sexual in the infant, and not at all an endogenous hatching. In this version of the model,
nothing should stop us from figuring the body precisely at this point of tangency.

l unconscio
xua us
se

e nig
m a ti c
m e s s a ge
 Closing and Opening of the Dream f 

I return to my question of the dream as communication or as embryo, as seed of

communication. It is here that the locution, “royal road toward the unconscious” need
not lead us to confuse the two, that is, the unconscious and the dream. That the dream
has no communicative intention, as Freud sometimes says, is perhaps an excessive for-
mulation, one that, strictly speaking, is valid only for the unconscious, the it (le ça)
itself. When he reexamines the question in , in his “Comments on the Theory
and Practice of the Interpretation of the Dream,” Freud is much less categorical.
Doubtless “the employment of dreams in analysis is something very remote from their
original purpose” (GW XIII, ; SE XIX, ). But Freud concedes very willingly that
in analysis dreams are the site of a “superior yield,” a “motor,” an “unconscious poten-
tial” (puissance). That he attributes this potential to suggestion is not satisfactory to
us, but with the term transference we are more at ease. Nonetheless it still remains for
us to agree about the word!
Do dreams follow the dictates of a communicative aim during analysis? Cer-
tainly. But no matter how unprecedented (inouïe, unheard of ), or even inaugural the
analytic situation is, we cannot be unaware that it is somehow prefigured in other
interhuman situations. Thus it cannot be denied that at all times and all places dreams
have borne within them a certain perlocutionary opening. Most certainly the dream
does not speak to anyone directly. It functions fully even if it is forgotten. Thus a mul-
titude of dreams fall into oblivion. But it cannot be denied that there has always existed
a certain compulsion to tell the dream to others, to open it onto the other.
Once again, it is Ferenczi who writes this short fragment, which is worthy of
being cited in its entirety: “To whom does one tell one’s dreams? Psychoanalysts know
that unconsciously one feels compelled to tell one’s dreams to the very person his
latent dreams concern. Lessing, it seems, already had this premonition when he wrote
this distich: ‘Somnum/Alba mihi semper narrat sua somnia mane/Alba sibi dormit:
somniat Alba mihi’ (Dream/Alba always tells me her dreams in the morning/Alba is
asleep to herself: may she dream for me).”19
We must go further; that is we must surpass the notion of an addressee, a simple
receiver marveling at a story in the mode of the fantastic. The poetic reception of
the dream, whether by the German Romantics or the Surrealists, far from satisfying
us, risks leading us astray. Divinatory art has always asked for dreams for interpreta-
tion, and it is difficult not to think that it is the soothsayer, and the enigma he incar-
nates, that is the element provoking certain dreams.20
“Provocation by the analyst”: this is the phrase I have employed concerning
transference. So if transference in the cure is rather provoked by the enigma embod-
ied by the analyst, how would it not be the same for dreams during the cure, or at
its margins, such as at the moment of resuming sessions? The diagram of tangency
applies well in both cases, both for transference in the dream and transference in the
cure. In both cases it is the discourse, the address of the analyst—real or supposed,
but always enigmatic—that elicits this transference, and provokes the sort of libidinal
neo-genesis linked to it.
 F Jean Laplanche

To give homage to the primacy of the other as originary in the constitution of our
unconscious, I have wanted to favor—counter to the mechanisms at whose origin is
the subject—the verbs and the actions where the subject is the other. Thus, beside the
central term of seduction, there are those of provocation, even of inspiration. Today
it comes to mind to add to these the one of looking for something, of asking for it
(chercher), in its popular sense, in which one says, “you are looking to provoke me,” or
“you are asking for it” (tu me cherches).
He is “looking for” it from me and I find him. This is a formula in which come
together Picasso, with his “I don’t seek, I find,” Freud, with his “finding” of the object
(Objektfindung), and even Pascal, with the words he hears from the mouth of Christ:
“You wouldn’t seek me if you hadn’t already found me.” In this way it can be said that
the dream, in certain circumstances, is sought after (cherché), provoked by a potential
addressee (allocutaire). And, in its turn, so to speak, the dream will “look for”—or seek
out—unconscious desire.
All by itself, chapter VII is a monumental work within this monument that is the
Traumdeutung. In translating it step by step, and with such difficulty, I have learned
yet again that Freud is not always, as is claimed, a great writer, nor, a fortiori, is he an
author to be read on the train; rather, he is an immense thinker. One more time I wish
to put him to work. But what a joy to discover, as if in a nook, the main instrument for
this work. With this three-line note on the unrolling of the diagram, what we are given
is something like a door, a corridor opening onto another chapter VII: virtual, but no
less effective. This “other” chapter VII is not the mirror image of the first. Rich with
a thousand developments, it takes into account, if its consequences are developed,
Freud’s main and initial discovery, even if this discovery is always buried anew: the pri-
macy of the message of the other in the constitution of the sexual unconscious.

Notes
This essay is published here for the first time in English. It has appeared in German under
the title “Sollen wir das siebte Kapitel neu schreiben?” in Der Traum in der Psychoanalyse, ed.
Jürgen Körner und Sebastian Krutzenbichler (Göttingen: Vandenhoek und Ruprecht, ),
and in the original in the proceedings of the Association pour la recherché sur la psychiatrie
et la psychanalyse de l’enfant (ARPPE) (Paris: Dunod, ). The editors wish to thank Dr.
Laplanche most kindly for his offering us this article for publication in lieu of being able to
deliver it in person in Minneapolis in October . The translators also wish to thank the
author, as well as M. Christian Fournier, for their energy and time, as well as their generous and
meticulous care in answering queries, solving problems, and going over the translation. All
remaining errors are the translators’. At the time of querying Professor Laplanche concerning
the translation, he supplied us with another, almost identical typescript of this essay bearing
the title “Rêve et communication” (Dream and Communication), and bearing the same sub-
title. Comparing this second typescript with the one from which we had made the draft of our
 Closing and Opening of the Dream f 

translation, we found there a few additions to the first. We have interpolated these here. The
Fischer edition of the Gesammelte Werke also contains the “Entwurf einer Psychologie” in its
unnumbered Nachtragsband. Texte aus den Jahren –. All notes and references hence-
forth are those of the author, except for material in square brackets, which, unless otherwise
stated, is that of the translators and editors.
1. Examples are borrowed from J. C. Lavie, “Parler à l’analyste,” Nouvelle Revue de la
Psychanalyse  ().
2. Collective and specific to each language: “que (queue) de que (queues) dans la langue
française!” (that there is only dick, how many dicks and tails there are in the French language!)
3. Lavie, “Parler,” .
4. Ibid.
5. Among many other critiques, see J.-F. Lyotard, Discours, figure (Paris: Klincksieck,
), –.
6. Serge Viderman, La Construction de l’espace anaytique (Paris: Denoël, ), .
7. Danielle Margueritat, “L’analyste et le rêveur,” in Le fait de l’analyse  (March ):
–.
8. Sandor Ferenczi, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Payot, ), :.
9. Margueritat, “L’analyste,” .
10. This position is already the object of the last paragraph of The Interpretation of
Dreams. For a short summary, see Freud, “Die Okkulte Bedeutung des Traumes” (GW I, -
; SE XIX, –).
11. See André Bourguignon, “Neurophysiologie du rêve et théorie psychanalytique,” in
La Psychiatrie de l’enfant XI,  (): –, .
12. Freud writes fremde Hilfe and “experienced individual,” erfahrenes Individuum, in the
Project (Nachtragsband, ).
13. Laplanche uses the word étayage as the translation of the German Anlehnung, which
Strachey and others have unfortunately rendered as “anaclisis,” or “anaclitic object choice,” a
translation Laplanche and Pontalis thus are themselves compelled to list in their Vocabulaire
de la psychanalyse. While Jeffrey Mehlman, in his translation of Laplanche’s Life and Death
in Psychoanalysis, uses the phrase “propping up,” Laplanche has told the translators that his dis-
satisfaction with this expression has to do with its implying the idea of holding something up, as
opposed to that of leaning upon or up against, which is Freud’s obvious meaning.
14. “As soon as this need [of food] occurs once again, a psychic motion is produced by
virtue of the established connection; this motion will want to invest the mnemic image of this
perception anew, and to provoke the perception itself once again, thus, properly speaking, to
reestablish the situation of the first satisfaction. Such a motion is what we call a wish; the reap-
pearance of the perception is the fulfillment of the wish” (GW II–III, ; SE V, –). The
words I have added here—“of food”—come directly out of the text two lines above. But in this
text the second time is not a reelaboration of the first, but only the hallucinatory repetition of
perception. Square brackets here are those of the author.
15. Laplanche himself has introduced this word as a translation for the German Nach-
träglichkeit, which in French is well served by the expression après coup, but which the transla-
tors of the Standard Edition render rather prosaically—and not at all consistently—as “deferred
action.”
16. See Christine Lévy-Friesacher, Meynert-Freud, “L’amentia” (Paris: Presses Universi-
taires de France, ).
 F Jean Laplanche

17. See a discussion of this point regarding the “Rat Man” in J. Laplanche, Problématiques
I (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, ), –.
18. For a more detailed development, see J. Laplanche, Problématiques V (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, ), –.
19. Ferenczi, Oeuvres complètes :.
20. See the dream “Tyre is thine” and my commentary on it in Problématiques V, –.
 R . Dreaming and
Cinematographic
Consciousness
Laura Marcus R

T
he year  is key in the history of psychoanalysis and cinema. On July ,
, Freud dreamed the Dream of Irma’s Injection, the Specimen Dream
of The Interpretation of Dreams. “Do you suppose,” Freud wrote to Wilhelm
Fliess in a letter describing a later visit to Bellevue, the house where he had
had the dream, “that someday one will read on a marble tablet on this house” that

Here, on July th, 

the secret of dreams
revealed itself to Dr. Sigm Freud.1

During September and October , Freud wrote the uncompleted Project for a
Scientific Psychology, which, as James Strachey notes in his editorial introduction to
The Interpretation of Dreams, contains sections constituting a first approach to a co-
herent theory of dreams. (SE IV, xv). The Interpretation of Dreams was, Freud himself
claimed, “finished in all essentials at the beginning of ” (SE XIV, ).
The Lumière brothers’ Cinématographe gave its first public presentation (to the
Société d’Encouragement de l’Industrie Nationale in Paris) on March , , exhib-
iting their film “Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory” as an example of the progress
being made in photography. Its immediate success was unexpected. The film is both
the most unmediated of early actualité films and a complex act of historical reflex-
ivity: the workers at Lumière père’s photographic plate factory look into the camera,
which would transform the very act of looking and turn still images into moving ones.
George Meliès’s trick films, which directly exploited the relationship between dream
and film, followed soon after.


 F Laura Marcus

Psychoanalysis and cinema thus emerged in tandem at the close of the nine-
teenth century: twin sciences or technologies of fantasy, dream, virtual reality, and
“screen memory.” In the following century, a vast body of literature explored the com-
plex historical and conceptual relationship between the two fields. Psychoanalytic film
theory has turned to a wide range of Freud’s writings—on fetishism, on femininity, on
fantasy, on “scopophilia”—as part of this exploration, and with a focus on cinematic
spectatorship. Dreams and dream theory have nonetheless retained a privileged role
in the “parallel histories” of psychoanalysis and cinema, just as dreams have a privi-
leged role in psychoanalysis itself.
Practioners and theorists of psychoanalysis have found the film–dream relation-
ship compelling for their understanding of unconscious processes; while philosophers
have turned to this relationship in their explorations of the workings of consciousness,
and of the relations of space and time, in particular, to dreams and to cinema. From
the first decades of the twentieth century on, cultural commentators have explored the
primacy of “wish-fulfillment” in the narrative structures of films, and as equivalent
to its function in dreams and daydreams. The cinema as a “dream factory” is an early
designation. For filmmakers themselves, dreams and dream states seemed from the
outset to be an essential part of film’s ontology: while “dream sequences” within films
may seem to be bounded, they are never fully sealed off from the film-space contain-
ing them. It has been said, moreover, that we can watch films precisely because we
are dreamers: for Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “a secret instinct is appeased” in film
spectatorship, “an instinct familiar to the dreamers of dreams.”2 Elsewhere we find the
implication that the film has in some sense replaced the dream in and for the twenti-
eth century: the argument might thus run that we know how to watch films because
we have in the past been dreamers.
Such ideas suggest a “total world” equivalence in their accounts of filmic and
oneiric universes. Yet the fascination with film and dream seems as often to situate
their interrelationship on borderlines and thresholds: between sleeping and waking,
inner and outer, visual and verbal, stasis and motion, reality and simulacra. It is such
borderlines and thresholds that this article in part explores.
“Cinema” (Kino) and “film” are absent from Freud’s theoretical work, appearing
neither as topics, nor as analogies in the Standard Edition, though we can find ref-
erences to photography and other optical technologies and instruments of vision,
including the microscope and the telescope, deployed as analogues for the workings
of consciousness and the unconscious. By contrast, Freud’s contemporary Henri Berg-
son made the “cinematograph” and the “cinematographical” central to his theoriza-
tions of mind and reality, even as he expressed doubts about film (the “movement,”
which is in one way illusory, and which mechanistically segments and spatializes time
into discrete and identical units, rather than producing it as continuous flow) as an
appropriate analogue for time and motion: “[R]ests placed beside rests will never be
equivalent to a movement.”3 A number of film theorists—in both the early and late
 Dreaming and Cinematographic Consciousness f 

twentieth century—have wanted to argue that Bergson’s understandings of time and

consciousness are ultimately cinematic, despite his expressions of ambivalence and
even hostility toward film, and that his writings—whether overtly debating the ques-
tion of the cinematographic or not—are the founding texts of philosophy and film.4
It is also worth noting that Bergson’s models of the cinematographic would have
been drawn largely from late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century (pre)cinematic
experiments (beginning with Etienne-Jules Marey’s “chronophotography,” which ex-
perimented with the representation and analysis of movement) rather than with the
later narrative cinema.5
Underlying Freud’s silence on the question of cinema may well be a resistance
to the “modernization” or mechanization of thought and consciousness. As I discuss
below, Freud, in the essay on “The Uncanny” (SE XVII) in particular, is resistant to the
connection of “the uncanny” and its manifestations with the “novel and unfamiliar”
(SE XVII, ) (which could include the new technologies of vision and animation),
firmly linking it instead with the archaic and the always known. For Freud to embrace
photography as an analogue for unconscious life, as in his use of Francis Galton’s
“composite photography” to analogize “condensation” in the dream-work, but to re-
main silent on the question of cinema, may suggest a habit of nineteenth-century
thought resistant to some of the innovations of the twentieth century. There may also
have been an ambivalence toward the primacy of the visual, which, in The Interpreta-
tion of Dreams, is represented as a regression, redeemed for meaning and for culture
by the highly verbal and textual work of secondary revision, narration, and interpre-
tation. We could usefully compare Freud’s approach with that of Bergson in his essay
on dreams (published in France in  and in an English version in ). There
are similarities, including foci on inscriptions and on the unfathomable mysteries of
dream-life—the latter taking both thinkers into the realms of psychical research and
telepathy. Bergson’s account, however, is more overtly concerned than Freud’s with the
hallucinatory and visual aspects of dreams, including the phenomena of hypnagogia
and the phantasmagoric, a concern linked to Bergson’s understanding of human sub-
jectivity as both mingled with and emerging out of a universe of images. 6
The approach of Havelock Ellis’s The World of Dreams to the visual arena also
provides a significant contrast with Freud’s. Ellis writes that “[t]he commonest kind of
dream is mainly a picture, but it is always a living and moving picture, however in-
animate the objects which appear in vision before us would be in real life.” Fascinated
by the hypnagogic state—“the porch to sleep and dreams”7—he discusses the ways in
which hypnagogic imagery crosses the threshold from waking to sleeping. Imagery in
motion is at times analogized through the kaleidoscope, as a way of representing the
renewal of the stream of sleeping consciousness. Echoing Baudelaire’s image of the
flâneur as “a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness,” Ellis writes: “[I]f the kaleido-
scope were conscious we should say that each picture had been suggested by the pre-
ceding pattern—but yet definitely novel.” Elsewhere Ellis makes the magic lantern the
 F Laura Marcus

more appropriate analogue: “The movement of the cinematograph, indeed, scarcely

corresponds to that fusion of heterogeneous images which marks dream visions. Our
dreams are like dissolving views in which the dissolving process is carried on swiftly
or slowly, but always uninterruptedly” (). This is the only reference in The World of
Dreams to the cinematograph, and it is striking that Ellis includes it as one among a
number of optical instruments or shows, not only undifferentiated from its precur-
sors, but less absorbing in its assumed inability to fuse and dissolve images. Freud may
not, or not only, have neglected the cinema on the grounds of its modernity, its seem-
ing lack of attachment to the already known, but because of its association with toys
such as the kaleidoscope, which, for so many of the nineteenth-century commentators
he critiques in the first chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams, implied not a pattern
of difference (as it does for Ellis) but a disordered and chaotic visual regime—precisely
the charge from which Freud wishes to redeem dreams and dreaming.
The absence of “film” in Freud’s work does not, however, diminish the perception
that there is a profound relationship between psychoanalysis and cinema, and the few
“glancing” references to film in Freud’s writings and in the biographical literature on
Freud become highly charged. In the second volume of Sigmund Freud: Life and
Works, Ernest Jones writes of a visit to the cinema in New York in : “We all dined
together in Hammerstein’s roof garden, afterwards going on to a cinema to see one
of the primitive films of those days with plenty of wild chasing. Ferenczi in his boyish
way was very excited at it, but Freud was only quietly amused; it was the first film they
had seen.”8 Stephen Heath argues that if Jones is right in claiming that this was Freud’s
first encounter with cinema, his disinterest becomes even more marked: there were
some eighty cinemas in Vienna at this time.9 In fact, a letter written by Freud to his
family from Rome in September  (published in Ernst Freud’s edition of Freud’s
letters and in a different English translation in Jones’s biography of Freud,10 though
Jones himself notes no contradiction) provides an earlier, and much fuller and more
appreciative, account of cinematic viewing, as Freud describes watching open-air pro-
jections of lantern slides on the Piazza Colonna:
They are actually advertisements, but to beguile the public these are interspersed
with pictures of landscapes, Negroes of the Congo, glacier ascents and so on. But
since these wouldn’t be enough, the boredom is interrupted by short cinematographic
performances for the sake of which the old children (your father included) suffer qui-
etly the advertisements and monotonous photographs. They are stingy with these tid-
bits, however, so I have had to look at the same thing over and over again. When I turn
to go I detect a certain tension in the attentive crowd which makes me look again, and
sure enough a new performance has begun, and so I stay on. Until  p.m. I usually
remain spellbound; then I begin to feel too lonely in the crowd, so I return to my room
to write to you all.11

As Jonathan Crary notes at the close of his recent study, Suspensions of Perception:
Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture, Freud says nothing of the content of the
 Dreaming and Cinematographic Consciousness f 

cinematographic performances.12 The spellbinding nature of the spectacle is precisely

the display of its own visibility, and this is to be situated as a historical moment in the
early history of cinematic reception. I would add that Freud’s account is interestingly
structured around the phrase and the concept of “look[ing] again,” which itself is mul-
tiplied as repetition (seeing the same thing over and over again), return (being called
back to look again), and renewal (looking again as seeing anew). For Crary, Freud’s
account offers a specifically modernized, urban vision, as the advertisements and the
images of foreign lands as touristic spectacle play over the surfaces of the ancient city
and its buildings.
Freud’s vivid description provides a counter to the view that he was hostile to
cinema where he was not indifferent to it. There is no overt suggestion, however, that
he saw in the cinematic spectacle an analogue for psychic life, or that he wished to
transmute the Roman holiday experience into the work of theoretical reflection. By
contrast, Lou Andreas-Salomé’s journal entry of February , , recounts both her
pleasure in the movies and her thoughts on film and psychic life:
A few purely psychological considerations deserve to be added to the many things
that might be said in vindication of this Cinderella of aesthetic criticism. One has to
do with the fact that only the technique of the film permits the rapid sequence which
approximates our own imaginative faculty; it might even be said to imitate its erratic
ways. . . . The second consideration has to do with the fact that even though the most
superficial pleasure is involved, we are presented with an extraordinarily abundant
variety of forms, pictures, and impressions. . . . Here in Vienna it was Tausk who took
me to the movies despite work, weariness, and lack of time.13

Andreas-Salomé makes the crucial link between cinema and consciousness. This con-
nection was explored at length by the psychologist Hugo Munsterberg, author of one
of the earliest works on film aesthetics, The Film: A Psychological Study (), for
whom film “unfold[s] our inner life, our mental play [in] tones which are fluttering and
fleeting like our own mental states”14: “The massive outer world has lost its weight, it
has been freed from space, time, and causality, and it has been clothed in the forms of
our own consciousness” (). His post-Kantian aesthetic not only connects cinema
and consciousness, but makes cinema (as does Andreas-Salomé) the reflector of a par-
ticularly modernized consciousness, imaged in the terms of a Baudelairean metropol-
itan modernity, in which “the fleeting, passing surface suggestion” is imbued with
depth and fullness only through “our mental mechanism,” as the gift of consciousness
to the phenomenal world. Linking “cut-back” or flash-back to “the mental act of
remembering” and close-up to “the mental act of attending,” he says, “It is as if the
outer world itself became molded in accordance with our fleeting turns of attention or
with our passing memory ideas” ().
Freud was silent on the topic of film’s capacity to “unfold our inner life.” He
did speak out, however, on the issue of using film as a way of representing psycho-
analytic theory. The most charged moment came in , when Karl Abraham wrote
 F Laura Marcus

to Freud, telling him that he had been approached by a director (Eric Neumann) of
UFA (Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft) about the possibility of a film exploring psy-
choanalytic concepts. Letters between Abraham and Freud chart Abraham’s growing
enthusiasm for the project and Freud’s continuing resistance:

My chief objection is still that I do not believe that satisfactory plastic representation
of our abstractions is at all possible. We do not want to give our consent to anything
insipid. Mr. Goldwyn was at any rate clever enough to stick to the aspect of our
subject that can be plastically represented very well, that is to say, love. The small
example that you mentioned, the representation of repression by means of my
Worcester simile [a reference to the analogy of the invader to illustrate repression and
resistance], would make an absurd rather than instructive impact.15

Freud may well have felt that his Introductory Lectures had already analogized and
dramatized psychoanalytic abstractions to a sufficient degree. To represent analogies
in cinematic form would thus be to further substantiate the dramatized example,
rather than the concept of which it was an illustration. The film was made, however,
as Secrets of a Soul, directed by G. W. Pabst. Abraham and Hanns Sachs acted as advi-
sors, and Sachs wrote the pamphlet that accompanied the film and explained some of
the psychoanalytic concepts it explored.
Sachs’s own introduction to psychoanalysis had come with his reading of The
Interpretation of Dreams in . He abandoned his law career in its early stages and
followed Freud into psychoanalytic work, initially through writing and editing, and,
in , through the training of analysts. Freud’s Dream Book remained a key text for
him, as did Freud’s  essay, “The Creative Writer and Day-dreaming.” Fascinated
by the application of psychoanalysis to the creative process and to the reception of
works of art, as well as by the concept of the work of art as a “collective day-dream,”
Sachs explored the idea of “day-dreams in common,” a concept that became central
to the articles he wrote on film in the late s and early s for the film journal
Close Up.16 In an article on “Film Psychology,” Sachs also opened up the relation-
ship between conscious and unconscious knowledges in relation to dream and film,
suggesting that the film-work functions not only by analogy, but by contrast with the
dream-work.17 While the dream disguises unconscious wishes and desires as a way of
eluding the censor, the film reveals them. In this sense, the film could be said to be
closer to dream interpretation, with its emancipatory potential, than to the dream itself.
The Secrets of a Soul pamphlet describes at length and in detail the action of the
film as an illustration of central Freudian concepts: repression, sublimation, displace-
ment, condensation.18 There is, however, virtually no analysis of the ways in which the
filmic medium might itself be operating in ways that are analogous to the psychic
apparatus; the film seems to function at this stage for Sachs as pure illustration, though
the dream sequences in the film use devices, such as superimpositions and fade-outs,
which others among his contemporaries were readily mapping onto the processes of
 Dreaming and Cinematographic Consciousness f 

the dream-work. In some senses, then, the pamphlet serves to neutralize or, at least,
to instrumentalize the cinema.
Sachs’s partial occlusion of the cinematographic in the Secrets of a Soul pamphlet
is found in a different guise and in a far more extreme form a few years earlier, in
Freud’s comments on Otto Rank’s study, The Double, in the essay on “The Uncanny”
(SE XVII). Freud discusses Rank’s exploration of the connections “which the ‘double’
has with reflections in mirrors, with shadows, with guardian spirits, with the belief
in the soul and with the fear of death,” as well as his theories of the evolution of the
idea of the double as a preservation against extinction. In a footnote he adds: “In
Ewer’s Der Student von Prag, which serves as the starting point of Rank’s study on the
‘double,’ the hero has promised his beloved not to kill his antagonist in a duel. But on
his way to the duelling-ground he meets his ‘double,’ who has already killed his rival”
(SE XVII, ). Ewers indeed wrote the script for The Student of Prague (), but it
is striking that Freud makes no reference to the film itself, referring to the narrative in
entirely literary terms.
If we turn to Rank’s The Double (), however, we find in his first paragraph
the following lines: “Psychoanalysis need not shy away even from some random and
banal subject, if the matter at hand exhibits psychological problems whose sources
and implications are not obvious. There should be no objection, then, if we take as a
point of departure a ‘romantic drama,’ which not long ago made the rounds of our
cinemas.”19 While Rank does add that “[t]hose whose concern is with literature may be
reassured by the fact that the scenarist of this film, The Student of Prague, is an author
currently in vogue and that he has adhered to prominent patterns, the effectiveness of
which has been tested by time” (–), he goes on to make a direct connection between
cinematic and psychic processes. As he writes:

Any apprehension about the real value of a photoplay which aims so largely at achiev-
ing external effects may be postponed until we have seen in what sense a subject
based upon an ancient folk-tradition, and the content of which is so eminently psy-
chological, is altered by the demands of modern techniques of expression. It may
perhaps turn out that cinematography, which in numerous ways reminds us of the
dream-work, can also express certain psychological facts and relationships—which
the writer often is unable to describe with verbal clarity—in such clear and conspic-
uous imagery that it facilitates our understanding of them. The film attracts our atten-
tion all the more readily since we have learned from similar studies that a modern
treatment is often successful in reapproaching, intuitively, the real meaning of an
ancient theme which has become either unintelligible or misunderstood in its course
through tradition. ()

The broader context for Rank’s discussion is the uncanniness of cinema itself, de-
scribed so often by early commentators as a world of shadows. “This is not life but the
shadow of life and this is not movement but the soundless shadow of movement,”
Maxim Gorki wrote in July , describing a showing of the Lumière brothers’s first
 F Laura Marcus

films: “It is terrifying to watch but it is the movement of shadows, mere shadows.
Curses and ghosts, evil spirits that have cast whole spirits into eternal sleep come
to mind and you feel as though Merlin’s vicious trick is being played out before you.”20
For cinema’s first spectators, the realism of early films, combined with their unlifelike
absence of sound and color, seems to have provoked, in Yuri Tsivian’s words, “the
uncanny feeling that films somehow belong the world of the dead” and that “cinema is
a convenient metaphor for death.”21
There is a phenomenological fear embodied in the early reception of cinema
that is strikingly reinvoked in German expressionist cinema of the s and s:
films such as The Student of Prague, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and Nosferatu do not
merely constitute an episode in the history of cinema, but act as figurations of the
materiality and the phenomenology of film and of fear. Such films, with their shadows,
their mirrors, and their doubles, inform—in however oblique and occluded a way—
many of the terms and the images of Freud’s writings of the period, in particular the
essay on “The Uncanny.” This, like Rank’s The Double, attempts to negotiate the rela-
tionship between the archaic and the modern: the animations and automations—
anthropologically conceived—of primitive mentation and belief, and of the new tech-
nologies, with their power to bring still things to life and to represent (though Freud
does not of course make the connection to filmic representations) “dismembered
limbs, a severed head, a hand cut off at the wrist . . . feet which dance by themselves”
(SE XVII, ). Moreover, and as Friedrich Kittler suggests, psychoanalysis and film—
science and technology—together extend and implode the life of the Romantic dou-
ble.22 The fundamental link between the two fields overrides Freud’s silence on the
question of the cinematic in his thoughts on “the double” and “the uncanny.”
In the quotation from Rank cited above, a specific equation is made between cin-
ematography and the dream-work. The plethora of psychoanalytic and psychological
studies of dream-life in the s and s was, I would argue, linked to the devel-
opment of film aesthetics, while writings on dreams and dream-life in the early twen-
tieth century found new forms of association and analogy in film. The intense debates
over visual-verbal representations in the transition from silent to sound film in the
s had highly significant counterparts in the discussions over the visual or verbal
dimensions, and the alphabetical or pictorial scripts, of dream-language. Time and
again in early film theory we find the paradox that this art or science or modernity
is being framed in the terms of a primitive or archaic consciousness, mapping onto
Freud’s exploration of the “regressive” transmutation of ideas into visual pictures in his
dream, and his account of visual thinking as “primitive” mentation.
Freud’s account of the “apparatus” of the mind had a crucial influence on later
filmic “apparatus theories,” most notably the work of film theorists such as Jean-
Louis Baudry and Christian Metz, who, in the s, made a theoretical return to the
machinery and apparatus of the cinema, constructing, as Stephen Heath notes, a
conceptual synthesis of the technological and the metapsychological.23 Film theory’s
 Dreaming and Cinematographic Consciousness f 

fascination with psychoanalysis also has its counterpart in psychoanalytic literature’s

deployment of film. Analysts and theorists have taken up the cinematic dimensions
of such concepts as “projection,” “scene,” and “screening.” I have discussed elsewhere
the centrality of such terms for Ella Freeman Sharpe, in her book Dream Analysis, for
Bertram Lewin, in his work on the “dream screen,” and, most recently, for Didier
Anzieu, in his formulations of “the skin ego.”24 For these psychoanalytic theorists, pro-
jections, such as we have in dream images, require a screen. As Ella Freeman Sharpe
stated in her account of the dream mechanisms of “dramatization” and “secondary
elaboration”: “A film of moving pictures is projected on the screen of our private inner
cinema.” One of the dreams Sharpe analyzes is an anxiety dream in which

[a] man is acting for the screen. He is to recite certain lines of the play. The pho-
tographers and voice recorders are there. At the critical moment the actor forgets
his lines. Time and again he makes the attempt with no result. Rolls of film must have
been spoilt.25

In Sharpe’s analysis of the dream the associations reveal an infantile situation in which
“the dreamer was once the onlooker when his parents were ‘operating’ together. The
baby was the original photographer and recorder and he stopped the parents in the
‘act’ by noise. The baby did not forget his lines!”

The “return of the repressed” is given in the dream by the element “rolls of film must
have been wasted” telling us by the device of metonymy, of a huge amount of faecal
matter the baby was able to pass at that moment.
Illustrated in this dream are some of the profoundest activities of the psyche.
We have the recording of sight and sound by the infant and the incorporation by the
senses of sight and hearing of the primal scene. We have evidence of this incorporated
scene by its projection into the dream dramatization. The modern invention of the
screen of the cinema is pressed into service as the appropriate symbol, the screen
being the modern external device corresponding to the internal dream picture mech-
anism. (–)

Sharpe’s analysis echoes (while also making explicit the film-dream analogy) Freud’s
account of one of the most famous dreams of psychoanalysis, his patient “the Wolf-
Man,” whose childhood dream was of observing, through a window, a number of white
wolves sitting on a tree and looking at him. “He had woken up and seen something,”
Freud comments. “The attentive looking, which in the dream was ascribed to the
wolves, should rather be shifted on to him. At a decisive point, therefore, a transposi-
tion has taken place” (SE XVII, –). Behind the content of the dream, Freud sug-
gests, lies the “primal scene,” the “Urszene,” in which the very young child observed the
parents’ sexual intercourse.
In Sharpe’s analysis, the transposition from observer to observed noted by Freud
revolves around the image of the “screen” as both interior (the “inner private cin-
ema”) and “exterior” (“the modern external device”). The perception both extends and
 F Laura Marcus

renders cinematographic Freud’s claim in “A Metapsychological Supplement to the

Theory of Dreams” that “[a] dream is . . . among other things, a projection: an exter-
nalization of an internal process” (SE XIV, ), and, in “The Ego and the Id,” that “The
ego is first and foremost a bodily ego: it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the
projection of a surface” (SE XIX, ). Freud’s emphases in this essay on the ego as a
bodily “projection,” and on the body and its surface as a “place from which both exter-
nal and internal perceptions may spring” (SE XIX, ), allow us to bring together the
concepts of “projection” as “prosthesis” (the body extended or projected into the world)
and as a “screening,” whereby not only the subject’s body but his or her relationship to
the “skin,” the screen-surface of the other (the mother) is projected or imaged.
In Bertram Lewin’s important work of the s, the “dream screen” becomes
the hallucinatory representation of the mother’s breast, which once acted as a prelude
to sleep, while the forgetting of dreams is often imaged as a rolling up or away of the
dream screen, repeating the experience of the withdrawal of the breast.26 In a more
recent study, and returning to the Wolf-Man, Lewin explores the ways in which events
in motion (paradigmatically the parents “operating” together in the “primal scene”) are
remembered as “stills”: “They are as if immobilized for better viewing.”27 “Screen mem-
ories,” it could be said, “freeze-frame” the moving picture. By extension, Freud’s photo-
graphic analogies could be taken not merely as pre-cinematic concepts, but as ways of
understanding the stillness of which the moving (cinematic) image is truly composed.
In making a distinction between the screen and the dream-images projected
onto it, Lewin allows for a distinction to be drawn between sleep (the blank screen)
and dream (the play and projection of visual images). The distinction between sleep
and dream is relatively untheorized in The Interpretation of Dreams, as are threshold
states between sleeping and waking. It is to such states that I now turn, in relation to
cinema and film spectatorship, in part as a way of pursuing the question of the archaic,
the modern, and their interrelationship.
My starting point comes in the opening section of chapter  of The Interpreta-
tion of Dreams, the preamble to the analysis of the specimen dream, the Dream of
Irma’s Injection. Freud is describing his development of the techniques of free asso-
ciation and their relationship to dream interpretation. This method of interpretation,
he writes, “involves some psychological preparation of the patient. We must aim
at bringing about two changes in him: an increase in the attention he pays to his
own psychical perceptions and the elimination of the criticism by which he normally
sifts the thoughts that occur to him” (SE IV, ). The distinction Freud draws—as
Strachey translates it—is between the “frame of mind of a man who is reflecting” and
“that of a man who is observing his own psychical processes.” While attention is con-
centrated in both cases, the man who is reflecting is exercising his critical faculty, and
censoring his thoughts. The self-observer, by contrast, need only suppress his criti-
cal faculty to enable “innumerable ideas [to] come into his consciousness of which he
could otherwise never have got hold.” Freud continues:
 Dreaming and Cinematographic Consciousness f 

What is in question, evidently, is the establishment of a psychical state which, in

its distribution of psychical energy (that is, of mobile attention), bears some anal-
ogy to the state before falling asleep—and no doubt also to hypnosis. As we fall
asleep, “involuntary ideas” emerge. . . . [and] change into visual and acoustic images.
(SE IV, )

The abandonment of the critical function is also to be found, Freud argues, in poetic
creation.
The significant phrase in this section of The Interpretation of Dreams is “mobile
attention,” and I want now to link the concept to those modes of (in)attention and
reduced wakefulness that so preoccupied critical theorists such as Siegfried Kracauer
and Walter Benjamin, and which the film threorist Christian Metz explored in a dif-
ferent conceptual and historical context, one more directly in relation to film and
dream, in The Imaginary Signifier.28 The film-dream analogy functions not only as a
correlation between dream-work and film-work, but through the concept of states—
film states and dream states—which converge in the transitional space between sleep-
ing and waking. As Kracauer stated in his Theory of Film: “Lowered consciousness
invites dreaming.”29
The work of Benjamin is of significant interest here. Axel Honneth has argued
that Benjamin took from American pragmatism and French versions of Lebensphil-
osophie (especially the work of Bergson) a fascination with religious and aesthetic
experiences as “borderline experiences in which reality as a whole is experienced as
a field of subjective forces.”30 Hence Benjamin’s preoccupation with situations of re-
duced attention or half-wakefulness—flâneurie, reading, listening to music, intoxica-
tion, artistic creation—and above all, moments of awakening, “when the environment’s
perceptual stimuli cannot yet be instrumentally classified in accordance with everyday
routine.”31 In ways that are at least analogous to Freud’s distinction between reflec-
tion and self-observation—the latter allied to free association—Benjamin suggests, in
Honneth’s words, that “when our purposively directed concentration is low, we tend
to experience reality as a field of surprising correspondences and analogies.”32 For
Benjamin, modernity, with its demands for instrumental, purposive, rational atten-
tion, threatens the “anthropologically based potential for intensifying experience by
reducing attention.”33
Film plays a most complex and ambiguous role in this model. The loss of aura,
which the cinema—among other modern technologies—embodies, could be seen (as
Honneth sees it) as a deprivation of those experiences of the shattering of the self
and of reduced attention. Yet Benjamin’s film viewer is also a centerless subject, re-
sponding to the “shock” of cinematic experience—its radical disruptions and “changes
of place and focus which periodically assail the spectator”34—“in a state of distrac-
tion.” The cinema trains the spectator, Benjamin seems to suggest, in the transformed
mode of perception demanded by modern life. For Siegfried Kracauer, writing a decade
earlier, “distraction”—originally a negative attribute, as opposed to contemplative
 F Laura Marcus

concentration—takes on a positive aspect as it becomes anchored in a nonbourgeois

mode of visual and sensorial experience, a form of attention or inattention appropri-
ate to the fragmentary, discontinuous nature of the modern visual media.
Kracauer’s Theory of Film (published in , but including earlier material)
explores the relationship between dreaming and cinema through “the two direc-
tions of dreaming”: toward and into the object and “away from the given image into
subjective reveries.” These apparently opposed movements of dreaming are in fact
intertwined:
Trance-like immersion in a shot or a succession of shots may at any moment yield
to daydreaming which increasingly disengages itself from the imagery occasioning
it. . . . Together the two intertwined dream processes constitute a veritable stream
of consciousness whose contents—cataracts of indistinct fantasies and inchoate
thoughts—still bear the imprint of the bodily sensations from which they issue. ()

The relations of “inside” and “outside” here strongly recall Freud’s emphases, noted
above, on the ego as a bodily “projection,” and remind us of the extent to which mind-
body and inner perception-outer world dichotomies are dissolved in Freudian dream
theories.
The work of Christian Metz leads us back to the question of cinema spectator-
ship as a mode of reduced attention on the borderlines of sleep and wakefulness:
[T]he filmic flux resembles the dream flux more than other products of the waking
state do. It is received, as we have said, in a state of lessened wakefulness. Its signifier
(images accompanied by sound and movement) inherently confers on it a certain
affinity with the dream, for it coincides directly with one of the major features of
the dream signifier, “imaged” expression, the considerations of representability, to use
Freud’s term.35

Throughout part three of The Imaginary Signifier—“The Fiction Film and its Specta-
tor”—Metz sets dream, daydream, and film alongside and against each other through
the question of degrees of sleep and wakefulness. Film and dream “are interwoven . . .
by differences.” The filmic state “is marked by a general tendency to lower wakeful-
ness”; “[t]he filmic and dream states tend to converge when the spectator begins to
doze off [s’endormir] . . . or when the dreamer begins to wake up. But the dominant sit-
uation is that in which film and dream are not confounded: this is because the film
spectator is a man awake, whereas the dreamer is a man asleep” (). Nonetheless,
“the filmic situation brings with it certain elements of motor inhibition, and it is in this
respect a kind of sleep in miniature, a kind of waking sleep. . . . To leave the cinema is
a little like getting up: not always easy (except if the film was really indifferent)” ().
“The spectator puts himself into a state of lessened alertness. . . . Among the different
regime of waking, the filmic state is one of those least unlike sleep and dreaming,
dreamful sleep” (). Metz’s procedure, however, is not to rest with such formula-
tions, but to introduce new terms for comparison; in this case, it is the daydream, so
 Dreaming and Cinematographic Consciousness f 

he concludes with the image of the film as a force field, in which distinct regimes of
consciousness—reality, dream, and daydream—are momentarily, but only momentar-
ily, reconciled.
I want to draw my discussion to a close by pointing to the significance of the
borderline for film, dream, and modernism. The transitional states between sleeping
and waking, and the experiences of going to sleep and of waking up, are central to mod-
ernist literature. Proust is the crucial example here. The most intensely cinematic or
cinematographic works of modern literature are also those that are most preoccupied
with the representation of states of going to sleep, sleeping, and awakening: for exam-
ple, Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse, which is so bound up with the representation
of reduced attentiveness and lowered wakefulness, as in Mrs Ramsay’s evening reverie:
“All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk,
with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, some-
thing invisible to others.”36 The central section of the novel, “Time Passes,” is highly
cinematic in its representations of sound “folded into silence” and of the animation of
the object world. It begins and ends with the processes of going to sleep and awaken-
ing—the last word of the section is indeed “Awake”—while its center is a correlation
between dream and the play of projected images on surface, which implies a cine-
matographic realm or consciousness. The last part of the novel, “The Lighthouse,”
returns to the realms of daydream, reverie, memory, and hauntings.
The importance of “the borderline” and of transitional states emerges, in a rather
different way, in the film writings of the poet H.D., a central figure for the interrela-
tions of psychoanalysis and cinema, historically and conceptually. In her articles for
the film journal Close Up in the late s (also the forum for Hanns Sachs’s writings
on cinema), H.D. describes the processes of an initial resistance to film, which we
could link to the resistance to sleep, understood as a fear of the loss of identity and
even of death. As Freud writes in “A Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of
Dreams,” the ego, in extreme cases, “renounces sleep because of its fear of its dreams”
(SE XIV, ).
In her article on the Russian film Expiation, H.D. writes of the ways in which,
about to enter the cinema to watch the film, she finds herself impelled to create a form
of prefilmic experience from the vision of the street: “I so poignantly wanted to re-
visualize those squares of doors and shutters and another and another bit of detail that
of necessity was lost at first that I did illogically (I was already late) climb back.”37 She
enters the cinema when the film is a third over: “Rain poured over a slab of earth and I
felt all my preparation of the extravagantly contrasting out of doors gay little street, was
almost an ironical intention, someone, something ‘intended’ that I should grasp this, that
some mind should receive this series of uncanny and almost psychic sensations in order
to transmute them elsewhere; in order to translate them” (–). Film and prefilm (the
“dimensional dream-tunnel” of the street) are brought into an “uncanny” relationship,
allowing H.D. as spectator, to “translate” the “remote and symbolical” dimensions of the
 F Laura Marcus

film. Expiation’s destructive beauty is perceived by H.D. as an “excess” having echoes

of the Romantic sublime: it is something beyond the limit, “the word after the last
word is spoken,” “taking the human mind and spirit further than it can go.” Her film
aesthetics and her model of vision are predicated on symbol, gesture, “hieroglyph,” and
her film writing tends to provide not retrospective judgment on a film, but a perfor-
mative running commentary on the processes of spectating, which becomes a form of
“inner speech,” acting as a screen onto which the film images can be projected.
H.D.’s article on The Student of Prague describes or enacts a spectatorial proce-
dure similar to that in Expiation, an initial resistance to film, an irritated awareness of
her surroundings, a disorder: “Something has been touched before I realise it, some
hidden spring; there is something wrong with this film, with me, with the weather,
with something,” and then a moment of understanding and an increasing absorption
in the film, until its close, when she “awakens” to the discordant voices of her fellow
spectators: “A small voice . . . will whisper there within me, ‘You see I was right, you
see it will come. In spite of “Gee” and “Doug Fairbanks” and “we must have something
cheerful,” it must come soon: a universal language, a universal art open alike to the
pleb and the inititate.’”38 The promise of the film as “universal language”—which did
not survive the transition to film sound for H.D.—becomes increasingly inseparable
from a model of the “universal language” of the dream.
For H.D. the intertwining of (silent) cinema and psychoanalysis was cemented
by the cinema of Pabst, whose Secrets of a Soul was, as I have noted, supervised by
Hanns Sachs, H.D.’s analyst for a brief period. H.D. not only wrote for Close Up; she
also acted in the films directed by one of the journal’s editors, Kenneth Macpherson.39
The most ambitious film, Borderline, in which H.D. acted alongside Paul Robeson,
took Secrets of the Soul as a central model, including the publication of a pamplet, writ-
ten by H.D., to explain the film.
In the spring of , as Close Up entered its final year, H.D. traveled to Vienna
for psychoanalysis with Freud, bearing Sachs’s recommendation. She did not refer to
her work in and on film in her accounts of the analysis—“Writing on the Wall” (–
) and “Advent” (–), published together as Tribute to Freud in —but it
seems likely that she saw her sessions with Freud as a way of continuing, or perhaps
replacing, the work of film, finding in dream and symbolic interpretation an equiva-
lent to, and extension of, the “language” of the silent cinema, which she invested with
both individual and “universal” meaning.
The “shapes, lines, graphs” of dreams are, H.D. writes, “the hieroglyph of the un-
conscious.”40 In an echo of Freud’s repeated references in The Interpretation of Dreams
to the popular newspaper Fliegende Blatter—in one of which he compares the work
of “secondary revision” with “the enigmatic inscriptions with which Fliegende Blatter
has for so long entertained its readers” (SE V, )—H.D. discusses “the newspaper
class” of dreams, implicitly suggesting the ways in which the diurnal newspaper itself
provides the materials for the “day’s residues”:
 Dreaming and Cinematographic Consciousness f 

The printed page varies, cheap-news-print, good print, bad print, smudged and
uneven print—there are the great letter words of an advertisement or the almost
invisible pin-print; there are the huge capitals of a child’s alphabet chart or building
blocks; letters or ideas may run askew on the page, as it were; they may be purpose-
less; they may be stereotyped and not meant for “reading” but as a test.41

The passage strongly recalls the debates about film captions and intertitles in the
s, and their indeterminate nature as speech or writing, as in the Hungarian film
theorist Béla Balázs’s account of the ways in which emotions in the silent film were
“made visible in the form of lettering. . . . It was an accepted convention, for instance,
that alerting alarm-signals rushed at us from the screen with tousled letters rapidly
increasing in space. . . . At other times a slowly darkening title signified a pause full
of meaning or a melancholy musing.”42 The “enigmatic inscriptions” to which Freud
refers are also the alphabets or hieroglyphs of film and dream.
In Tribute to Freud, as in others of her autobiographical writings, H.D. represents
her childhood memories and dreams as moments of vision, which are also moments
in a history of pre-cinema and cinema, and autobiography becomes intertwined with
a history of optics (lenses, daguerrotypes, transparencies). Most strikingly, there is the
“writing on the wall,” her “visionary” experience in Corfu in the early s, which
Freud saw as “the most dangerous symptom” and H.D. herself viewed as her most sig-
nificant life experience. She recounts, frame by frame, the inscription of hieroglyphs,
images projected on a wall in light, not shadow. The first are like magic lantern slides,
the later images resemble the earliest films. “For myself,” she writes, differentiating
her position from that of Freud, “I consider this sort of dream or projected picture of
vision as a sort of halfway state between ordinary dream and the vision of those who,
for lack of a more definite term, we must call psychics or clairvoyants” (). Later in
the text, she recalls an earlier dream or “flash of vision” of a carved block of stone, a
solid shape that appeared before her eyes “before sleeping or just on wakening” ().
“Crossing the line,” “crossing the threshold,” are H.D.’s signature phrases. They refer
both to the blurred borderline between ordinary experience and “psychic” life, and to
the threshold between the states of sleeping and waking. In this indeterminate zone,
films and dreams share a reality.
For H.D., remembered scenes, recalled in the analytic session, “are like trans-
parencies, set before candles in a dark room,” and the network of memories builds up
to become a surface, onto which “there fell inevitably a shadow, a writing-on-the-wall,
a curve like a reversed, unfinished S and a dot beneath it, a question mark, the shadow
of a question—is this it?” (). Throughout Tribute to Freud (and its companion text,
Advent) we are led around (as in a cinematic panning-shot) the space of Freud’s con-
sulting room in Vienna, following the line of its walls, the fourth of which is a wall that
is not a wall, its folding doors opening onto a connecting room, the “room beyond,”
which “may appear very dark or there may be broken light and shadow” (). She links
this “fourth wall” and the room beyond, which contains Freud’s books and antiquities,
 F Laura Marcus

to the “fourth dimension,” the dimension that, for Sergei Eisenstein, writing in Close
Up, was the dimension of the Kino. It is the “fourth wall” and the “room beyond” that
both H.D. and Freud face or look toward, as she lies on the couch with Freud seated in
the corner behind her, his cigar smoke rising in the air.
In Advent, the account of her analysis with Freud based most closely on the notes
she made at the time, H.D. represents Freud as absorbed by particular aspects of her
Corfu experience, the Writing on the Wall of her hotel room, including

the lighting of the room, or possible reflections or shadows. I described the room
again, the communicating door, the door out to the hall and the one window. He
asked if it was a French window. I said, “No—one like that,” indicating the one win-
dow in his room. ()

In Advent, the space of the hotel room, the scene of the Writing on the Wall, becomes
increasingly identified with the space of Freud’s consulting room, an identity to which
his own insistent questioning would seem to point. If both spaces are the sites of
projection, of picture-writing, of a Writing on the Wall, then psychoanalysis, too,
becomes a cinematographic arena, with both analyst and analyand facing toward a
surface—wall or screen—onto which memories and imaginings are projected.
As H.D.’s Tribute to Freud helps us to understand, Freud’s silence on the question
of cinema (a silence with which H.D., despite all her then recent and intense engage-
ment with film, appears to have colluded) conceals the profundity of the relation-
ship between psychoanalysis and film. Psychoanalysis is itself cinema, the projection
and play of sign, image, and scene upon a screen that, like H.D.’s representations of
Freud’s “fourth wall,” is at once past, present, and future and is simultaneously absent
and present, wall and not-wall. In this reading, the absence of filmic analogies in
Freud’s writings does not signal an indifference toward cinema. In the absence of anal-
ogy, a more fundamental relationship—the identity between psychoanalysis and film—
begins to emerge.

Notes
1. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction
Theory (New York: Penguin, ), .
2. Hugo von Hoffmannsthal, “A Substitute for Dreams,” The London Mercury, November
 to April , –, translated from “Der Ersatz für die Träume” ().
3. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (London: Macmillan, ), , trans. Arthur
Mitchell, from L’Evolution creatrice ().
4. See in particular the work of Gilles Deleuze, especially Cinéma : L’image-mouvement
(Paris: Minuit, ), trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam as Cinema : The Move-
ment Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ); and Cinéma : L’image-temps
 Dreaming and Cinematographic Consciousness f 

(Paris: Minuit, ), trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta as Cinema : The Time-Image
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ).
5. Mary Ann Doane has argued for a conceptual and historical link between Freud and
Marey, in that both psychoanalysis and chronophotography were attempts to correlate storage
and time. See Doane, “Freud, Marey, and the Cinema,” in Endless Night: Cinema and Psycho-
analysis, Parallel Histories, ed. Janet Bergstrom (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Cali-
fornia Press, ), –.
6. Henri Bergson, Dreams (), trans. Edwin E. Slosson (London: Unwin).
7. Havelock Ellis, The World of Dreams (London: Constable, ), .
8. Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work (London: Hogarth, ), :.
9. Stephen Heath, “Cinema and Psychoanalysis: Parallel Histories,” in Endless Night:
Cinema and Psychoanalysis, Parallel Histories, ed. J. Bergstrom (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, ), .
10. Jones, Sigmund Freud, –.
11. Sigmund Freud, The Letters of Sigmund Freud, ed. Ernst L. Freud, trans. Tania and
James Stern (New York: Basic Books, ), .
12. Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture
(Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, ).
13. Lou Andreas-Salomé, The Freud Journal, trans. S. A. Leavy (London: Quartet, ),
.
14. Hugo Munsterberg, The Film: A Psychological Study (New York: Dover, ), .
15. “A Psycho-Analytic Dialogue: The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Karl Abraham,
–,” ed. Ernst L. Freud and Hilda C. Abraham, trans. Bernard Marsh and Hilda C.
Abraham (New York: Basic Books, ), .
16. The Close Up essays discussed in this chapter have been anthologized in Close Up
–: Cinema and Modernism, ed. James Donald, Anne Friedberg, and Laura Marcus
(London: Cassell, ).
17. Hanns Sachs, “Film Psychology” (), in ibid., , .
18. Hanns Sachs, Psycho-Analyse: Rätsel des Unbewussten (Berlin: Lichtbild-Buhner, ).
19. Otto Rank, The Double: A Psychoanalytical Study, trans. Harry Tucker (London:
Maresfield, ). .
20. Richard Taylor and Ian Christie, eds., The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema
in Documents – (London: Routledge, ), .
21. Yuri Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and Its Cultural Reception, trans. Alan Bodger
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), .
22. Friedrich Kittler, Literature, Media, Information Systems (Amsterdam: Overseas Pub-
lishers Association, ).
23. Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ),
.
24. Laura Marcus, Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams: New Interdisciplinary
Essays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ).
25. Ella Freeman Sharpe, Dream Analysis (London: Hogarth, ), –.
26. Bertram Lewin, “Sleep, the Mouth, and the Dream Screen,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly
 (): –.
27. Bertram Lewin, The Image and the Past (New York: International Universities Press,
), –.
 F Laura Marcus

28. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. C.
Britton, A. Williams, B. Brewster, and A. Guzzetti (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ).
29. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (New York:
Oxford University Press, ), .
30. Axel Honneth, “A Communicative Disclosure of the Past: on the Relation between
Anthropology and Philosophy of History in Walter Benjamin,” in The Actuality of Walter Ben-
jamin, ed. L. Marcus and L. Nead (London: Lawrence and Wishart, ).
31. Ibid., .
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid., .
34. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” trans.
Harry Zohn, in Illuminations (New York: Schocken, ), .
35. Metz, Imaginary Signifier, .
36. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ), .
37. H.D., “Expiation,” Close Up , no.  (): -.
38. H.D., “Conrad Veidt: The Student of Prague,” Close Up , no.  (), –.
39. Close Up was edited by Kenneth Macpherson and by Bryher (Winifred Ellerman).
Bryher was also analyzed by Hanns Sachs, and writes about him in her memoir, The Heart to
Artemis: A Writer’s Memoirs (London: Collins, ).
40. H.D., Tribute to Freud (Manchester: Carcanet, ).
41. Ibid., .
42. Béla Balázs, Theory of Film, trans. Edith Bone (London: Dobson, ), .
 R . A Knock
Made for the Eye
Image and Awakening in
Deleuze and Freud
Yün Peng R

Thought as Theater
This essay is part of a larger project in which I try to trace certain links in twentieth-
century thought among thinkers such as Freud, Deleuze, Benjamin, Heidegger, and
Blanchot. I introduce my theme by referring to Foucault’s  essay on Deleuze,
“Theatrum Philosophicum.” Here Foucault writes that the most important question
for philosophy now, as Deleuze shows us, is the relation between thought and non-
thought, or stupidity. Thinking is therefore an act in the double sense of the word. It
is first of all an act of giving birth to itself, from and in relation to stupidity. The act
of birth—and here comes the second sense of the word—is enacted in what Foucault
calls “a theater of mime,” in which thought “approaches” and “mimes” stupidity by
remaining “motionless to the point of stupefaction,” and lets stupidity “slowly grow”
within itself, all the while awaiting “the shock of difference.”1 Deleuze’s “philosophy as
theater” is the scene of thought: “multiple, fugitive, and instantaneous scenes in which
blind gestures signal to each other” (, ).
I wish to call attention to the word scene here. In What Is Philosophy? Deleuze
and Guattari speak of philosophy as being dependent on a prephilosophical act,
namely, the laying out of a plane of immanence. The plane of immanence “is not a con-
cept that is or can be thought but rather the image of thought” (my emphasis).2 The
question I ask here is, why image, or scene? Why does the scene or the image crop
up precisely at the critical moment when it is the relation between thought and its
outside that is at stake?
In “Theatrum Philosophicum,” the most important gesture Foucault sees in De-
leuze’s philosophy of immanence is an affirmation of both the event and the phantasm:


 F Yün Peng

Thinking . . . requires the release of a phantasm in the mime that produces it as a

single stroke; it makes the event indefinite so that it repeats itself as a singular uni-
versal. It is this construction of the event and the phantasm that leads to thought in
an absolute sense. A further clarification: if the role of thought is to produce the phan-
tasm theatrically and repeat the universal event in its extreme point of singularity,
then what is thought itself if not the event that befalls the phantasm and the phantas-
matic repetition of the absent event? ()

I propose that Deleuze’s concept of the “crystal image” is precisely the image of
thought with which I am concerned. In the crystal image Deleuze has found a dif-
ferent place for phantasm other than the one defined by the dichotomy of “essence”
versus “appearance.” A crystal image is a redoubling, a “small circuit” in which the real
and the imaginary, the actual and the virtual “chase after each other, exchange roles
and become indiscernible.” It is the “coalescence of an actual image and its virtual
image, the indiscernibility of two distinct images.”3 In the crystal image, the two
sides—the real and the imaginary, the virtual and the actual—are linked only by the
heterogeneity between them, and this in the same way that, for Foucault, the theater
of thought affirms both the event and phantasm, but affirms only in disjunction. The
crystal image is thus a scene in which event and phantasm are constantly in exchange
with each other.4
A fuller understanding of the crystal image takes us to Freud, a thinker who, as
we shall see, tackled a very similar problem.

Freud’s Dream: A Crystal Image

The Dream of the Burning Child is introduced by Freud in chapter  of The Interpre-
tation of Dreams, where Freud is about to embark on his general psychology. The
dream, which Lacan considers to be “in a category of its own,” goes as follows:
A father had been watching beside his child’s sick-bed for days and nights on end. After
the child had died, he went into the next room to lie down, but left the door open so
that he could see from his bedroom into the room in which his child’s body was laid
out, with tall candles standing around it. An old man had been engaged to keep watch
over it, and sat beside the body murmuring prayers. After a few hour’s sleep, the father
had a dream that his child was standing beside his bed, caught him by the arm and whis-
pered to him reproachfully: “Father, don’t you see I’m burning?” He woke up, noticed
a bright glare from the next room, hurried into it and found that the old watchman
had dropped off to sleep and that the wrappings and one of the arms of his beloved
child’s dead body had been burned by a lighted candle that had fallen on them.5

With a gesture uncharacteristic of him, Freud quickly sets aside the question of mean-
ing: the dream, he says, “raises no problem of interpretation” (SE V, ). The peculi-
arity of the dream is rather the structural symmetry, the “quasi-identity,” as Lacan puts
 A Knock Made for the Eye f 

it, between the burning in the dream and the burning in reality.6 But precisely because
the distance between dreaming and waking is here at its smallest limit, the difference
between them is all the more irreducible. The first question that arises is thus: what is
the relation between the dream scene and the reality?
In analyzing Freud’s dream, Lacan offers an example. Suppose someone knocks
at the door when he, Lacan, is asleep. Because of the knock, he begins to have a dream,
though in the dream the knock is disguised, as it often happens in so-called “awaken-
ing dreams” (i.e., dreams in which the instigating disturbance is masked so as to pro-
long the sleep). He then wakes up and is aware of the knocking. But how—since the
knocking is thus absent from perception? Here is Lacan’s main point: the knock that
finds its place in consciousness is a re-presentation. In other words, the knock is re-
presented in the subject’s consciousness insofar as it becomes caught up in a web of
coordinates reestablished upon awakening (“I’m here,” “I am waking up,” etc.). There
is a split between perception (as reception) and consciousness. When the knocking
occurs in the subject’s sleep, its impression is received, but not registered in con-
sciousness. It only enters the subject’s consciousness in the form of representation,
thus at the very moment when it has already and definitively been left out of percep-
tion. The knock itself, as an event, therefore, eludes the subject through the irreducible
gap between perception (which comes too early) and consciousness (which comes too
late). The event of the knock is encountered neither in dream, nor in waking.7 Mean-
while, the dream, though it does not reproduce the knock, nevertheless transmits its
effect; the subject is “knocked up.”
The Dream of the Burning Child has a similar structure. The reality (noise, glare,
etc.) recognized by the waking consciousness is—as in the case of the knocking—a
representation, or, in Lacan’s words, a representation “by means of reality.” The dream
scene, on the other hand, is the counterpart of the conscious representation. It is that
which takes the place of the representation. In other words, the dream is not a repre-
sentation; it is rather a placeholder for something that is not present. This something
is the real.8
Precisely because the dream is not a representation (but is rather, like Freud’s
soldiers’ dreams, already a repetition, an afterimage, as it were, of the missed en-
counter with the real) it is, for Lacan, more “real” than the noise, glare, and so on by
which the father also recognizes the reality of the fire in the next room. It is “only in
the dream” that the father’s encounter with another reality, in the form of the child’s
voice, can occur. But that is not all. Lacan is rather more interested in the “forking”
that has taken place between reality and dream, a forking in which lies the “ambigu-
ity of awakening.” It is “between dream and awakening” that the encounter is missed.9
The real is therefore located precisely in the gap, in the parting of the two correspon-
ding lines: the real is what binds them by dispersing them. Though absent, the “knock”
of the real impregnates the dream, which rises up as the effect of the missed encoun-
ter and also forms the empty core around which consciousness weaves together its
 F Yün Peng

representations. A bullet of void, the “knock” shoots through, and binds together, the
two walls of the symmetrical structure of awakening: “I am knocked up.”10
As described in Lacan’s reading of Freud, this structure is precisely that of a crys-
tal image. The crystal image is pivotal to Deleuze’s attempt at extracting such notions
as the “cause” and the “social whole” from their Hegelian dialectical entanglement.
Following Spinoza, he argues that the real cause, which is “coextensive with the whole
social field” can only be an immanent, “absent cause.” The immanent cause is a cause
that manifests itself only in the effects it produces; it is “‘not above’ but within the very
tissue” of its own effects. The immanent cause realizes itself “only by taking diverg-
ing paths, splitting into dualisms, and following lines of differentiation.” 11 In other
words, the virtual actualizes itself by dispersing into two forms: between these two
is an irreducible “non-place.” In Lacan’s version, this gap forced open by the virtual is
the place—or non-place—of the unconscious, or the real. The unconscious is a limbo:
it is “neither being, nor non-being, but the unrealized”—in other words, the real is the
virtual.12 It is a gap in causality: “[T]he Freudian unconscious is situated at that point,
where, between cause and that which it affects, there is always something wrong.”13
But the gap is precisely the cause, because the encounter with the real is always missed
and an entire series of repetitions is generated. Thus, in the Dream of the Burning
Child, the real is neither the dream, nor the reality: it is rather the power that has
connected the two by setting them apart, the absent “knock” that has produced the
crystalline structure.
In the Dream of the Burning Child, as with a crystal image, the imaginary (the
dream scene) comes into relation with the real, and “there is no longer any linkage of
the real with the imaginary, but [rather an] indiscernibility of the two, a perpetual
exchange.”14 First, there is the indiscernibility between the dream scene and the trau-
matic void behind: the awakening takes place precisely in the dream. Then there is
an exchange between the actual and virtual at another level: for what is the accident?
As Freud shows in the Wolf-Man Case, an accident, such as the witnessing of the “pri-
mal scene,” is a contingent event in an individual’s life; but it “becomes necessary” as
soon as it marks the point of contact between the individual and phylogenetic devel-
opment (SE XVII). If we think of the latter as a circuit of repetition that exists in-
dependently outside the individual, we begin to understand that the unconscious is
at once “the inside that lies deeper than any internal world,” and the outside that is
“farther away than any external world.”15

Cinema and the Primal Scene

The resemblance between dream and crystal image is not a coincidental one. Accord-
ing to Deleuze, the crystal image emerges out of a crisis that marks the “break” between
modern (postwar) cinema and classical (prewar) cinema: the crisis of the sensory-motor
 A Knock Made for the Eye f 

link. For him, the breakdown of the sensory-motor link—or, in other words, the link
between perception and action—is what characterizes the postwar period as a new
phase of modernity. In cinema, the rupture changes the nature of image. Classical cin-
ema makes an attempt to contain the crisis by reestablishing the link between images
and extending it into action. In modern cinema, this is no longer possible. Action, as
well as narrative, becomes fragmented. Thus being cut off from motor development,
an image comes into relation only with its virtual image. For the modern subject, the
breakdown of the sensory-motor link means that s/he no longer has the ability to act;
s/he is lost in a purely optical and acoustic situation that no longer extends into action.
The character becomes a seer rather than an agent.16
The breakdown of the sensory-motor link has left us profoundly in the condition
of dreaming. Like images in cinema, dream unfolds in a suspended world in which no
action is possible. Indeed, it is the paralysis of the subject in dream that puzzles Freud
in his interpretation of the Dream of the Burning Child: at a moment when immedi-
ate action seems most necessary, why dream at all?
For Deleuze, the loss of one’s ability to act is the consequence of the condition
of modernity. It is part and parcel of the shock experience characteristic of this era of
the subject. The subject’s perception no longer extends into action because s/he is
confronted with something “too powerful, too beautiful, too painful” for him/her to
act.17 The modern experience is too overwhelmingly shocking to be absorbed by con-
sciousness. Likewise, modern cinema becomes a scene that unfolds by itself in front
of one’s eyes, one both too overwhelming and too fascinating—this is the primal scene.
To compare cinema to the primal scene is not invariably to reduce cinematic
images to castration. The fundamental resemblance between the two lies rather in the
peculiar temporal structure these share, namely, the structure of deferral Freud dis-
covers in the Wolf-Man Case. In cinema as in dream, time is “out of joint.” There is
an essential passivity on the part of the subject. The position of the seer—the subject
in dream and the character involved in optical and acoustic situations—is “profoundly
that of someone who does not see. The subject does not see where he is leading, he
follows.”18 If the subject is paralyzed in its action, it is because there is an essential
piece, something fundamentally missing. Vis-à-vis the scene, the subject is always
either too early or too late. This also amounts to saying that the scene is never entirely
a presence, never fully present.
The temporality of deferral brings the question of visibility to the fore, inasmuch
as perceptual images are associated with consciousness and therefore with represen-
tation. In every perceptual image, a traumatic “knock” is always missed. It is in this
sense that Lacan maintains that the gaze is what is always elided in vision.19 However,
the “knock,” which bypasses the shield of consciousness to leave a trace in the uncon-
scious, comes back in dream and is what motivates dream images. Images in dream
therefore unfold in the gap between perception and consciousness. Likewise, con-
sciousness is always belated in the “purely optical and sound situation” of the postwar
 F Yün Peng

cinema. Thus in dream as well as in cinema, one sees precisely what is invisible, what
is eluded in the “normal” perception. In other words, what distinguishes the image of
Irma’s throat in Freud’s dream, or the butterfly in the Wolf-Man’s dream, from “nor-
mal” perceptual images is that they are stripped of the “wandering shadow” of the ego
and are rather haunted by the encounter with the Real.
For Deleuze, image is distinguished from perception because it is neither hidden,
nor visible. The visible in modern cinema is haunted by the invisible, and what one
sees in cinema is precisely the invisible. How can something be “neither hidden nor
visible”? We have first to realize that here we are not dealing with the opposition
between the surface and what is hidden beneath it. In other words, this is not a ques-
tion of depth. The invisible is not hidden. We are rather dealing with something like a
film strip—to use Jean-Clet Martin’s metaphor—on which images are superimposed.20
Everything is on one single surface; one only needs the right running speed for what
is on this surface to become legible. This is precisely the problem Freud faces in the
Wolf-Man Case. The importance of the “primal scene” as an analytic—and, shall we
say philosophical—construct, lies in that it enables Freud to make a temporal cut into
the entangled and superimposed threads of the case. The primal scene holds together
two irreconcilable things, namely, the unconscious, which is timeless, and the analytic
process, which is necessarily temporal. To extend the metaphor a little bit, shall we say
that with the primal scene Freud has discovered the cinematic apparatus necessary to
run the film strip?
Understood in this way, image becomes a matter not so much of visibility as
of “legibility” or “readability.”21 Here Deleuze’s concern converges with that of Freud
when the latter compares dream images to hieroglyphic signs, and also with the con-
cerns of Walter Benjamin when he likens modern photographic images to “scenes of
crime” and maintains that captions are obligatory for such images to be readable.22 For
all three thinkers, image (the visible) has to be understood in conjunction with speech
(the articulable). Thus, for Deleuze, what modern cinema does for philosophy is to
bring to the fore this relation—or rather “non-relation”—between image and speech.
By raising the two to a common limit, which separates them but connects them pre-
cisely in separating them, both image and speech are opened up to the outside.23 An
aberrant event, indeed: a crime scene.

The Irrational Cut of Awakening

The dream “raises no problem of interpretation”: what remains enigmatic is rather the
very nature of dream. This is how Freud ends his discussion of the Dream of the Burn-
ing Child. But here the writing suddenly turns dark. From now on, “every path will end
in darkness” (SE VII, ). What is the anxiety behind this moment of darkness, if not
the question that has also haunted Descartes, namely, the question of distinguishing
 A Knock Made for the Eye f 

“toilsome wakefulness” from the “bedeviling hoaxes” of dreams?24 In other words, how
does one know that one’s interpretation is “awake,” that it has reached the moment of
“awakening”? Now, near the end of the dream book, this question is at once more
acute and more difficult: awakening in relation to what? Awakening to what? Awak-
ening as what? (Where is the subject at?) Awakening forces Freud to confront the
limit of interpretation, not as an infinite plenitude of meaning, but as the beyond of
meaning. When it comes to the Dream of the Burning Child, it is no longer a question
of inquiring about the “hidden meaning.” For here the dream is all about the scene of
a wake as well as about awakening—at an hour when all are asleep. Lacan’s question is
therefore: awakened by what? Or, what is a knock?
Perhaps Deleuze also precisely has awakening in mind when he suggests, quot-
ing Antonin Artaud, that image in cinema should be a “knock made for the eye.”25 The
essence of the image, Deleuze says, is only realized when it produces “a shock to
thought.”26 This is because, like “a matron who has not always existed” (Artaud), thought
“has no other reason to function than its own birth, always the repetition of its own
birth, secret and profound.”27 Thought, which “has not always existed,” needs to be pro-
voked. Here we encounter Heidegger: “Most thought-provoking in our thought-provoking
time is that we are still not thinking.” 28 What provokes thought is stupidity, i.e., what
withdraws from thought, yet must be thought. The withdrawal, like a maelstrom,
exerts an attraction in the place of the void. Thus Deleuze says that what forces us to
think is the “impower” (impouvoir) or powerlessness of thought.29 The question is: how
does thought “introject” stupidity, which long ago “has turned away” from thought?30
Thought’s relation—or nonrelation—to its outside is the structure of awakening;
thought as an act must be understood as the repetition of the moment of awakening.
Awakening is no longer a matter of certainty, as it is with Descartes. As we have seen
from the Dream of the Burning Child, the “knock” is encountered neither in dream,
nor in waking, but is rather missed in the gap between the two. Between dream and
reality (considered as representation), awakening is a void, an interval that binds the
two by setting them apart. It is precisely what Deleuze calls an irrational cut.
Cinema’s potential for thought therefore has to be sought in its ability to set the
power of the interval into relief: “[T]he interval is set free, the interstice becomes irre-
ducible and stands on its own.”31 The interval is “power” because it is not a secondary
term added to two existing primary terms; the interval is primary to that which it sep-
arates, but connects in separating. In Deleuze’s words:

[T]he whole undergoes a mutation, because it has ceased to be the One-Being, in

order to become the constitutive “and” of things, the constitutive between-two of
images. The whole thus merges with [what] Blanchot calls the force of “dispersal of
the Outside,” or “the vertigo of spacing.”32

In other words, the force of the Outside is the “constitutive ‘and’” that creates through
bifurcating and evacuating itself.
 F Yün Peng

The primary spacing demands a different understanding of both space and time.
Spacing is no ordinary space. Once again we think of Freud’s assertion that dream is
a different locality. Lacan also elaborates on this in his discussion of the Dream of
the Burning Child. The dream is “another locality, another space, another scene, the
between perception and consciousness,” because it unfolds in the causal gap, in the
liminal space breached by the “knock.”33 Dream is precisely a matter of “spacing,” and
its secret is not to be sought in fantasy and wish fulfillment, but rather in its nature
as an envelope of the real. This space, where the “knock” is repeated but not repre-
sented, is a feminine sort of space. It is a space that is “knocked up,” impregnated. As
Shoshana Felman argues, the space of dream, like the navel, does not simply lead to
the unknown, but is rather the “pregnancy” of the unknown and the “fecundity” of
feminine resistance.34
In cinema, one finds the same enveloping structure in what Deleuze calls fram-
ing. For him, framing in modern cinema is not to be understood in the classical out-
of-field sense; rather, sound image and visual image become frames themselves and
are, in turn, framed by the common limit, the interstitial space, between them. In this
way, speech is made to confront the visual image as its irreducible internal spacing,
while the visual image is raised to the level of legibility by moving toward the limit
set by speech. Image as frame draws what essentially cannot be thought into the heart
of thought; it “colors” stupidity, as it were.
Benjamin once wrote that “the past can be seized only as an image which flashes
up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.”35 The reason that
the past “can be seized only as an image” is because the past is an absolute past; it is
time itself. When Foucault says that thinking produces the phantasm and “repeat[s]
the universal event in its extreme point of singularity,” what is at stake is the same
problem Freud was also facing in the Wolf-Man Case, namely, how does something
timeless, such as the unconscious or the event, cut into something temporal? Image
should be considered as situated precisely in this radical heterogeneity. Impregnated
with the seed of time, image’s delicate, enveloping structure is opened up by the power
that is time and that continuously bifurcates.
It is because void haunts image that image, like Eurydice’s face in the night, fas-
cinates thought. Thought, fascinated by image, is the thought of becoming, or the
becoming things of thought.

To experience an event as image is not to free oneself of that event, to dissociate one-
self from it, as is asserted by the esthetic version of the image and the serene ideal of
classical art, but neither is it to engage oneself with it through a free decision: it is to
let oneself be taken by it, to go from the region of the real, where we hold ourselves at
a distance from things the better to use them, to that other region where distance
holds us, this distance which is now unliving, unavailable depth, an inappreciable
remoteness become in some sense the sovereign and last power of things.36
 A Knock Made for the Eye f 

Notes
1. Michel Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Prac-
tice (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, ), .
2. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Graham Burchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), .
3. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema , trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, ), .
4. Ibid., –.
5. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, trans.
James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, ), .
6. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheri-
dan (New York, London: Norton, ), .
7. Ibid., .
8. Ibid., –.
9. Ibid., –.
10. Ibid., .
11. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, ), .
12. Ibid., .
13. Ibid., .
14. Deleuze, Cinema , .
15. Deleuze, Foucault, .
16. Deleuze, Cinema , .
17. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University
Press, ), .
18. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, .
19. Ibid., .
20. Jean-Clet Martin, “Eyes of the Outside,” in Deleuze: A Critical Reader, ed. Paul Patton
(Oxford, England, and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, ).
21. Deleuze, Negotiations, ; Cinema , .
22. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, ), .
23. Deleuze, Cinema , .
24. René Descartes, Meditations (Indianapolis, Ind., and Cambridge, Mass.: Hackett Pub-
lishing Company, ), , .
25. Deleuze, Cinema , .
26. Ibid., .
27. Ibid., .
28. Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper
and Row, ), .
29. Deleuze, Cinema , .
30. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? .
31. Deleuze, Cinema , .
32. Ibid., .
33. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, .
34. Shoshana Felman, “Postal Survival, or The Question of the Navel,” in Yale French
Studies  (): –. In this light the “narrative envelope” of the Dream of the Burning
 F Yün Peng

Child is worth noting. According to Freud, the dream was told to him by a woman patient, who
herself had heard it in a lecture on dreams. The woman then repeated it in her own dream (SE
V, ). Who else, at the time, was giving lectures on dreams other than Freud himself? (I owe
this point to Thomas Pepper and his two seminars on Freud.) But when Freud says that the
actual source of the dream was unknown, he is not simply lying. For what does it mean to ask
who dreams the dream, anyway? One finds here a relay between the virtual and the actual,
between the analyst and the patient. This is the becoming hysteric of Freud.
35. Benjamin, Illuminations, .
36. Maurice Blanchot, “Two Versions of the Imaginary,” in The Station Hill Blanchot
Reader (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill, ), –.
R
Matters of
Intensity
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 R . Insomnia
Pablo Kovalovsky

Translated by Cecily Marcus R

Through insomnia
the rain slips its painful phrasing. . . .
—Pedro Arturo Estrada

The Isakower Phenomenon

The withdrawal of stimuli coming from the external world, and which Freud deemed
necessary to the onset of sleep, entails, according to Otto Isakower, a phenomenon
that occurs in some people at the moment just prior to falling asleep.1 In his descrip-
tions Isakower notes how this “falling” reveals a subjective destitution, and how the
subject later reencounters itself as an object in the dream scene. This phenomenon
consists of sensations that imply the dissolution of the corporeal limits between the
inside and the outside, a loss of corporeal integrity, and a predominance of the oral
zone. In his text Isakower also compares this to other phenomena, such as déjà vu and
the epileptic aura. The visions and sensations described in his work of  have the
virtue of linking the fall into sleep with the undoing of personhood and with estrange-
ment—crepuscular states linking the dispersion of the phantasm into its components,
the subject and the object. Isakower argues that this withdrawal is gradual and that
it presupposes an irregular distribution of cathexes, which, once withdrawn from ex-
ternal world, flow back into the I. As a consequence of this irregular distribution, the
body is confused with the external world. On the other hand, in casting the oral zone—
not the return to the maternal breast, as Freud had done—as the paradigm of the fall
into sleep, something between the child and the mother is left unresolved, remaining
open to the elaborations of another author, Bertram Lewin.
Lewin affirms Isakower’s theory, especially since the incorporation of oral stim-
uli, Lewin tell us, dissolves the limits between subject and object; and it is this that


 F Pablo Kovalovsky

grants the reversibility characteristic of dream images.2 Moreover, Lewin adds that the
squashing of the breast by the nursling literally flattens the breast, so that it serves as
the projection screen for the dream dreamed by the sated child.
This screen is—it doesn’t represent—the wish to sleep. It doesn’t enter the rep-
resentational field of the dream. This is to say: the dream screen is the border of the
dream, it is the real of sleep. Invoking Freud again, Lewin later adds that the tran-
scription of the dream renders it useless for the purposes of analysis because the
transcription emphasizes the screen rather than the dream itself. As an example, he
describes how a supposedly transcribed dream is found, upon awakening, to be a
blank page. That empty page, Lewin says, was the screen for the dream that wasn’t.

In Freud’s Work
The two functions of dreams—wish fulfillment and guarding sleep—underwent diver-
gent fates in Freud’s work. It is only from  on, with “An Introduction of Narcis-
sism,” in which Freud develops the imaginary structure of the ego, that certain clinical
consequences of these differences appear. One year later, in the “Metapsychological
Supplement to the Theory of Dreams,” Freud will announce that he is addressing such
affective states as grief and falling in love (significantly, he does not say “melancholia”),
as well as sleep and the phenomenon of dreaming. Freud writes:

We are not in the habit of devoting much thought to the fact that every night human
beings lay aside [ablegen] the wrappings in which they have enveloped their skin, as
well as anything which they may use as a supplement to their bodily organs (so far
as they have succeeded in making good those organs’ deficiencies by substitutes), for
instance, their spectacles, their false hair and teeth, and so on. We may add that when
they go to sleep they carry out an entirely analogous undressing of their minds and
lay aside most of their psychical acquisitions. Thus on both counts they approach
remarkably close to the situation in which they began life. (SE XIV, )

The nakedness of the state of sleep and the peaceful isolation from the external world’s
stimuli that Freud calls “primitive narcissism” concur with the tendency to go from the
lowest possible level of excitation to nirvana. On the horizon of an imaginary forma-
tion, Freud places the impossible absolute jouissance in the confines of horror.
The so-called wish to sleep is now defined as a passion: “not wanting to know
anything about the external world” (will nichts von der Aussenwelt wissen).
Here affirmed as disturbers of sleep, dreams—and the wishes fulfilled in them—
become knowledge. The strangeness3 the dream bears4 is produced by the collapse of
the scenic perspective,5 which supposes the vacillation of the structure of phantasm.
In the dream the gaze “shows itself ” and disturbs us, while the I seems to have multi-
plied, at once to have been disseminated everywhere and nowhere.
 Insomnia f 

At the border of the dream—neither external nor internal to it, neither separate
from nor part of it—the function of secondary revision is to keep watch so the dream
may continue, and thus to prolong the state of sleep. If the dream is an “awakening that
begins,” the secondary revision is what makes it intelligible, setting it on a stage and
supplying it with a façade that integrates phrases and locutions, material from waking
life ready and available for use—“prêt à porter,” as Lacan calls it.6 The dreamer’s I
makes itself present in the form of a negation: “It is only a dream” provides the strange-
ness of the dream image with a stage upon which perspective is restored and the un-
determined parts of the dream dissolve. On the edge of the dream, negation serves
as the “shifter” linking the event with its legibility. This negation not only makes the
dream legible, but it provides the frame that allows sleep to continue. By putting a veil
over the dream’s strangeness it shows up as writing. The double nature implicit in the
renunciation “it is only a dream” is clear: at once it shows and hides the letter of the
dream itself.
Heine’s humor served well for Freud’s attempts to describe this negation (or sec-
ondary revision) and its function, which Freud compares to Heine’s “sleepless philo-
sopher”: “With his nightcaps and the tatters of his dressing gown he patches up the
structure of the universe.” Of secondary revision itself Freud writes: “It fills up the gaps
in the dream structure with shreds and patches.”7
If the imminence of anxiety brought on by the possibility of wish fulfillment
interrupts both dreaming and sleeping, then secondary revision separates these, pro-
voking a first awakening even while one still sleeps.

The Treatment of Insomnia

The temporal gap introduced between dream and sleep is an index of the suspended
jouissance sustaining the dream scene. This economy of jouissance, which is linked to
the introduction of the imaginary of narcissism, leads Freud to ponder the treatment
of insomnia. Until this point, insomnia had merely been considered an annex to actual
neuroses as a toxic excess of excitations.8
What can be taken from the above is that neither the absence of the ego, which
localizes the dream through negation (“it is only a dream”), nor the case in which the
ego doesn’t emit the signal of anxiety to the subject (because for Freud, the signal of
anxiety comes from the ego toward the subject, and for this reason is distinct from
other states described here) will cause the subject to awaken, on account of a deficit of
the imaginary function of the ego. Indetermination and strangeness persist because of
the lack of delimitation of the dream scene, which has its correlate in the body. In this
way, the dream is narrowly tied to the imaginary function. We find ourselves in the
nightmare from which there is no waking up and sleep is never interrupted. Marked
by the jouissance of the Other, and beyond the subjectivation of anxiety (inasmuch as
 F Pablo Kovalovsky

here the ego does not emit any signal to the subject), the function of the Other’s desire
reveals the effect of madness characteristic of many clinical pictures that coexist with
insomnia, that is to say where the imaginary function is also deficient.9
Further on Freud outlines the relationship between melancholia and insomnia.
He will explain the exacerbation of narcissism or its deficit. The point from which one
cannot remove the object to which the I is tied—a piece of clothing or something that
supplements a part of the body—corresponds, in insomnia, to an equivalent retention
where the superego is the sleepless guardian. A supplemental body part, though, is not
just a prosthesis. It is the real of an apparatus that refers to everything mediating the
body, expanding toward anything that is “incorporated” into the body but that still
subsists at the limit of the corporeal: the objects “a” for Lacan, for example, are “in-
corporated” as extensions of the body—the pain of a mutilated limb as much as the
pain of a phantom one both demonstrate the phantasmatic character of the image of
one’s own body. In  Freud also speaks about hypochondria. It is known that the
passion to “want to know nothing about the external world,” as in the passion for igno-
rance Freud ascribes to the sleeper, is authenticated in hypochondria as the passion for
“wanting only to know.” This “wanting only to know,” the incessant and undetermined
exteriorization by which the body makes itself aware, is the insomniac’s greatest warn-
ing. The insomniac evokes for us the pathetic figure of the mythological guardian,
Argos. With one hundred eyes surrounding his head, fifty of which are always open
even as he sleeps, Argos is nonetheless hypnotized by Hermes’ flute and beheaded.
The relationship between hypnotized and hypnotist, which Freud compares to
the sleeping mother’s attentiveness to her baby’s cry, represents this part of the sub-
ject that is always irremediably awake, even while in the depths of sleep. The absolute
of sleep is disturbed by something exceptional, and in this case it is a unique object.
The melancholic’s self-reproach is consistent with his imaginary deficit of self-
recognition, the only trait Freud situates as a specific difference contrasting melan-
cholia to mourning. The critical sleepless instance persecutes the I in a savage and
incessant way. The hypnotist takes on this vigilant function of the super-ego. He
acquires the power of the object that supports the tyranny of the pulsation to make
this object coincide with the ego-ideal.
In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud is aware that at the root
of the passionate phenomenon of falling in love (which, significantly, he already placed
in this context along with mourning and melancholia in ) is a homologous con-
junction in which hypnosis can be used for enchantment or for terror.
In sleep the part of the subject that is still awake will be inhabited either by the
wish fulfilled of the dream or by the phantasm of the hypnotist. The hypnotist occu-
pies the place corresponding to the subject who sleeps, annulling the dream. The
hypnotic sleep keeps a part awake, which corresponds to the dream inasmuch as the
dream is the awakeness of sleep: if there is no sleeping subject, the hypnotist is a
recourse, a parapet that doesn’t keep the reward of the jouissance of the Other from
 Insomnia f 

the sleeper, sending him to nirvana. This part that stays awake puts a limit on the
jouissance of the Other and can be used for the worst things—as is seen in Group Psy-
chology. This is the price paid by the subject for erecting a barrier against the jouis-
sance that ravages him.
From the beginning Freud was aware that the hypnotist localizes and gives a
fixed border to this part of awakeness existing within sleep in a way that prevents
the sleeper from being at the mercy of the absolute jouissance of primary narcissism.
Maximum jouissance is conjoined with the imaginary and incestuous horror, the
return to the mother’s womb. One could well interrogate the analyst’s own position in
examining determinate structures or in moments of the cure where, by a lack of out-
lining the oneiric scene, the nightmare of insomnia reappears.

The Analyst’s Position

The phrase “It is only a dream” opens the dream space and allows the dream scene to
advance beyond its own negation. The enunciation of the negation makes possible
both the dream and play.
In this sense, the place that Freud provides for humor is significant.10 In humor,
the super-ego is kind, caring for the I of the subject like a child and creating the effect
of illusion (Illusion) in the place of a painful reality (Realität). These are Freud’s terms,
and it is important to point out that one might confuse them with Wirklichkeit, a real-
ity represented as both framed and less painful. Humor, though, sets a stage, turning
the real of the dream into fiction while caricaturing the imaginary side of power by
increasing it out of all realistic proportions. By stressing these traits, solemnity fades.
The ideal detaches itself from the object, underlining the hypnotic power of their
union. Access to the comic comes not via the joke—which is the way of the uncon-
scious—but via disavowal, just as the disavowing “it is only a dream” hides the dream’s
strangeness at the same time that it shows the letter of the dream. It is a way of turn-
ing the unreal event of the dream into a text, like a transcription of another reality—
an Other scene that prolongs the negated event and allows it to coexist in the manner
of one dream inside another.
On the other hand, hypnosis prevents the passage of the dream scene to the wak-
ing scene, as the phenomenon of passionate infatuation shows. The person is awake,
but the subject is asleep, a situation that evokes somnambulism.

Dora 
In  Dora visits a clinic because of the hearing difficulties accompanying the
migraines she has suffered since childhood. She is interviewed by Felix Deutsch11
 F Pablo Kovalovsky

and complains of insomnia. She relates that her son, whom she suspects has started
to date women, comes home in the night’s wee hours. She lies awake listening for
his footsteps.
Deutsch interprets that Dora cannot sleep because she is unable to keep from
hearing her son’s footsteps. Suffice it to say that she is stunned. The problems that
brought her to consult a doctor improve immediately. We should differentiate, how-
ever, between the character of footsteps that are surprising and continuous on the
one hand, and those that make sleep possible on the other. The state of being stunned
blocks the localization of the lost object; and when there is no respite, the object
retains its voraciousness because of the indeterminate source of the noise. Dora is
stunned precisely by the footsteps she did not hear. On the contrary: the footsteps she
actually hears localize a time and delimit a field of an absence.

By Way of Concluding
The passage from the phantasm’s screen to the dream screen implies an imaginary
buoying up of an object or of a place as a support for the I, which has cut itself off. The
same I will later say: “It is only a dream.” This development coincides with Winnicott’s
mention of a zone in his dreams he called “My Club,” a place that established itself in
his dreams after he stopped being a member of the Athenaeum. The equivalence
between insomnia, nightmare, melancholia, and hypochondria supposes for the ana-
lyst a position in the cure that opens the scene to free association, while hypnosis,
inasmuch as it blocks the possibility of both dreaming and play, brings together the
suggestion of prescribed knowledge and the addictive fixation on an object—a magi-
cal, chemical object that will never be incorporated.

Notes
1. O. Isakower, “A Contribution to the Psychopathology of Phenomena Associated with
Falling Asleep,” Journal of Psychoanalysis : –.
2. B. Lewin, “Sleep, the Mouth, and the Dream Screen” Psychoanalytic Quarterly (),
and “Reconsideration of the Dream Screen,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly  (): –.
3. See Freud, “Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams,” GW X, –;
SE XIV, –.
4. J. Lacan, Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis, unpublished seminar, session of Decem-
ber ,  (Library of the “Escuela Freudiana de Buenos Aires”). In the course of this, Lacan
articulates the strangeness of dreams with the Other scene, in particular with the topology of
the surface of the Klein Bottle.
5. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE IV–V, , , –.
6. J. Lacan, “The Logic of Fantasy,” unpublished seminar (Library of the “Escuela Freudi-
ana de Buenos Aires”).
 Insomnia f 

7. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE V, . Referred to “Die Heim Kerh of

Heime” (LVIII).
8. See Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, n. , and his letter to Fliess of
October , , as well as “Neurasthenia and Anxiety Neurosis,” SE I, .
9. J. Lacan, The Seminar II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psycho-
analysis (–) (Paris: Edition du Seuil, ). Here Lacan defines madness as distinct from
psychosis: the former is a disruption on the imaginary plane, while in psychosis there is a deficit
in the symbolic order: “A madman is he who adheres to the imaginary purely and simply” (Lec-
ture of May , ).
10. S. Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (SE VIII, ). The function of self-
observation linked to the super-ego had also been ascribed to secondary revision in relation to
the “dream within a dream” structure such as it figures in an appendix to The Interpretation of
Dreams in . This explains the “dreamt” character of dreams. Freud says the intention is to
rob the dream of its reality. (See chapter VI, section C, “Conditions of Representability,” SE IV,
.) The function of the scene within the scene allows the dream the possibility of passing
through censorship by fooling it, as may be observed in Hamlet’s play scene, which is a sort of
whimsy.
11. F. Deutsch, “A Footnote to Freud’s Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria.” This
contribution was first published in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly (XXVI, –) in .
This page intentionally left blank
 R . Strange
Intelligibility
Clarity and Vivacity in
Dream Language
Rei Terada R
Where the sheets are not rumpled, poetry has not spent the night.
—Osip Mandelstam

M
“ ost prominent among [the] formal characteristics, which cannot fail to
impress us in dreams,” Freud asserts, are the “differences in intensity”
within them (SE IV, ). Freud notes that “differences in intensity
between particular dream-images cover the whole range extending
between a sharpness of definition which we feel inclined, no doubt unjustifiably, to
regard as greater than that of reality and an irritating vagueness which we declare
characteristic of dreams because it is not completely comparable to any degree of
indistinctness which we ever perceive in real objects” (SE IV, ). In Freud’s experi-
ence—and in our own, we would probably agree—dreams are both sharp and dim,
vivid and pallid, in whole or in part. The logic by which we account for these varying
intensities matters because it promises to explain how some ideas appear more sig-
nificant than others. In the sensorium, intensity signals emphasis, prioritizing impres-
sions to create sense; it seems reasonable to ask whether in a dream, intensity is the
perceptual correlative of affect.
Freud’s account of dreams’ variable intensities is complicated from the outset by
the co-presence of different kinds of intensity. He associates “intensity” (Intensität)
with “sharpness of definition.” But as he points out, there is also a second kind of in-
tensity, vivacity, and it’s easy to confuse clarity and vivacity. This confusion appears
in chapter VI of The Interpretation of Dreams when Freud proposes to examine, sep-
arately but in the same breath, the “distinctness [Deutlichkeit] of particular parts of
dreams or of whole dreams as compared with one another” and the “sensory intensity”
or “vividness” (Lebhaftigkeit) of “particular dream-images” (SE IV, ):


 F Rei Terada

In the former case clarity [Deutlichkeit] is contrasted with vagueness, but in the latter
case it is contrasted with confusion [Verworrenheit]. Nevertheless it cannot be doubted
that the increase and decrease of the qualities in the two scales run parallel. A section
of a dream which strikes us as perspicuous [klar] usually contains intense elements;
a dream which is unclear [unklarer], on the other hand, is composed of elements of
small intensity. Yet the problem presented by the scale which runs from what is appar-
ently clear [Klaren] to what is obscure and confused [Undeutlich-Verworrenen] is
far more complicated than that of the varying degrees of vividness [Lebhaftigkeit] of
dream-elements. (SE IV, , translation modified)

Got it straight? Probably not. Not the same, yet intimate, these qualities scintillate
in dizzying trompe-l’oeil effects. To make matters worse, clarity also metaphorically
denominates the intelligibility with which we associate properties of clarity and vivac-
ity. Clarity and vivacity contribute to impressions of intelligibility, sometimes decep-
tively; they belong to the rhetoric of intelligibility. Hence we arrive at the category of
the “apparently clear.”
Freud’s discussions of all of these features bear particularly on language. His ex-
tended reflections on dreams’ deployment of words as objects point back to the cen-
tral fact that the ability to associate invisible ideas and feelings with perceptible words
creates excitement. His privileged illustration of dream intensity is the formula for tri-
methylamin in his Dream of Irma’s Injection; appropriately enough, this paradigm of
oneiric intensity operates both as an idea and as a word. In chapter IV Freud remarks
that in his dream he saw the formula for trimethylamin “printed in heavy type, as though
there had been a desire to lay emphasis” on something (SE IV, ). He does not repro-
duce the formula, however, but uses the word to exemplify the modulation of intensity:

The case is the same as when, in preparing a book for the press, I have some word
which is of special importance for understanding the text printed in spaced or heavy
type; or in speech I should pronounce the same word loudly and slowly and with
special emphasis. The first of these two analogies reminds us at once of an example
provided by the dream-work itself: “trimethylamin” in the Dream of Irma’s Injection.
(SE V, , translation modified)

Strachey translates this phrase, “the word ‘trimethylamin’” (SE V, ). But the word
“trimethylamin” does not appear in the dream. What does appear is hard to say:
something unrepeatable that holds the place of the formula—unrepeatable language,
paraphrasable but not phrasable, translatable but not readable. Comparing dream in-
tensity to emphatic language, Freud embodies the comparison in his own emphasized
type. Typographical alteration, of course, represents special stress. I would suggest that
Freud’s analogy to heavy type also compares intensity to language as such.1 Language
is stress for us; it marks what is important and likely to recur. We routinize its inten-
sity, and so apply boldface and volume as supplements. In the murky environments of
dreams, however, language recovers the power to electrify by sheer articulation.
 Strange Intelligibility f 

How might Freud understand this electrification, and what impact might it have
on interpretation? In the first section of this chapter, I’ll trace Freud’s attempts to discern
repression and condensation through the clarity and vivacity of dream language. Intel-
ligible language, as Lyotard has pointed out, is a serious problem for Freud’s hypothe-
sis that “the dream-work does not think.” Dream language shows that thoughtfulness
and thoughtlessness are logical distinctions, which cannot be formally distinguished.
Thus, it turns out that specific instances of intensity cannot be interpreted as such.
Rather, as I suggest in the second section, we are left to speculate about the dynamics
of the feelings of clarity and vivacity in general. Freud’s examples of dream language
reveal that we strategically forget the thoughtlessness within language so as to create
feelings of clarity and vivacity that support our sense of our own intellectual intensity.

The Challenge of Vivacity

“Trimethylamin” supplies the starting point for Freud’s treatment of vivacity in his
Project for a Scientific Psychology. More concerned in the Project with waking than
dreaming states, Freud uncontroversially argues that vivacity signals importance in
normal sensory life—a function that becomes problematic when censorship must con-
ceal import. His vision of the chemical formula for trimethylamin in the Irma Dream
was “immensely vivid” (sehr lebhaft), he recalls (SE I, ). Before recounting part of
the dream, Freud opines that “in dreams the vividness of the hallucination is directly
proportionate to the importance—that is, to the quantitative cathexis—of the idea
concerned. This indicates that it is Q [quantity] which determines the hallucination”
(SE I, ). As Strachey points out, the mysterious concept of “quantity” is defined in
the Project only as “what distinguishes activity from rest . . . subject to the general laws
of motion” (SE I, ).2 Freud states that both vivacity and quantitative cathexis are
“proportionate to . . . importance,” hence aligning the two. Further, we learn that vivac-
ity indicates greater significance than “interest”; Freud connects interest, in contrast,
to clarity. A perception of the external world “in waking life . . . is no doubt made
clearer” by a “cathexis (interest)” from within, “but not more vivid; it does not alter its
quantitative characteristic” (SE I, ). In other words, I’m not going to see you more
vividly—or as more important—just because I’m focusing my attention on you. I can,
however, work backward from vivacity to significance. If I see you more vividly than
other entities in my perceptual field, that does mean you must be important to me—
so important that my cathexis to you has overcome the natural dominance of percep-
tion over ideas and forced its way upstream from the mind to the perceptual system.
The Interpretation of Dreams reiterates the potential signal function of vivacity. “If we
are considering a psychical process in normal life and find out that one out of its sev-
eral component ideas has been picked out and has acquired a special degree of vivid-
ness [Lebhaftigkeit] in consciousness,” Freud writes, we can regard this as “evidence
 F Rei Terada

that a specially high amount of psychical value [Wertigkeit] . . . attaches to this pre-
dominant idea” (SE IV, ).
The natural connection of sensory vivacity to value obligates the censorship to
dispel its telltale stress. Freud goes so far as to assert that it is in response to the threat
of vivacity that the dream-work invents its tactics. In the struggle of the dream-work
the dreamer’s values are “stripped” from objects:
[A] psychical force is operating which on the one hand strips the elements which
have a high psychical value of their intensity, and, on the other hand, by means of
overdetermination, creates from elements of low psychical value new values, which
afterwards find their way into the dream-content. If that is so, a transference and
displacement of psychical intensities occurs in the process of dream-formation, and it
is as a result of these that the difference between the text of the dream-content and
that of the dream-thoughts comes about. The process which we are here presuming
is nothing less than the essential portion of the dream-work; and it deserves to be
described as “dream-displacement.” (SE IV, –)

The old, direct relation between psychical intensity and sensory vivacity survives in
only one respect: “In most dreams it is possible to detect a central point which is
marked by peculiar sensory intensity . . . . this central point is as a rule the direct rep-
resentation of the wish-fulfillment” (SE V, ). Aside from this instance, the ratio
between subjective import and vivacity is utterly destroyed. Not only is there a trans-
valuation of all “psychical intensities” in dreams: that process “is nothing less than the
essential portion of the dream-work,” and it is “as a result of ” the necessity of displac-
ing intensities that dreams are as they are (SE IV, ).
What does this transvaluation consist of? According to the Project, in waking
life powerful psychic intensity simply yields sensory vivacity. Yet in chapter VII Freud
notes that in the dream “the psychical intensity of the elements in the dream-thoughts
has been replaced by the sensory intensity of the elements in the content of the actual
dream” (SE V, –). Value-stripped dream elements and elements of low value
exchange qualities to create misleading impressions, exploiting the fact that “psychical
intensity or value or the degree of interest of an idea is of course to be distinguished
from sensory intensity or the intensity of the image presented” (SE IV, n). The
dream-work trades endlessly on the ambiguity of the conjunction of these two things
that must be distinguished. It is not simply that when psychical intensity is “replaced
by” sensory vivacity in dreams, psychical intensity drops from consciousness, leaving
a seemingly inexplicable sensory vivacity. If that were all that happened, we would
always know how to interpret vivid elements, by connecting them to their missing
associations. Freud insists more radically that the dream-work pulverizes any connec-
tion between psychical and sensory intensities:
[I]t might be expected that the sensory intensity (that is, the vividness) of particular
dream-images would be related to the psychical intensity of the elements in the
dream-thoughts corresponding to them. In the latter, psychical intensity coincides
 Strange Intelligibility f 

with psychical value: the most intense elements are also the most important ones—
those which form the centre-point of the dream-thoughts. We know, it is true, that
these are precisely elements which, on account of the censorship, cannot as a rule
make their way into the content of the dream; nevertheless, it might well be that their
immediate derivatives which represent them in the dream might bear a higher degree
of intensity, without necessarily on that account forming the centre of the dream.
But this expectation too is disappointed by a comparative study of dreams and the
material from which they are derived. The intensity of the elements in the one has
no relation to the intensity of the elements in the other: the fact is that a complete
“transvaluation of all psychical values” [in Nietzsche’s phrase] takes place between the
material of the dream-thoughts and the dream. (SE IV, )

Similarly, displacing vivacity from one element onto another nearby would not be
enough to obscure what is going on; something more serious occurs:

[A]nalysis shows that the most vivid elements of a dream are the starting-point of the
most numerous trains of thought—that the most vivid elements are also those with
the most numerous determinants. We shall not be altering the sense of this empiri-
cally based assertion if we put it in these terms: the greatest intensity is shown by
those elements of a dream on whose formation the greatest amount of condensation
has been expended [für deren Bildung die ausgiebigste Verdichtungsarbeit in Anspruch
genommen wurde]. (SE IV, )

Not only are features of strong psychic value prohibited from appearing in the dream
in the first place; the vivacity that once was theirs is scattered, kept away even from
“their derivatives,” so that “no relation” remains between vivacity and psychical value.
Vivacity is dispersed, not annihilated; scattered vivacity is pressed together again
wherever condensation is strongest. It accumulates in condensed dream elements that
register the tectonic energy that has pushed them together. Vivacity is reconstituted,
but is now more substance than signal.
Freud thus arrives at a new, quantitative standard of significance in which num-
bers of determinants still warn of import, but without any relationship—direct or in-
direct, positive or negative—between the warning and any specific meaning. Vivacity
reflects density as though measuring particles in air. The standard of this intensity is
still subjective: we expend energy on dispersing and condensing things only when they
have mattered to us. But from vivacity, we cannot know more than that this happened:
we cannot know what is important.

Clarity and Intelligibility

If vivacity is defeated by censorship, what of clarity, dream language that is sensorily
(literally) and conceptually (metaphorically) clear? Presumably, if vivacity can be melted
down and redistributed, then so can clarity or any feature. For Freud’s theoretical
purposes, it is actually preferable that this be the case with the intelligibility of dream
 F Rei Terada

language: the unintelligibility of dreams is crucial evidence for the very existence of
unconscious processes.
Freud maintains the uniqueness of unconscious processes by dividing dream-
thoughts from dream-work (a maneuver that has been investigated with great profit
by J.-F. Lyotard).3 Dream-thoughts are ideas compiled before dreaming and consciously
organized; in the course of the dream-work, repression deforms the dream-thoughts,
generating the compromise of the dream and obscuring its sense. Compartmental-
izing dream-thoughts and dream-work allows Freud to assert that the dream-work
mentions language without using it: the dream-work cannot do “intellectual work” (SE
IV, ) or craft new sentences. It cannot perform mathematical calculations, but
“merely throws into the form of a calculation numbers which are present in the dream-
thoughts and can serve as allusions to matter that cannot be represented in any other
way” (SE V, ). It follows, however, that Freud’s prohibition on dream thought is
imperiled whenever intelligible phrases or accurate-looking mathematical operations
do appear in dreams. Proposing that dream words specially illuminate the pressures
of dream-work through their very resistance to those pressures, Freud also admits
their potential exceptional thoughtfulness:

The work of condensation in dreams is seen at its clearest [am greifbarsten] when it
handles words and names. It is true in general that words are frequently treated in
dreams as though they were things, and for that reason they are apt to be combined
in just the same way as are presentations of things. Dreams of this sort offer the most
amusing and curious neologisms. (SE IV, –)

Freud tries to turn the hardest case to greatest advantage: even words are diced and
recombined by the dream-work, which does not recognize their integrity. Thus we
learn how vigorous the condensation is. His examples are convenient: neologisms bear
scars of manipulation that can be interpreted as traces of censorship; portmanteau
words show the seams of condensation. When words are at their clearest, however, the
presence of condensation is not clear.
Sensory and cognitive clarity are inextricable because there are minimal distinct-
ness conditions for intelligibility. If we cannot read, hear, or remember the content of
some instance of dream language, it serves only as an allusion to language in general.
Cy Twombly’s writing-like paintings operate in this generically suggestive way, as do
stylized depictions of letter-writing in films, in which the actors don’t really write, but
make gestures that mean “here imagine a letter being written.” These instances raise
no obstacle to Freud’s hypothesis that the dream-work does not produce language. His
concern must be for words with both sensory clarity and intelligibility intact.
Freud offers two explanations for the strange presence of such language: down-
loading and secondary revision. First, since the dream-work relies exclusively on form
for expression (SE V, –n), words may get through the censorship when they are
processed as objects. An analogue for this process might be PDF file format, which
 Strange Intelligibility f 

treats a text en bloc as an image, rather than recognizing characters as units. This lan-
guage is intelligible, but doesn’t belong to the dream:

[A]ll spoken sentences which occur in dreams and are specifically described as
such are unmodified or slightly modified reproductions of speeches which are also
to be found among the recollections in the material of the dream-thoughts. A speech
of this kind is often no more than an allusion to some event included among
the dream-thoughts, and the meaning of the dream may be a totally different one.
(SE IV, )

Freud thus calls words in dreams “reproductions” of words. An emblem of this con-
ception of dream language appears in his dream of a bookstore window.4 Freud spots
“a new volume in one of the series of monographs for connoisseurs which I am in the
habit of buying . . . . The new series was called ‘Famous speakers’ or ‘Speeches’ and its
first volume bore the name of Dr. Lecher” (SE IV, ). Here we see Freud’s description
of dream language—“reproductions of speeches”—literalized. The reproducibility of
language is underlined by the volume’s being part of a series and by Freud’s “habit”
of buying other volumes in similar series. The notion of origin the dream offers—a
“first volume” begat by a reproductively prolific “Dr. Lecher”—mirrors its end in Dr.
Freud the reader, who, as the dream’s author, is actually the progenitor of Dr. Lecher,
whom the dream suggests he would like to resemble. Thus, the example also suggests
that the point of the distinction between dream-thoughts and dream-work is to allow
the dreamer to marvel at the thoughts in the dream by obscuring the dynamic of
thought-production. I’ll return to this idea later on.
Second, dream language may also achieve illusory intelligibility through second-
ary revision, in which the censorship “fills up the gaps in the dream-structure with
shreds and patches.”5 “As a result of its efforts,” Freud continues, “the dream loses its
appearance of absurdity and disconnectedness and approximates to the model of an
intelligible [verständlichen] experience” (SE V, ). To extend Mandelstam’s metaphor,
there are poems that smoothe themselves and people who rumple sheets to make
the bed look slept in. Not only does the apparent clarity of language not guarantee
the intelligibility of its sense, it can brilliantly obscure. Secondary revision allows
Freud to hypothesize that any instance of clear language is only “apparently clear” (SE
IV, ). The problem is that the reverse is then also true. In preserving the possibil-
ity of distortion for any instance of language, Freud loses hold of any measure of the
dream-work’s thoughtlessness. To be strong enough for Freud’s theoretical purposes,
thoughtless language must be too strong for his interpretive purposes.
Both of Freud’s explanations for the faux-intelligibility of dream language—sec-
ondary revision and the thesis of imported language—have no formal or empirical
dimensions. Thoughtfulness and thoughtlessness prove to be logically distinguishable
and formally indistinguishable. There is no way to tell a word from a reproduction of
a word: is the painted word “blue” in a Jasper Johns painting a word or a picture of
 F Rei Terada

a word?6 Ironically, because the distinction of the dream-work is its dependence on

formal expression (SE V, –n), there is no sure formal distinction between a rep-
resentation of language and language that thinks. We cannot show that dream lan-
guage thinks, and Freud cannot show that it does not.

Intelligibility and Understanding

Words in dream language get their intensity from their received nature, which is one
with their cultural density. Freud’s examples suggest that the unevenness of the effect
comes from selective forgetfulness: I wish the words in the bookstore window were
mine, forgetting that I put them there. (These individual forgettings are subsets of the
forgotten foundational fact that I am dreaming.) As intelligibility depends on access
to reproduction in the circular sense of Freud’s bookstore dream, insights of under-
standing may be elations of tautology—moments in which we get to “discover” things
we know. At the same time, words are never simply one’s own, and in that sense they
really are marvelous.
The possibility of tautological insight is raised by “Asplenium and the Lizards,”
a dream recounted by the nineteenth-century philosopher of psychology Joseph
Delboeuf and cited by Freud as a heroic feat of oneiric recall. The dream involves the
Latin name for a small fern:

He saw in a dream the courtyard of his own house covered with snow and found two
small lizards half-frozen and buried under it. Being an animal-lover, he picked them
up, warmed them and carried them back to the little hole in the masonry where they
belonged. He further gave them a few leaves of a small fern which grew on the wall and
of which, as he knew, they were very fond. In the dream he knew the name of the plant:
Asplenium ruta muralis. The dream proceeded and, after a digression, came back to
the lizards. Delboeuf then saw to his astonishment two new ones which were busy on
the remains of the fern. He then looked round him and saw a fifth and then a sixth
lizard making their way to the hole in the wall, until the whole roadway was filled with
a procession of lizards, all moving in the same direction . . . and so on. (SE IV, –)7

Like Freud’s dream of reproduced speeches, this Escherian dream is about genera-
tion and animation. Delboeuf is taken aback by the Latin name in the dream because
“when he was awake, Delboeuf knew the Latin names of very few plants and an Asple-
nium was not among them.” “Sixteen years later,” Freud writes,

While the philosopher was on a visit to one of his friends, he saw a little album of
pressed flowers of the sort that are sold to foreigners as mementos in some parts of
Switzerland. A recollection began to dawn on him—he opened the herbarium, found
the Asplenium of his dream and saw its Latin name written underneath it in his own
handwriting. (SE IV, )
 Strange Intelligibility f 

The incident combines sensory clarity, intelligibility, and a sense of the marvelous in a
recovery of language. The herbarium highlights the objectlike quality of a name: the
name identifies the sample flower and the flower exemplifies the name, the noun level
with the thing.
The classic notion of thing as name and name as thing occupies the center of
a drama of understanding, of obscurity brought to light. What requires explanation
is the dream’s ability to use a word that the dreamer doesn’t know he knows. This
name, Asplenium, seems unusually memorable. Not only does it stick in a corner of
the dreamer’s mind without his permission, hence reappearing in the dream; he also
remembers that reappearance sixteen years later. Asplenium is memorable because of
its unaccountability; it had been a “mystery,” Freud writes, that remained unsolved.
The story of finding the herbarium is presented as a solution to the mystery. It features
the phenomenology of understanding, the “dawning” feeling. Delboeuf ’s understand-
ing is never miraculous; it is his own, in “his own handwriting.” It seems miraculous
insofar as he forgets what he knows; his having forgotten is what really demands expla-
nation and remains unexplained by the story. We are “driven to admit,” writes Freud,
that “we knew and remembered something which was beyond the reach of our waking
memory” (SE IV, ). The moment is striking for its simultaneous climax and anticli-
max: we begin with a sense of extra insight—which we might be tempted to attribute
to superstition, or “overstanding”—and exchange it for a rational explanation, yet
every bit of wonder lost to the explanation is replenished by the wonder of our new-
found rationality. The circular explanation extends the circular relation between noun
and thing, which seems to explain things simply by pairing them (“That fern is an
Asplenium.” “So that’s what it is!”)
Freud’s point in retelling the dream is not interpretive but theoretical: Asple-
nium, an artifact of photographic memory, embodies the passivity of dream language,
which appears very insightful because it is also very received. The temporary occlu-
sion of familiarity is enough to activate a vivacity that belongs all the time to language
as such, as the other side of its standardization. “I know this word!” is most of the
excitement. The identity of the unthought and the twice-thought cannot be reduced
simply to thoughtlessness, however, because that identity just is what it means to have
one’s own thoughts.
In the dream Freud calls “Non Vixit,” the desire to control anxiety about one’s
capacity for understanding culminates in the relief of access to a prefabricated utter-
ance. In the dream, Freud finds himself conversing with Wilhelm Fliess and his dead
friend P. (Josef Paneth, Freud’s successor at the Vienna Physiological Institute [SE V,
n]).8 The conversation juxtaposes vague and distinct, flat and intense segments:
Fl. spoke about his sister and said that in three quarters of an hour she was dead, and
added some such words as “that was the threshold.” As P. failed to understand him, Fl.
turned to me and asked me how much I had told P. about his affairs. Whereupon,
overcome by strange emotions, I tried to explain to Fl. that P. (could not understand
 F Rei Terada

anything at all, of course, because he) was not alive. But what I actually said—and I
myself noticed the mistake—was, “non vixit” [“He did not live,” instead of “Non
vivit,” “He is not alive”]. (SE V, )

Freud goes on,

It was a long time . . . before I succeeded in tracing the origin of the “Non vixit” with
which I passed judgment in the dream. But at last it occurred to me that these two
words possessed their high degree of clarity in the dream, not as words heard or spo-
ken, but as words seen. I then knew at once where they came from. On the pedestal
of the Kaiser Josef Memorial in the Hofburg [Imperial Palace] in Vienna the follow-
ing impressive words are inscribed:
Saluti patriae vixit
non diu sed totus.
[For the well-being of his country he lived / not long but wholly.] (SE V, –)

Freud observes elsewhere that clarity and obscurity of presentation can formally ex-
press a thematic concern that “arises from the material of the dream thoughts and is
a constituent of it” (SE IV, ). A patient who described “indistinct and muddled”
people in her dream, for example, “was obliged to confess that she was expecting a
baby but was in doubts as to ‘who the (baby’s) father really was’” (SE IV, ). Another
dream of Freud’s in which Fliess expounds a crystal-clear theory of bisexuality turns
out to be wishing that Fliess could be so lucid (SE IV, ). “Non Vixit,” too, is about
clarity and obscurity, vivacity and aliveness. Freud’s groping, then piercing dream
wishes to be clear and satisfies itself with an imported visual memory of language.
In keeping with his own hypothesis that dream language is not thoughtful, Freud
invokes the inscription and appropriates its authority. The alien chill of the words lies
in their chiseled sharpness against the fumbling three-way conversation in which
Freud utters them. Fliess speaks unnamed words about his sister, then “some such
words as ‘that was the threshold’” when “P. fail[s] to understand him.” Fliess then turns
rather accusingly to Freud, who “trie[s] to explain” why P. does not understand. Fliess
seems to blame the misunderstanding on Freud, who passes the blame on to P. Freud’s
explanation falls short in turn, and not only because of his error in tense. In parenthe-
ses Freud fills in for the reader the reasoning he was trying to give Fliess, but appar-
ently didn’t provide: “P. (could not understand anything at all, of course, because
he) was not alive” (SE V, ). While Freud wanted to convey that P. could not under-
stand anything because he was not alive, what he immediately meant to say was “P. is
not alive”—which is hardly illuminating, and still not what he claims he really wanted.
Discussing the dream’s associations, Freud realizes that a verse by Heine hovers over
the scene:
Selten habt ihr mich verstanden,
Selten auch verstand ich Euch,
Nur wenn wir im Kot uns fanden,
So verstanden wir uns gleich.
 Strange Intelligibility f 

[Rarely have you understood me,

And rarely too have I understood you.
Not until we both found ourselves in the mud
Did we promptly understand each other.] (quoted in SE V, )

Freud dispels a gathering panic about the treachery of speaking and listening by say-
ing something that has to be distinct because it has been inscribed on a monument.
All this seems to be forgotten, however, once the fatal words are out. Upon Freud’s
death sentence pronounced in a dead language, P.’s “form grew indistinct . . . and finally
he melted away” (SE V, ). “It’s not our words that are indistinct, it’s you who are
indistinct,” Freud seems to say to P., and he says it so clearly that P. disappears. Yet this
is not a comfortable conclusion: Freud has to speak from the monument to negate
his friend; he has to lose the illusion of speech, as he would himself define thinking
speech, in order to communicate this well.
The dynamic of “Non Vixit” is conventionally uncanny and sublime: the ready-
made visual memory of language supplies what appears as new power because its
familiarity is veiled. As in “Asplenium,” thought does not need to be new for the feel-
ing of understanding to dawn: indeed, it needs not to be. Most interesting for my pur-
poses is Freud’s satisfaction with the inscription as a clarification of the clarity of the
words in the dream. The words have “a high degree of clarity” because of the breath-
taking efficiency of the mind’s access to its own stored ideas—the access of the dream-
work to the dream-thoughts. The experience is one of the shortening of obstruction,
where “obstruction” means consciousness: Freud becomes a minimal channel through
which the lapidary words swiftly and killingly flow. Rapidity of access replaces con-
struction: the access is rapid—and the experience powerful—because the thoughts
are already thought. The speed of Freud’s utterance, outrunning his ability to know
what he’s saying, registers the brilliance we feel when we begin processing something
we’ve already processed. Sublime forgetfulness, Freud’s dream implies, casts our relief
at reaching familiar territory as discovery, and figures as insight the fantastic speed at
which we travel over ground already behind us.

ReadyMade Fantasy
These dreams of language hint at a materialist informatics even as Freud’s explications
explore the sublime feelings of clarity and vivacity they inspire. This is no contradic-
tion: from its origins in Freud’s Project, psychoanalysis bridges phenomenological
depth to quantity. In this, psychoanalysis is the ancestor of the cognitive science that
is sometimes perceived as having replaced it. Daniel Dennett’s article “Are Dreams Ex-
periences?” (), for example, also proposes a theory of information access en bloc.
Noting that the “received view” of dreaming posits a phase of nocturnal presentation
accompanied by recording and a subsequent phase of waking retrieval, Dennett con-
siders problems created for the received view by dreams that know too much—beauti-
fully detailed, elaborately plotted dreams that incorporate the circumstances of waking:
 F Rei Terada

Perhaps you have had a dream leading logically and coherently up to a climax in
which you are shot, whereupon you wake up and are told that a truck has just back-
fired outside your open window. Or you are fleeing someone in a building, you climb
out a window, walk along the ledge, then fall—and wake up on the floor having fallen
out of bed. In a recent dream of mine I searched long and far for a neighbor’s goat;
when at last I found her she bleated baa-a-a—and I awoke to find her bleat merging
perfectly with the buzz of an electric alarm clock I had not used or heard for months.9

Dennett begins by recognizing that composition within the dream is not an option—
obviously not when the prescience of the dream exceeds the capacities of any life. He
argues that while these dreams cannot be fathomed within the temporality of pres-
entation and recollection, they are possible if there is no dream presentation (no
present-tense experience of dreams). What if, instead, “all dream narratives are com-
posed directly into memory banks,” available to be chosen at the moment of waking?
“If our memory mechanisms were empty until the moment of waking,” Dennett notes,
“and then received a whole precomposed dream narrative in one lump, the idea that
precognitive dreams are experienced episodes during sleep would have to go by the
board”—but the unconsciousness of dreams would be preserved, and the unique-
ness of dream life acknowledged, without superstitions of precognition.10 Further, the
attack holds for the received view of all memory and peripheral experience: a “cassette
theorist” like himself, “emboldened by the success with dreams, puts forward the sub-
liminal peripheral recollection-production theory, the view that the variety of periph-
eral details . . . are not consciously experienced, but merely unconsciously recorded for
subsequent recall.”11
Freud develops his own “cassette theory” of dreams in his reflection on a
“famous” dream in the memoirs of Emile Maury, to which he refers three times in The
Interpretation of Dreams.12 “Maury, having been struck in his sleep on the back of his
neck by a piece of wood, woke up from a long dream which was like a full-length story
set in the days of the French Revolution” (SE V, ). Freud recounts how the dreamer
was condemned, and led to the place of execution surrounded by an immense mob.
He climbed on to the scaffold and was bound to the plank by the executioner. It was
tipped up. The blade of the guillotine fell. He felt his head being separated from his
body, woke up in extreme anxiety—and found that the top of the bed had fallen down
and had struck his cervical vertebrae just in the way in which the blade of the guillo-
tine would actually have struck them. (SE IV, )

Because the blow of the furniture coincides with the blow of guillotine, it seems as
though “the whole elaborate dream must have been composed and must have taken
place during the short period of time between the contact of the board with Maury’s
cervical vertebrae and his consequent awakening” (SE V, –). Freud proposes that
the dreamer invokes a “long-prepared phantasy” at the moment of waking, much as
a “key-phrase” from Mozart’s Figaro may serve “as a port of entry through which the
whole network is simultaneously put in a state of excitation” (als Einbruchsstation, vor
 Strange Intelligibility f 

der aus ein Ganzes gleichzeitig in Erregung versetzt wird) (SE V, ). “Nor is it neces-
sary that this long-prepared phantasy should have been gone through during sleep,”
Freud continues, “but only in the recollection of the sleeper after his awakening” (SE
V, ). If something in the dream-work seems too ingenious to be improvised, it is.
Freud does not assert that all dreams, or even “all arousal dreams,” “admit of this
explanation” of what he calls “ready-made phantasies” ( fertige Phantasien) (SE V ,
). It would not damage Freud’s general dream theory if he did, however, just as it
does not damage his theory that the dreamer’s report of the dream is part of the
dream.13 To the contrary, Freud’s description of dream language invites extension into
a general theory of legibility. “If we look closely into a speech that occurs in a dream,”
Freud maintains,

we shall find that it consists on the one hand of relatively clear and compact portions and
on the other hand of portions which serve as connecting matter and have probably been
filled in at a later stage, just as, in reading, we fill in any letters or syllables that may have
been accidentally omitted. Thus speeches in dreams have a structure similar to that of
breccia, in which largish blocs of various kinds of stone are cemented together by a bind-
ing medium. (SE V, –)

Freud’s DNA-like vision consists “on the one hand of relatively clear and compact por-
tions” of dream language and “on the other hand of portions which serve as connect-
ing matter.” The “connecting matter” sounds subordinate, like grammatical particles,
but the “clear and compact portions,” presented as rock fragments, are also static and
inorganic—not the usual associations of language that is clear and compact. Whole
fantasy retrieval and “ready-made” interpolation suggest that the greatest condensa-
tion and vivacity, in culture as in dream life, can be found not in the immediate but
in the previously worked, the thing produced “from concentrate”: in the cultural sed-
iment of language.
Although Freud proposes that dream language is unthinking and that conscious
language is thinking, the language in his dreams is both and neither of these. By main-
taining the unique unthinkingness of dreaming despite its intelligible language, Freud
distances its implications for conscious thought. Over the course of his career, the ambi-
guity never stabilizes: Freud alternately questions and reinstates the duality of linguis-
tic thoughtfulness and thoughtlessness. Contemplating an especially dazzling exam-
ple of dream clarity in chapter IV, Freud juxtaposes a “particularly well-constructed”
dream to a sleepy idea about dreaming, and loses and refinds the distinction between
the two:
Thus I remember a dream of mine which struck me when I woke up as being so par-
ticularly well-constructed, flawless and clear that, while I was still half-dazed with
sleep, I thought of introducing a new category of dreams which were not subject to
the mechanisms of condensation and displacement but were to be described as
“phantasies during sleep.” Closer examination proved that this rarity among dreams
 F Rei Terada

showed the same gaps and flaws in its structure as any other; and for that reason I
dropped the category of “dream-phantasies.” (SE IV, )

The almost sleeping Freud dreamily thinks and thoughtfully dreams of a new category
of dreams that would be more like thinking. Disqualifying the new kind of dream from
thought, after all, because it has “gaps and flaws in its structure,” Freud deflects the
equally Freudian thesis that thought itself is structured by gaps and flaws. But he adds
in a  footnote: “Whether rightly I am now uncertain” (SE IV, n).

Notes
The epigraph to this chapter is drawn from Osip Mandelstam, “Conversation about Dante,” in
The Complete Critical Prose and Letters, ed. Jane Gary Harris, trans. Jane Gary Harris and Con-
stance Link (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, ), .
1. For assessments of the place of dream language in Freud’s theory of dreams and lan-
guage, see Jean-Michel Rey, “Freud’s Writing on Writing,” Yale French Studies - ():
–; and J. B. Pontalis, “The Dream as Object,” International Review of Psychoanalysis 
(): –. Sara van den Berg observes that “several of the dreams in Freud’s books hinge
on a single word or phrase: trimethylamin, pelagie, non vixit, afflavit et dissipati sunt”—and
she considers some of these dreams in “Reading the Object: Freud’s Dreams,” Psyart: A Hyper-
link Journal for Psychological Study of the Arts (), www.clas.ufl.edu/ipsa/journal/articles/
psyart/vanden.htm.
2. Appendix C, “The Nature of Q,” SE I, –.
3. J.-F. Lyotard, “The Dream-Work Does Not Think,” trans. Mary Lydon, in The Lyotard
Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Blackwell, ), –.
4. This dream is related in many ways to the better-known Dream of the Botanical
Monograph.
5. Freud asserts at one point that “only in extreme cases” does dream language think (SE
V, ). Although he does not give an example, his later idea that secondary revision may be a
kind of thought may indicate that it is the extreme case he has in mind.
6. Lyotard describes but does not reflect on this problem. He remarks that through con-
densation, “it could happen that ‘Révolution d’Octobre’ might read ‘Révons d’Ore’ and be heard
as ‘rêvons d’or’” (Lyotard Reader, ). “Rêvons d’or” is a perfectly standard phrase unless context
marks it as nonsense; nothing reveals that it is actually a crumpled version of “Révolution
d’Octobre.” A similar problem occurs when Husserl argues that words addressed mentally to
oneself are merely a “phantasy” of words, when Austin disqualifies “words spoken in soliloquy”
from being performative utterances, and when P. D. Juhl asserts that words uttered by parrots
only seem to be words (Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay, d ed., 
vols. [New York: Humanities Press, ], First Investigation, sec. ; J. L. Austin, How to Do
Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà, d ed. [Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, ], ; P. D. Juhl, Interpretation: An Essay in the Philosophy of Literary Criticism
[Princeton: Princeton University Press, ], ).
7. According to Freud, the “correct name” of the plant “is Asplenium ruta muraria, which
had been slightly distorted in the dream” (SE IV, ).
 Strange Intelligibility f 

8. For another dream about Freud’s rivalry with Paneth, see SE IV, ff.
9. Daniel Dennett, “Are Dreams Experiences?” in Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on
Mind and Psychology (Cambridge: MIT Press, ), .
10. Ibid., .
11. Ibid., .
12. See Emile Maury, Mes Souvenirs sur les evénéments des années – (Paris: La
Boutique de l’histoire, ).
13. See Dennett, “Are Dreams Experiences?” .
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R
Interpretative
Arts
R
This page intentionally left blank
 R . The Marnie
Color
Raymond Bellour R

One
When I received a letter from the University of Minnesota inviting me to celebrate,
with the end of the century, the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams, I felt
honored but mainly thrilled. I couldn’t help thinking back at that moment to when,
very young and in a tiny hotel room in Munich, I read the book, at that time out of
print, in the old translation of Ignace Meyerson, La Science des rêves, as it was called
in French—a copy of which had been lent to me by my friend, the future French
philosopher André Glucksmann. This turned out to be one of the most extraordinary
episodes of reading in my whole life, and one that has remained inalterable, whatever
I may think now, after Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, about psychoanalysis
in general as one of the last romantic gospels of the nineteenth century still shaping
our now passed twentieth century.
So, I want to thank all of you who invited me, and particularly John Mowitt,
who took care of everything regarding my presentation.1 As I do usually when I have
to speak English in public, I prefer to struggle with my rough personal English, or
“French-English,” rather than read you a convoluted translation that I’ll not be able to
phrase properly or even understand terribly well.2

Two
I could not presume, for various reasons but mainly for lack of time, to elaborate any-
thing on Freud’s book itself, or even to make some new general statement, for example,


 F Raymond Bellour

about psychoanalysis and cinema. So the organizers and I agreed that I would present
some remarks that I had recently elaborated about Alfred Hitchcock’s film, Marnie,
and more precisely about the use of one color in Marnie, the “red,” which emblema-
tizes compulsively the “coming back” effect of the initial trauma throughout the life
of the heroine. When I was asked, some years ago, to contribute to an important
book about color in cinema, edited in France by Jacques Aumont, the first and only
thing that came immediately to my mind was this “red,” this “Marnie color” that, years
and years after my first interest and work on the film, still retained its immediate and
affective violence. 3
Before getting concretely to the variations of this red throughout the film, this
necessitates a few remarks about Freud and Hitchcock. First, we must remember that
Hitchcock had directed Spellbound, for David Selznick, in , a film that has been
considered officially as the first American film explicitly devoted to psychoanalysis.
Years later Hitchcock will say to Truffaut: “just another manhunt story wrapped up
in pseudo-psychoanalysis.”4 This remark, along with the fact of Hitchcock having
specifically been asked to direct Spellbound, should be taken in at least two ways.
First, that Hitchcock was well aware of the way in which any film, to be a film, could
only deal explicitly with psychoanalysis in a “pseudo” way, an inevitable distortion
effect of its inner reality and truth. But, also, such facts imply that Hitchcock, through
his “manhunt stories,” was perhaps the director who has approached instinctively
and in the closest way this reality and this truth of the contradiction between film and
psychoanalysis.
This means that Hitchcock has been addressing more or less in all of his films
since the s the overwhelming question that had been developed by Freud through
the discovery of psychoanalysis as well as through its whole history: the question of
trauma and of its interpretation. Hitchcock’s films are all organized around traumatic
events, which have to be interpreted by one or several characters through the devel-
opment of the action and for this reason by the spectator or spectatrix each for him or
herself. This is why Deleuze, without reference to psychoanalysis, can make of Hitch-
cock (in Cinema I: The Movement-Image) the hero of the crisis of the action-image, the
hero of the mental image as an exemplification of the relation-image, and through this,
the transition and the link between classical and modern cinema.
This question of trauma and of its interpretation acquires a particular degree
of acuteness when it happens to be inscribed within films in which mental illness
and pathological cases are linked explicitly to psychoanalytical theory, and in which
the didactic obligation of naming and explaining the symptoms parallels the develop-
ment of action and more or less inspires it. This is the line through Hitchcock’s œuvre
that separates, on one side let’s say Shadow of a Doubt and Strangers on a Train, and
on the other, Spellbound, Psycho, and Marnie. And in these last, which are the three
Hitchcock films where a psychoanalyst is present (either professional, in Spellbound
and Psycho, or amateur, “pseudo,” as in Marnie), another distinction must be made. In
 The Marnie Color f 

Psycho, the last-minute contribution of the psychiatrist to the rationalization of the

enigma reinforces the speculative dimension of the film without weakening its un-
common structural and emotional power. For this reason among others, Psycho is per-
haps Hitchcocks’s masterpiece, and is really the film that divides the American cinema
between the “old and the new.” In Spellbound and Marnie, in different ways, the imbri-
cation of the drama and of its psychoanalytical interpretation provokes a sort of split,
which generates the specific and tormented interest of both films.
In order to be clarified, and, ultimately, resolved, the original trauma has to be
conveyed through the whole film by its actual clinical symptoms, and finally to be
shown in itself, as a sort of final primal scene. This very need clearly carries its own
risk, a mixture of crudeness and intellectual vulgarity, both in the propositions of the
scenario and in their elaboration through images. Elsewhere Hitchcock has been per-
fectly conscious of this, saying to Truffaut about Marnie: “I was forced to simplify the
whole psychoanalysis aspect of it.”5 But this risk also has its possible reward. Specifi-
cally, it challenges one to recreate figuratively the appearances of the symptoms and
the final explosion of the primal traumatic scene itself. It is interesting to note that
this problem, which—through the various levels of traumatic moments Hitchcock has
attempted to depict—has always been fundamental for him. Moreover, it echoes
Freud’s famous reply to Karl Abraham regarding the proposal for Pabst’s film, Secrets
of a Soul, in : “My chief objection is that I do not believe that satisfactory plastic
representations of our abstractions is at all possible.”6
Here could be the most challenging part of the problem: How can the image,
through its figurative and figural choices, express the abstractions with which Freud
is concerned; but also, how can the image qualify and carry more fundamentally
something of the economical dimension Freud consistently attached to trauma? Recall
here his characterization of trauma in the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis:
“Indeed, the term ‘traumatic’ has no other sense than an economic one. We apply it to
an experience which within a short period of time presents the mind with an increase
of stimulus too powerful to be dealt with or worked off in the normal way, and this
must result in a permanent disturbance of the manner in which the energy operates”
(SE XV, ).
And this leads us directly to the Marnie color, the red in Marnie.

Three
It is a thematic color, which obeys a very simple principle, and which seems to have
been a screenwriter’s idea: a child who kills a man, in a scene in which she felt herself
to be the victim, and which has since been repressed, cannot now bear the sight of
the red, which terrifies her as a vision carrying all the strength of the buried memory
of her violent act.
 F Raymond Bellour

The importance of this red in Marnie lies first in its generation of an irreality
(un irréalisme). It is one about which we don’t care because we are carried along by
the developing story about this woman the film constantly follows, whose looks fill
so many scenes. There is so much red in life—for example at the corners of so many
streets—that the image in Marnie had to be emptied of all the likely and even possible
reds. So, from the point of view of “natural perception,” so to speak, a world almost
without red had to be conceived so as to save the red for the drama that it embodies.
This explains a particular quality of the color in general in Marnie, of which it’s not
easy to evaluate the perceptible result, but which can nevertheless be qualified. On the
one side, the effects of contrast and insistence are reserved for other colors (the bright
green of the meadow, for example, in the hunting episode, or the enigmatic crudeness
of the yellow handbag in the opening shot); on the other side, a very rich scale of inter-
mediary tones (in the blues, browns, and greens) avoids any combination with the red,
in order not to risk any type of confusion with its symbolism.
A slight but telling exception seems to have been reserved for the character of
Lil, Mark Rutland’s sister-in-law, who is clearly a bit too jealous of Marnie. She appears
twice in tones close to red: a crimson dressing gown for her daily life at home, and a
rose-orange dress for the reception given at Rutland’s house to introduce Marnie.
Here is the first irreality (le premiere irréalisme) of a film that struggles to orches-
trate all the ones it has combined: actors (Sean Connery, still too much stuck to the
James Bond myth, overwhelmed by this role of intellectual-boss-husband-amateur
therapist); screenplay (the roughness of the theory of trauma, of its miraculous reso-
lution); this extreme and rare challenge of trying to express through the sudden irrup-
tion of a color the intensity of an interior state, further than the actor’s performance
can bear, further than words can say.
The process is simple: it conveys the color from so-called objective perception
toward its subjective counterpart. As a result, the figure created is elaborated so as
to increase affect as much as possible, perhaps by means of this excess saving what the
coherence of the represented story cannot really deal with.
Rarely will a film have shown so clearly that “cinema, first, is stupid,” as the
French philosopher Dionys Mascolo has said commenting on Marguerite Duras’s
India Song.7 He continues: “Stupid two times: on one side as power, on the other as
servitude, by its total submission to the reality of things (force des choses).” Hitchcock’s
intelligence, or maybe his instinct—here, where he is confronted more than ever by
“stupidity,” where he more or less gives up the pure mechanics of the intrigue (else-
where, his strength), and confronts himself directly with psychology in the form of a
travestied psychoanalysis—here, Hitchcock’s instinct has pushed him to organize a
chain of instants forged by a color, and thus to balance through a certain intransitive
violence—what is then signified about the theme and its symbolism.
So it happens that seven times the red, as purely material but abstract, invades
the screen, covers the image and then disappears. To list each of the seven times: first,
 The Marnie Color f 

the vision of the gladioli when Marnie visits her mother in Baltimore; second, her first
nightmare (in her mother’s house); third, the red ink that spills on her sleeve in her
office at Rutland’s firm; fourth, the jockey’s jersey at the horse races; fifth, the second
nightmare (in Rutland’s house); sixth, the jacket worn by the “lancer” during the fox
hunt; and seventh, in the final scene, when the brightness of the trauma is given back
its full memory.
An eighth scene contrasts with the seven others, entering in the series and
becoming the fourth in their unfolding. To lure her into the trap into which he him-
self is falling, Mark Rutland has asked Marnie to come to his office over the weekend
and type an article he has written about zoology, his former interest.
This scene, through its capacity to suggest—that is to say, to link—touches on the
most “stupid,” the most perverse aspect of the symbolic circuit. One finds here the only
example of a distinct but minimal red seen by Marnie without the otherwise charac-
teristic reaction of fright, the effect of which will be developed in another way through
the scene: the tongue or the throat of a little stuffed animal, “a female jaguarundi,”
as Mark Rutland specifies, which was part of the collection of his former wife, an
anthropologist, recently and suddenly dead. It’s between two shots of Marnie’s look
that this red stain glitters, and that the conversation shifts from animal predators to
their human equivalents: men and women. But the storm that erupts, and which is a
central element of the original scene of the trauma (not to say the “primal scene”),
accelerates the return of the trauma. The importance of the storm in terms of color is
that it links gradations of different hues—red, but mauve and blue as well—to the total
whiteness of the lightning out of which the colors seem to stream. A terrified Marnie,
protecting herself against the wall opposite the main window, and as if struck by the
rhythmic flashes of lightning, cries out: “The colors! I can’t stand more colors.” “But
what colors?” answers Mark, as he moves near to her and takes her in his arms. They
are then suddenly both deprived of any natural color by the white of the lightning,
which bears in itself the entire spectrum of colors, first and foremost the red it im-
plies and carries, a white that illuminates Marnie’s and Mark’s faces in a close-up. The
kiss that follows the last lightning flash and that shows more and more closely Mark’s
mouth looking for Marnie’s lips—this kiss reaches a sort of obscenity, which is under-
scored by a faded color: Marnie’s lips are marked by a pale red. Were she to open
them—which, being frigid, she does not do (this being the ultimate stake of the film)—
the inside of her mouth would glitter with the same red that had appeared in the
jaguarundi’s throat. This color terrifies her, because it is the color of her body’s inte-
rior, real and imaginary (réel-imaginaire), and of her sex organs as they are seen and
dreamt of (vus-rêvés) here by Rutland—and by Hitchcock as well, who himself clearly
enjoys a specific jouissance in the shooting of this scene.
So each of the eight scenes may be read, depending on its position in the unfold-
ing of the screenplay (scénarisation), as an element of a symbolic embroidery, which
Hitchcock thus crudely refines. But the strength of the red is not only that of an
 F Raymond Bellour

announced raw symbol, a symbol of the blood linked to sex; the red is also acting with
the subtlety of an agent that modifies what surrounds it, chiefly the most physical
components of the mise-en-scène: framings, movements, and the actors’ expressions.
Generally, when Marnie is seized by the red she is framed in a still, close shot, or even
a very close shot, and she is either dreaming and groaning, or her look is fixed on the
mesmerizing (médusant) object (indeed, mixing these two types of scenes is one of
the ways through which perception and hallucination make common cause). The
color saturating the screen modifies this action, in that it overcharges (sur-affecte) the
expression and at the same time makes it less visible. It does so by acting as a veil,
through its own thickness, one could say. Thus the color becomes the sign of what
can’t be expressed.
One time, in the episode of the red ink, movement is added: movement of the
camera, first, as soon as the red appears on the screen, which leads our look to the
close-up, as if the look were stirred by this red through which it enters; and second,
the movement of Marnie herself, who rushes, once the color has subsided, to the rest-
room. She is followed by a camera far slower than her that stops to see her move away
(a careful eye may then, in the depths, by chance or by virtue of a perverse sign, see
a red seat), before we again find her cleaning the stain on her sleeve, and with it all
this red-screen (écran rouge), which, as though carried by her movement, remains
stuck to our eyes.
A second time, in the final scene, where everything is rebuilt and offered to
the spectator or spectatrix, the camera movement absorbs and diffuses (one does not
know to what precise point) the excess of the color. After the murder of the sailor-
client of the prostitute-mother, two close-ups of the mother and her daughter howling
embody the excess of the trauma. Here, however, it is a completely blank screen that
is covered with red. In fact, this time the screen is not fully covered, as happens in the
other scenes, where the red covers the elements represented in the image. This serves
to introduce the idea that, in addition to the excess of the symbol, this shot depicts
real blood as it invades the white cloth of the screen. Almost immediately the shot
is affected by a brutal and short camera movement, from the bottom to the top,
which pulls it at the same time toward an absolute of blood and an absent field—in
effect, a memory of the pure movement of the trauma. This, at least, is what one feels
after the event, when one has abruptly fallen into the facticity and the present of the
following shot.
It would appear that Truffaut remembered this shot in Les Deux Anglaises et le
continent, when shooting the defloration of Muriel: the camera focuses on the stains
of blood on the sheet, which thus extend to invade the whole screen, with an effer-
vescent red on which the camera is fixed, imposing there a sort of abstraction. But
there is no other narrative stake. There is simply the insistance on a variation on
life, sex, and death, through the two sisters of Henri-Pierre Roché, transformed into
Brontë sisters.
 The Marnie Color f 

What then can one say, finally, about color, about this specific use of color?
On one side, the color accentuates the symbol; on the other, it obscures it. How so?
Beyond the meaning the color confers on the symbol, it insists as a physical pressure,
which has its own value, producing a sort of strictly somatic energy. The music con-
tributes to this effect by means of its brutal thrusts, those scannings of the theme so
well liked by Bernard Hermann. At the same time such themes isolate the moments
and connect them to the modulation of the whole film, according to a consummate art
of the system, which is peculiar to the great classical cinema and especially to Hitch-
cock. However, as with the expressivity of the color, the expressivity of the music
challenges the meanings it also qualifies. The trouble is linked to the fact that, filling
the whole frame, the color is itself related to Marnie, the figure who appears within it.
Thus, what produces this body, and the space in which it appears, creates an impossi-
ble equation between the materiality of this space and the interior sensation posed
by it. The body of the actress communicates this, in its pure exteriority, only because
the immobile spectator or spectatrix receives it through perception, in the silent but
lively intimacy of his or her own body. It is this movement, this migration of the
acting body toward the spectator’s immobile body, accentuated by the color, which—
from an effect of interiorization that is supposed to come from the screen itself—
makes color at once perceptible and intelligible. This is why the effect of the last shot
of the traumatic scene (from which Marnie is absent) is, paradoxically, so strong: it is
the screen as such, that is to say, beyond the character, the technique (dispositif ) of the
projection itself, which is caught in the movement to which it is submitted. This hap-
pens because—from the point of view of the fiction, and indeed despite this fact—the
scene produces the most absolute psychical instant: the mother and the daughter,
simultaneously in the past and in the present, live and relive the scene with, as witness-
spectator, the man who sees and hears (les entend) them: Mark, the one who has just
occupied, under the figure of the bloodied sailor, the place of the dead man (du mort)
in the drama.

Four
As an epilogue, I would like, briefly, to introduce Spellbound, in order to clarify as
well as elaborate this view about the somatic value of an image devoted to the evoca-
tion of an initial trauma. In Spellbound, the equivalents of the “red” and of the storm
in Marnie are also formed by a combination: the phobia of a color, the white—much
more difficult to treat in a film in black and white—and of a motive—stripes, different
sorts of stripes—which may be produced by a fork drawing a pattern on a tablecloth,
or printed on a dressing gown, or even by the image of railway tracks. Those moments,
qualified, as in Marnie, through the look of the frightened hero, are striking, but they
are not as systematically organized as they are in Marnie through the chain of “reds.”
 F Raymond Bellour

Two other moments in Spellbound deal directly with the traumatic material. The
first one is a dream, which has become famous, largely because Hitchcock asked Sal-
vador Dali to design the artwork for it; the second one, near the end, is the “coming
back” of the trauma itself. Strangely, the dream images, however impressive, because
of the strangeness of their motives, are not really physically disturbing; nor are they, in
their connection one to another, truly emotional. The reason for this may be that these
images are offered directly for interpretation by the film through the deciphering of
the dream’s meaning by the psychoanalyst Constance Petersen/Ingrid Bergman and
her master Alex Bolow. In contrast to these so-called surrealist—but in a way pretty
tame—images, one can oppose the final shots of the return of the original trauma,
which present a high degree of perceptual and sensorial disturbance.
We are on the slopes of Gabriel Valley. Gregory Peck—that is to say John Ballan-
tyne, who is pretending to be John Brown—is accused of having murdered Doctor
Edwards, whose identity he has borrowed, because of Ballantyne’s deep guilt complex.
John Ballantyne has been brought to Gabriel Valley by Constance Peterson, his psy-
choanalyst and lover, to try to overcome his amnesia and to facilitate the revelation of
the truth. The dream has been a crucial step toward this end.
Similar to Marnie’s ending, but in a situation so completely unrealistic that it
actually increases the anxiety of the spectator or spectatrix, John Ballantyne and Con-
stance Peterson are both skiing—indeed in the same way that John is supposed to have
done with Dr. Edwards when he was killed.
As we have seen, these shots are very brutal. Their speed so taxes actual percep-
tion that even Truffaut missed one of them when, in his book on Hitchcock, he pre-
sented a series of photograms, each of which supposedly corresponds to a different
shot. (Thus Truffaut prints five photos instead of six, missing the second shot—namely
the first occurrence of the fourth shot, which depicts the young John Ballantyne’s
point of view when he is sliding on the stone balustrade.)
What makes this scene an extraordinary moment of cinema, one capable of
achieving a high degree of emotion, able to communicate and imprint in the spectator
or spectatrix the strength and the horror of the trauma?
Four elements are at stake: () The identity of the framing (a close shot) on John
Ballantyne skiing and on him as a little boy, which reinforces the identification, not
only with the character, but with the movement itself; () the reversibility of the point
of view, the boy seeing and being seen, not only by the viewer, but in a sense as seen
or at least felt by his younger brother, who, though too late, will look back—a position
we ourselves will adopt; () the expressivity of the components of the shot—framing,
lighting, and, above all, the expression of John, who acts as if in a nightmare; and finally
() there is the question of speed. In an instant, we have both the descending movement
of the boy and the division of the space of this action by the time of the succesive shots.
This creates an extreme brutality in the transitions among the shots. In effect we have
not really seen what we have seen, but for that reason we have seen it too much.
 The Marnie Color f 

It seems to me that here, as with Marnie’s color, we are confronted with the
image’s high degree of physicality, a physicality that concerns directly the very somatic
dimension of the human experience Freud tried all his life to delineate as the economic.
To speak in Lacanian terms, while this somatic level is never independent, in Hitch-
cock’s films, from the symbolic organization of the plot and its elements, neither is it
reducible to them. In this sense, the somatic level also escapes the systematicity of
what a long time ago I myself called, in my analysis of North by Northwest, the “sym-
bolic blockage.”8 Indeed, this level may also escape the hyper-Lacanian logic to which
Slavoj Žižek, in the volume he edited, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about
Lacan, But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock, has submitted all of Hitchcock’s work.9
But how, then, is one to imagine, for those extremely traumatic moments, as well
as, in a more general way, for film form and figuration, that is, for the film considered
at the level of the emotions it carries—how is one to imagine a satisfying regime of con-
ceptual description and an evaluation for the aesthetic experience?
I can see only two ways to grasp this aesthetic dimension of the film body, of the
body of cinema. One would be to keep on building a strict and explicit Freudian aes-
thetics, as is proposed by Jean-François Lyotard in his central book, Discours/Figure.10
The other would be to find a medial way and an articulation between two directions
of thought that may be seen as having little to do with one another, but which can
be linked in unexpected ways: on one side are Félix Guattari’s and Gilles Deleuze’s
works in general, mainly concerning the concepts of fluxes and intensities, or of mod-
ulation; on the other is the work of the American psychoanalyst and experimental
psychologist Daniel Stern, in his crucial book, The Interpersonal World of the Infant.11
My preference is clearly for the second way. You will understand that now is not the
right moment to elaborate such a point of view. I will only suggest that it could be, even
paradoxically, not the least faithful way to echo Freud’s obsessive but fundamental
concern with the economic dimension of desire that traverses all his work, and mainly
in The Interpretation of Dreams.

Notes
1. [This essay was delivered after a screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie, organized as
a special event at the Walker Art Center, on Friday, November , . We wish to thank the
Walker Art Center for making this event possible.—Ed.]
2. [It must be acknowledged that the text published here differs slightly from the text read
during the conference in October . When discussing this volume, Professor Bellour asked
that I blend the French text he had initially submitted and subsequently translated, with the
elaborations, written in English, that he had added to the text prior to its delivery, smoothing
out the English in the process. Having been provided with the original French text, I did avail
myself of it when pondering especially rough passages. This is not then a translator’s note per
se, but a word to the wise just the same.—Ed.]
 F Raymond Bellour

3. Jacques Aumont, Introduction à la couleur: des discours aux images (Paris: Armand
Colin, ).
4. François Truffaut, Hitchcock, rev. ed. (New York: Touchstone Books, ), .
5. Ibid., .
6. Sigmund Freud, A Psycho-Analytic Dialogue: The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Karl
Abraham, ed. Hilda Abraham and Ernst Freud, trans. Bernard Marsh and Hilda Abraham (Lon-
don: Hogarth Press, ), .
7. Dionys Mascolo, “Naissance de la tragédie, à propos d’ India Song,” in Marguerite
Duras (Paris: Editions Albatros, ).
8. Raymond Bellour, The Analysis of Film, ed. Constance Penley (Bloomington: Univer-
sity of Indiana Press, ).
9. Slavoj Žižek, ed., Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan, But Were
Afraid to Ask Hitchcock (London: Verso, ).
10. Jean-François Lyotard, Discours/Figure (Paris: Klincksieck, ).
11. Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psycho-Analysis and
Developmental Psychology (New York: Basic Books, ).
R . “Other Languages”
Testimony, Transference, and
Translation in Documentary Film
Jonathan Kahana R
The analyst’s ear practices precisely on hearing the murmurs and games of these
other languages. It makes itself attentive to the poetics which is present in every
discourse: these hidden voices, forgotten in the name of pragmatic and
ideological interests, introduce into every statement of meaning the “difference”
of the act which utters it.
—Michel de Certeau, “Lacan: An Ethics of Speech”

Film and the Scene of Listening

A staple of documentary cinema from its earliest days, the interview may be the one
situation in cinema where vision is redundant. The power of the interview as a docu-
mentary technique has primarily to do with the temporal continuity between the
event and its cinematic representation embodied in the interview subject’s voice. The
synchronous recording of sound and sight in the documentary interview presents us,
then, with another instance of the confrontation of the look and the gaze in cinema.
To the viewer, this gaze takes the form of a question that can never be articulated: if
I can hear, why do I need to see?
For a diverse group of contemporary documentary filmmakers, this problem has
become critical to the relationship between theory and practice. For these filmmakers,
it is no longer possible to regard cinema as a mere instrument of historical knowledge.
One prominent example is Claude Lanzmann’s epic oral history of the Holocaust,
Shoah, a film explicitly concerned with the difference between visual and aural mem-
ory, and that builds on the observation made by Alain Resnais (in his  film, Nuit
et Brouillard [Night and Fog]) that the technology of cinema is related to the destruc-
tion of the very past it seeks to recover.1 The role of testimony in Lanzmann’s film is,
in part, to oppose the efficiency of mechanical vision through which the past can be
painlessly apprehended.


 F Jonathan Kahana

In a scene filmed at a town square in Corfu, where the members of the Jewish
population were rounded up and loaded onto trains or shot, a survivor tells Lanzmann
that while these events were taking place, Christians from the town stood by and
watched. Lanzmann isn’t present in the shot that frames the survivors who have
accompanied him to the site of their deportation, as he is in other interviews, but his
voice is heard pressing his subjects on the fine details of their memory, determining
exactly where and how events took place. The director and his camera operator are
positioned in such a way as to force the main subject of the interview to appear in
profile in the frame, so that one looks him in the ear. “Christians heard that Jews were
being rounded up,” the survivor tells Lanzmann, “so they came.” Feigning disbelief,
Lanzmann asks, “Why’d they come?” The survivor responds, “To see the show.” This
last remark appears in the original French of the interview as “Pour voir le cinéma.”
This irony would not be lost on Lanzmann, who elsewhere challenges the accuracy
of his translators on screen, admonishing them for leaving out details in their encoun-
ters with non-French-speaking subjects; but it is lost on a monolingual audience that
can only read the subtitles. Translation in cinema, as Shoah demonstrates, is not just
from one language to another, but also from the register of the aural to the register of
the visual.
Thus the supplementary relation between vision and listening in the documen-
tary interview of this sort can present the cinema with an immanent critique, a con-
fession that follows a Freudian logic. In his prefatory comments to the analysis of the
Dream of Irma’s Injection, Freud confesses: “I have other difficulties to overcome,
which lie within myself,” by which he means his “hesitation about revealing so many
intimate facts about one’s mental life” (SE IV, ). But the desire to create a public for
this new science overcomes his modesty, and before long he has turned this limitation
into the condition of his appeal: “my readers,” he promises, “will very soon find their
initial interest in the indiscretions which I am bound to make replaced by an absorb-
ing immersion in the psychological problems upon which they throw light” (SE IV,
). Freud thus transfers or displaces the material of the confession from the auto-
biographical to the clinical realm.
In her discussion of these remarks, Shoshana Felman gives this process the name
“testimony.” In this way, psychoanalysis theorizes listening as a relationship that is
always producing an extra perspective. In the psychoanalytic dialogue, Felman ob-
serves, “[T]he doctor’s testimony does not substitute itself for the patient’s testimony,
but resonates with it, because, as Freud discovers, it takes two to witness the uncon-
scious” (). In fact, given Freud’s concern for the readers looking and listening over
his shoulder, we might want to say that it always takes more than two.
This extra perspective is familiar to anyone who has seen a conventional docu-
mentary interview, of the sort where a subject offers his or her speech in support of the
film’s argument. Two things are emphatically missing in such encounters: the sound of
the question that produces the testimony, and the visible presence of the interviewer,
 “Other Languages” f 

for whom the unwavering look of the camera is a kind of surrogate, linking or trans-
ferring the effect of the interview to the film’s audience. This speech can be said to
have a visual component: to paraphrase Theodor Reik’s description of the psycho-
analytic dialogue, it is on display insofar as the subject speaks not to the listener so
much as before him.2 But this means that, like the speech of the analysand, the testi-
mony of the interview subject is, in effect, blind, because it is addressed to an audience
it cannot see.
As he does throughout the film, Lanzmann initiates a dialogue with unsettling
resonance for documentary cinema itself, particularly the work of documenting a
crime meant to leave no evidence. By relying entirely on interviews for evidence of
events that Shoah recounts and eschewing the kind of historical imagery that docu-
mentaries about the Holocaust usually employ, he waives the usual guarantees of the
documentary genre’s authority. The effect of familiar images of victims, perpetrators,
and locations is to ground the typical Holocaust documentary in historical actuality.
This traditional use of stock footage advances a more or less implicit claim about
the trustworthiness of cinema, as a medium, against the vicissitudes of memory. It also
allows a particular film to derive some of the broad historical authority of the cinema
archive. Lanzmann’s suspension of these relations of trust is vital to his film’s ethical
agenda; it answers Resnais’s question about how cinema will avoid reducing the Holo-
caust to a singular event, fixed in the past.
As with the analytic dialogue, the cinematic interview makes the voice of tes-
timony alien or foreign—even to the speaker. The value of a comparison between
documentary and psychoanalysis is in the attention such a comparison focuses on
the rhetoric of testimony. Where disciplines of listening and interrogation tend to
naturalize—often at great pain to the testimonial subject—his or her oral “evidence
of experience,”3 the form of the interview employed by the filmmakers I will examine
establishes the significance of this voice in the subject’s exterior, outside conscious-
ness: in the texts, spaces, and technologies structuring it. In this way documentary
can be used to call into question the currently fashionable distinction between mem-
ory and history, a distinction that depends on a particular fantasy of what Walter
Benjamin referred to as the “equipment-free aspect of reality.” Demonstrating the
tangency of the concepts of testimony, transference, and translation is one of the ways
the kinds of documentary films I will deal with have effected this critique.

The Dreams of Cinema

The opposition of the spectator’s look on the one hand and the gaze of the cinematic
apparatus on the other, a problematic imported into film studies from Lacanian psy-
choanalysis, has been a staple of film theory since the s. This problematic, like
film theory in general, has rarely been applied to nonfiction cinema. Until recently, the
 F Jonathan Kahana

exemption from theoretical analysis granted documentary cinema has been related to
a certain conception of another oppositional relation: that of the image and reality.
As Jane Gaines has suggested, film theory began, in the s, to regard the
issue of realism, which fascinated postwar critics such as André Bazin and Siegfried
Kracauer, as something of an embarrassment, if not a scandal.4 In the early s,
Bazin had separated practitioners of cinema into two kinds of filmmakers: those who
“put their faith in the image, and those who put their faith in reality.”5 Lacanian and
Althusserian positions, which have dominated film theory since the s, turned film
away from reality and toward the image. If theorists who took up these positions could
not exactly be said to believe in the image, nonetheless they certainly behaved as if
spectators did. This criticism, whether psychoanalytically or ideologically inflected,
directed itself at the social conditions and consequences of regimes of spectacle,
voyeurism, and fetishism that had promulgated certain misrepresentations of the
world. (It was as if Bazin’s distinction between two kinds of directors, the realists and
the imagists, had been collapsed into a suspicion of the image presupposing the exis-
tence of reality external to representation.)
One well-known and far-reaching version of this iconophobic position was the
critique of the male gaze that objectifies women. As has been pointed out by a num-
ber of feminist film theorists seeking to correct a misreading of Lacan, the gaze is not
“an idealized point from which the film can be looked at.”6 Rather, the gaze, in psy-
choanalytic theory, stands precisely for that which is impossible to translate into visual
representation. In the translation from the object world to a system of visual repre-
sentation, the gaze occupies the place of what is lost in translation, that operation by
which the human subject surrenders agency to the cinematic apparatus. The trans-
lation of the psychoanalytic subject into the language of film theory had, in other
words, the effect of making the correspondence between the technology of cinema
and what Christian Metz called the “mental machinery” of cinema appear more com-
plete than it is in practice.7 The problem with this theory of the cinematic apparatus
is, as Mary Ann Doane has written, “that the apparatus always works. It never breaks
down, is never subject to failure.”8
A number of recent works of documentary cinema engineer this failure and
place it on display. In their attention to what Metz called the “aural object,” a sound
that resists identification, these works challenge the theory that the technology of cin-
ema models the spectator’s activity. Because of their attention to the ethics and aes-
thetics of listening, these works reflexively raise the question of what it means to be an
audience. In such scenes, the theory and practice of cinema come together, as they do
in psychoanalysis, where “the encounter between analyst and analysand. . . inevitably
produces the surprise, the destabilization of the given theories—the constant shock
of otherness we associate with the unconscious.”9 These works might, therefore, renew
the question of how psychoanalysis can model the analysis of cinema. They do so
 “Other Languages” f 

precisely by posing again Bazin’s question: what kind of irrational desire makes the
cinema real? By “real,” of course, Bazin meant a collapse of the distinction between
theory and practice: the photographic image doesn’t just share “the being of the model
of which it is the reproduction,” he argued, “it is the model.”10
In the example I will focus on, Isaac Julien’s psycho-biography of Frantz Fanon,
conventional documentary methods are joined with narrative and avant-garde tech-
niques that recall not only the language and grammar of fiction film, but the early
history and pre-history of cinema itself. Julien joins other practitioners of a hybrid
version of nonfiction cinema, including filmmakers as diverse as Trinh T. Minh-ha,
Werner Herzog, and Errol Morris, in challenging the ontology of the documentary
form while working in it. Especially in their staging of the documentary interview,
these filmmakers demonstrate the resemblance between cinema and the Freudian the-
ater of the unconscious.
Each of these filmmakers has attempted to capture the effects of the “other lan-
guages” of the unconscious (to use Michel de Certeau’s formulation) in the subjects
of their films. In their eliciting of repressed or traumatic speech, these films suggest a
simple methodological resemblance between the interview in documentary cinema
and the psychoanalytic dialogue. But the more compelling reason to use the model of
psychoanalytic dialogue to describe these works of documentary is to capture the char-
acter of a particular theoretical gesture that one finds in the work of the aformentioned
filmmakers: a reflection on the language of documentary testimony that inhibits or
interrupts the film’s transmission of evidence from a moment or site of origin.
This thesis builds on Mary Ann Doane’s remarks about psychoanalytic dialogue
where she writes that

psychoanalysis itself proposes the fragility of any theoretical construct, its affinity
with paranoia and delirium, and hence the problematic status of knowledge and he
who purports to know. In other words, psychoanalysis must be contaminated by its
own theorized and simultaneously untheorizable object—the unconscious.11

Doane makes use of the fundamental impasse in the concept of theory that Freud
articulates in The Interpretation of Dreams, where the concept of the unconscious
must function at once as the foundation of the science of psychoanalysis and as a site
of resistance to reason itself. As Freud writes: “To explain a thing means to trace it
back to something already known, and there is at the present time no established psy-
chological knowledge under which we could subsume what the psychological expla-
nation of dreams enables us to infer as a basis for their explanation” (SE V, ). This
object—the unconscious—provided an opportunity to devise a new science. And to
justify itself, this new science had to maintain the inexplicability of its origin. Theo-
retical knowledge is, according to Doane, at once the source and the casualty of the
destabilizing that psychoanalysis effects on the concept of consciousness.
 F Jonathan Kahana

Dream : Nadar
It is perhaps no accident that the interview is so frequently the central explanatory
device of films challenging the ontological and epistemological premises of documen-
tary, since the practice of the interview appears in founding statements of both psy-
choanalysis and cinema theory. In “The Myth of Total Cinema,” where he famously
concludes that cinema had not yet been invented, André Bazin refers to the “dream”
reported by the nineteenth-century French photographer Nadar in , several years
before the first publicly exhibited moving pictures: “My dream is to see the photo-
graph register the bodily movements and the facial expressions of a speaker while the
phonograph is recording his speech.”12 Nadar did, in fact, publish a prototype of the
filmed interview in the Journal illustré in , a series of photographs of the chemist
Chevreul on the occasion of his hundredth birthday, captioned by statements Chevreul
was apparently speaking at the moment each image was taken. Nadar had intended to
accompany the photographs with recordings made with an invention called a photo-
phone, but because of technical difficulties with the apparatus, he was forced to resort
to approximate transcriptions of Chevreul’s speech. Since his failed invention only
forestalls the future realization of cinema in its pure state, it functions, for Bazin, as
a more authentic site of origin than the ephemeral—and profit-driven—industrial ex-
periments of Edison and the Lumière brothers.
If the return to this pure origin—the first moment at which cinema was concep-
tually rather than technically possible—eludes the cinema, then each subsequent
practice of the filmed interview also replays, on a transferential stage, this frustrated
return to the origin. The filmed image connects viewers to history only by an act of
magic (or, as Bazin would prefer, faith) that permits them to take the present moment
of moving pictures for the past instant of recording. In the scene of recording we are
presented with in the interview, the equipment of sound filmmaking is seemingly
made to disappear, and cinema effects the return to a primitive depiction of move-
ment, the movement back in time through a voice inspired by memory.

Dream : Little Dieter

This fantasy is on display in Werner Herzog’s  film, Little Dieter Needs to Fly, a
film that consists essentially of one long interview with the full-grown Dieter of the
title, who became obsessed with a childhood dream of flight during the Second World
War, when his German town was bombed by American planes.13 To pursue his dream,
Dieter emigrated to the United States, eventually joining the Navy and flying military
missions during the Vietnam War. He was shot down over Laos and spent several
months as a prisoner of war in Laos and North Vietnam. During these months of
captivity, Dieter endured unspeakable cruelties, and finally made a miraculous escape.
The film recreates these experiences through a combination of archival footage and
 “Other Languages” f 

present-day interviews with Dieter, who has a remarkable capacity to narrate: he speaks
almost continuously throughout the film, recalling his experiences in vivid detail, and
almost without a trace of emotion. The presence of cinema in the locations Dieter
speaks about is incongruous, because documentary cinema is logically opposed to the
kinds of “visions” the film revisits and restages. If the film is to demonstrate that his
stories are true, grounding them in experience and historical reality (and thus liberat-
ing both Dieter and the audience from what Deleuze called the dream of the other), it
must differentiate Dieter’s visions (dreams, fantasies, hallucinations) from those of the
documentary apparatus, from the evidence gathered by the mechanical eye and ear. In
this way, the film establishes the trustworthy character of its encounters: with this
traumatized individual, and with the past that produced him.
But Herzog refuses to distinguish the reality of Dieter’s visions from the reality
produced by cinema, thus demonstrating the Bazinian dictum that “despite the prompt-
ings of our critical intelligence,” the photographic image has an “irrational power” that
“bear[s] away our faith” in reality.14 The incredible story Herzog coaxes out of this
material suggests that Dieter was doomed to play out, and suffer the consequences of,
his childhood fantasy. The film’s exposition stresses the tension between these mental
visions and the vision of the film itself, as when archival images of devastation and
privation are accompanied by the words, spoken by Herzog himself, “as a child, Dieter
saw things around him that just made no earthly sense at all. Germany had been trans-
formed into a dreamscape of the surreal.” Indeed, Dieter’s life story is one in which the
imaginary makes a regular appearance. In a manner that stretches credibility, Dieter’s
history is measured according to the recollection of hallucinatory images: on a street
just like this one, Dieter remembers seeing a shop window displaying the first sausage
anyone had seen in years; here is the place where Dieter, escaping from his North
Vietnamese captors, had a vision of his dead father, pointing out an escape route.
(Sausages, a dead father: are objects like these not the very reason Freud invented
the unconscious?)
To underscore the force of Dieter’s original dream of flight in the subsequent
events that make up his biography, the interviews with him are more mobile than
usual. The interview-based documentary tends to frame its subjects in a single, evoca-
tive or emblematic location: in front of the factory where they once worked; next to a
ravine where a terrible event occurred; in the office where they conduct their research.
This technique accentuates the magical power of the testimonial voice, its capacity
to (re)cover great distances in space and time, and to spirit the viewer to another place
and time than the one seen in the present image. The frame of the image is often static
during these interviews: the mobility of the apparatus is muted, so the agency of the
voice can be brought into relief. Herzog, in contrast, replaces Dieter in the authentic
settings of his story, using editing to transport him back and forth between locations
identified with the more distant or more recent past. If this visual displacement is
meant to illustrate the power of the voice to evoke images of the past, these literal
 F Jonathan Kahana

demonstrations—as when Dieter is made to narrate, while bound and running through
the jungle, the story of his forced march from Laos to North Vietnam—have the oppo-
site effect: they undermine the voice’s agency and aura, placing the documentary power
of the image in conflict with that of the voice. The Freudian character of this reversal
consists in its destabilization of the origin: Dieter and Herzog return to the original
locations of Dieter’s dreams and nightmares and find, of course, that the perpetrators
of his torture are no longer there, that the sites themselves are transformed. In staging
a cinematic version of the dialogue in the analyst’s office, and pursuing the same ther-
apeutic effects, Herzog’s film demonstrates the incomplete or frustrated character of
the transference between cinema and psychoanalysis.

Fanon’s Otobiography
In Black Skin, White Masks—a text written within earshot, we might say, of Lacan’s
influential lectures—Frantz Fanon captures precisely the difference between the gaze
and ordinary human vision when he writes that

[t]he eye is not merely a mirror but a correcting mirror. The eye should make it pos-
sible for us to correct cultural errors. I do not say the eyes, I say the eye, and there is
no mystery about what the eye refers to; not to the crevice in the skull but to that very
uniform light that wells out of the reds of Van Gogh, that glides through a concerto of
Tschaikowsky, that fastens itself desperately to Schiller’s Ode to Joy, that allows itself
to be conveyed by the worm-ridden bawling of Césaire.15

Fanon describes a fantastic confusion of the senses: great works of art force on us a
synesthesia, wherein music or literature may speak to us in light. But how does the ver-
tigo precipitated by this derangement of the senses amount to a correcting experience?
Fanon’s reflections on Western art appear in the chapter of Black Skin, White
Masks on “The Negro and Psychopathology,” in which he argues that racism is directly
related to the language of vision. Like the Jew, Fanon says, the Negro is a symbol of
Evil, “[t]he black man more so, for the good reason that he is black. Is not whiteness
in symbols always ascribed in French to Justice, Truth, Virginity?” (). If Fanon’s
humanism obligates him, at this stage in his political development, to value citizenship
over nation or ethnicity (“What is all this talk of a black people, of a Negro national-
ity? I am a Frenchman. I am interested in French culture, French civilization, the
French people” []), then undoing the peculiar cultural logic of perception that ties
skin color to “French” is nonetheless one of his central goals. In his later writings on
the Algerian revolution, Fanon stresses the place of listening in both colonial and anti-
colonial strategy, from the use of radio for propaganda and counterpropaganda to
police practices of interrogation and the variations on psychotherapeutic dialogue
applied by both the French and the Algerian liberation movement, which eventually
 “Other Languages” f 

included, of course, Fanon himself. These writings on listening practices can be read
as a continuation of the theme Fanon introduces in the above passage: the separa-
tion of signification from the evidence of the senses, for the purposes of “correcting
cultural errors.”
In his writing on “Aural Objects,” Christian Metz suggests that aurality provides
an opportunity to reverse the “primitive substantialism” of visual culture, the primacy
accorded to classes of objects that confirm the independence and integrity of the sub-
ject sensing them.16 In the language of cinema, Metz shows, the image is encoded with
“tactility”: we experience images as either “there” or not. Within the boundaries of the
frame and screen, images are fully present and fully separate from the spectator. Metz
argues that a description of cinema that restricts itself to the objects of screen and
image is fated to explain the experience of cinema in terms drawn from the Enlight-
enment conception of the subject, and to perpetuate the “world view” that maintains
this subject’s privilege.17 By making use of what Metz calls the “infra-objects” of sound
in cinema, Julien and the other filmmakers I have mentioned challenge this “primitive
substantialism” and, in doing so, the premise that distinguishes documentary from fic-
tion filmmaking and that has exempted documentary from theoretical analysis: the
idea that recording is essentially physical, not social.
The analysis of a gaze in listening is one of the central themes of Julien’s 
film, Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask.18 Like some of Julien’s previous works,
including the  feature Young Soul Rebels, and the semi-documentary “meditation”
on Langston Hughes, Looking for Langston, Frantz Fanon uses a complicated sound
design to underscore a politics of group identity.19 As in those previous works, listen-
ing—as both diegetic content and as dimension of the spectator’s experience—is cen-
tral to the film’s efforts to challenge the separation of media and cultures into original
and authentic domains. Frantz Fanon recounts Fanon’s biography using various forms
of documentary exposition, including archival footage, interviews, dramatic reenact-
ments of Fanon’s life and writings, and the social and political consequences of his
work on behalf of the Algerian nationalist cause. Fanon himself appears in both doc-
umentary and fictionalized scenes; the latter include a series of choreographed, mute
tableaux of his family life. These recreations illustrate one of the film’s central ques-
tions: how is the vexed status of the Oedipus complex in Fanon’s notion of the alien-
ated black male, and thus for colonial society itself, related in a decisive way to his
biography? In an early tableau that will be revisited again and again, young Fanon is
listening to Caribbean dance music on the radio when his mother enters and turns the
music off. This scene reverberates through the rest of the film. Before describing its
organization in detail, I will explain how the film arrives at its basic set of topics.
The film’s narration is suspended between two authoritative kinds of interviews
distributed throughout its length: on the one hand, there are interviews with Fanon’s
interpreters, scholars such as Stuart Hall and Françoise Vergès; and on the other, with
figures who stand for the historical origins of Fanon’s work, including co-workers and
 F Jonathan Kahana

relatives, such as Joby Fanon, Frantz’s brother, and Olivier Fanon, Frantz’s son. Although
the two types of interviews are distinguished from each other in overtly formal ways,
both respect the cardinal rule of the documentary interview: that the subject does not
address the camera directly, but appears to be engaged in conversation with an inter-
locutor slightly off-axis from the camera. (This adherence to documentary tradition is
one of the film’s many ambivalences, since Julien breaks the taboo against actors look-
ing into the camera—which applies in documentary as strictly as it does in narrative
cinema—almost every time the actors playing Fanon appear on screen.)
What comes to look like the film’s “primal scene,” the family conflict over the
radio, is prefaced by a portion of the interview with Stuart Hall, in which Hall outlines
the Hegelian contract of identity on which Fanon’s theory of the look relies (and which,
at the same time, it revises20), the so-called Master-Slave Dialectic. As Hall’s explana-
tion is presented on the soundtrack, the screen displays newsreel footage of a colonial
ceremony of recognition. Hall’s description of colonial relations interprets this news-
reel footage theoretically, making it clear that by “look,” the film is not referring to
purely perceptual relations. In the newsreel image, a formally dressed official is shak-
ing the hands of a line of colonial subjects, recognizing them for service to the empire.
In this image there are at least four possible looks: that of the colonial administrator
and his ceremony of recognition, the look of the colonized back at the official, the look
of the newsreel camera recording the event, and of the camera rephotographing the
newsreel for inclusion in the film we are watching. The look with which the film is
ultimately concerned, then, is not that face-to-face relation that takes place within the
physical relations of colonialism, but the sense of overlooking that the entire ceremony
represents. The newsreel apparatus can be seen as complicit with the gaze of colo-
nialism, insofar as the techniques convey the deeds of a benevolent administration
back to the nation. There is a kind of slippage, it is suggested, between acts of face-
to-face looking, acts of official recognition, and the cinematic apparatus. One of the
goals of Julien’s film is to deconstruct this sense of visuality, even as he claims to be
using the medium to “visualize theory,” a contradiction that leads to the film’s most
interesting problems.21
As this rhythm of document and analysis unfolds, the film continues to explore
the construction of perceptual space. When we return to the shot of Hall’s interview,
the critic explains that the colonial situation is an extreme version of the Master-Slave
Dialectic, which stretches it to its limit: “[I]t is the master saying, ‘I do not see you at
all.’” This statement is accompanied by a cut to a black-and-white ethnographic pho-
tograph of an unidentified group of natives facing the camera. Julien’s camera pans
over this photograph and then passes into the setting of Fanon’s memory, a tableau
vivant of the traumatic family scene at the radio. Aided by a musical cue, a Caribbean
dance tune, which rises in volume as we leave the field of the photograph and enter
the mise-en-scène of the familial space, the camera here articulates an aural logic of
space, an architecture of listening derived from the associations that occur, among
 “Other Languages” f 

other places, in the analytic dialogue. Passing from one space and time to another, the
film here subordinates the logic of the image—which governs the structure in place
since Griffith, of spaces abutted on the order of discrete shots—to the logic of sound,
which, as we shall see, is a logic not of parallelism or metaphor, but of contamination
and overdetermination. In the sequence of seven shots that follows, the sounds of the
radio at which the young Fanon sits move us back and forth between two different
physical spaces: the interior of the home and a dance taking place in an “outside” as
it is represented by newsreel footage. When Fanon’s mother reaches down to shut off
the radio, the camera moves in, framing young Frantz against a black background,
staring defiantly into the camera.
As this final image is composed, two sounds come up in the mix: the beginning
of the next interview and the musical signature of this event—a few brooding notes
from a chamber orchestra and a brief aria sung by a woman’s voice. Each time a crisis
of identity strikes Fanon in the film this voice is heard, linking the crisis to its source
in this scene. In the following sequence, Françoise Vergès explains the significance of
the previous scene: Fanon’s mother was a very light-skinned Alsatian, and his father
was very dark. One day Frantz was listening to his mother singing a French song. When
he interrupted and asked her for a Creole song, his mother told him to “stop being
like a nigger.” Finally, the camera movement linking the discourse on the look and
the following discourse on sound from the beginning of this sequence—a movement
that appeared to function in a purely grammatical, copulative manner—is grounded in
a biographical source: it becomes the signifier of Fanon’s mother’s racism, which the
film diagnoses as a phobia of contamination.
Julien’s staging of this moment of castration refers to and, in a clever way, resists
one conventional explanation for the acoustic “mirroring” that hearing is supposed to
effect in the subject. The subject’s voice has the property, according to Guy Rosolato
(from whom Kaja Silverman takes the notion of the “acoustic mirror”), of “being at the
same time emitted and heard, sent and received,” internalized at the same time that it
is externalized. This relationship to one’s own voice extends the experience of sound
presumed to take place in the womb, where hearing is a primary and omnidirectional
sense.22 The “subtle” and “archaic” sense that Michel Chion describes in The Voice in
Cinema develops from the primitive situation of the fetus and the infant: “In the infant’s
experience, the mother ceaselessly plays hide-and-seek with his visual field. . . . But the
olfactory and vocal continuum. . . maintain the mother’s presence when she can no
longer be seen (in fact, seeing her implies at least some distance and separation).”23
Julien makes reference to these ontogenic arguments by making this scene of listening
into a primary source of identity for Fanon. This nostalgic structure is seemingly rein-
forced by Julien’s use of the tableau vivant to stage this and other emblematic scenes,
since the frontal, exhibitionist image created by this framing recalls the shot favored
in early or so-called “primitive” cinema: the wide, static shot that allowed an entire
narrative to be played out in a single take.
 F Jonathan Kahana

But Julien also undercuts this psycho-biological premise by making the radio the
source of the racially and spatially undifferentiated sounds that inspire Fanon’s plea-
sure and later his political energy. The mother is here identified with the incisive
injunction against listening to “nigger” music, a command that separates “inside” from
“outside” and “you” from “that” or “them.” (The betrayal of the “son” by the “mother”
is already one of the film’s tropes: the story about the mother reminds us of the story
we have just heard about how the Empress Josephine convinced Napoleon to reinsti-
tute slavery in the colonies—a story accompanied by an image of a decapitated and
bloodied statue of the Empress.) Julien is probably closer here to the conceptions
of listening offered by Metz, who emphasizes the indeterminacy of a sound’s origin,
or by Paul Willemen, whose theory of cinematic enunciation insists upon an “unceas-
ing . . . oscillatory dialogue” between “the subject’s sense of identity” and the “image
of another.”24 The presence of a technological apparatus, the radio, in Fanon’s fantas-
matic scene echoes Willemen’s suggestion that the subject spoken by cinema is the
product of a “filling-in operation reconstituting the fantasy of pre-oedipal plenitude,
a fantasy always marked by the symbolic incision of the frame.”25 As is the case with
the Freudian concept of testimony, where the metaphor of the technical apparatus is
present from the beginning, it is impossible to separate the textual operation from its
subject-effects.26
In fact, the distance between this scene of listening and a bio-historical point of
origin is further increased by the recognition that its construction strongly resembles
other scenes of listening in Julien’s work, scenes in which forms of identity and com-
munity unspeakable in the historical situations depicted are “spoken” by the film. In
Young Soul Rebels, for instance, the mixing of records in a dance club scene brings
together two distinct subcultures—white punks and gay black disco dancers—who
had been presented in the diegesis as antagonists. Looking for Langston constructs
an imaginary world of gay life during the Harlem Renaissance from a combination of
fictional period scenes and archival images, including footage from films by Oscar
Micheaux, newsreels, and a television appearance by Hughes. The collage of images,
which moves around freely in time and history, is mirrored in the soundtrack, which
blends the poetry of Hughes, James Baldwin, Bruce Nugent, and Essex Hemphill with
Bessie Smith’s blues and contemporary dance music. One is tempted to read Julien’s
habitual use of sound mixing to bridge past and present as an authorial signature:
he encourages such an interpretation by frequently appearing in his films, as in the
opening sequence of Looking for Langston, in which Julien appears as the corpse in
a coffin, while Toni Morrison reads James Baldwin’s poetry (at Baldwin’s funeral) on
the soundtrack.
But such an autobiographical reading is, at the same time, discouraged by the
recognition that scenes of listening appear as frequently in Fanon’s own writings.
These writings are the other significant point of reference for Julien’s use of sound in
Frantz Fanon.
 “Other Languages” f 

We noted that in Black Skin, White Masks Fanon uses an image of synaesthesia—
sounds and words that can be seen—to describe the gaze, which he charges with the
task of “correcting cultural errors.” When Fanon takes up the cause of Algerian nation-
alism, this critique of perceived truth—particularly spoken truth—remains an im-
portant tactic. In his discussion in The Wretched of the Earth of the mental disorders
produced on both sides by the colonial war in Algeria, Fanon notes the variety of
devices developed by French medical personnel to compel speech and break down
resistance. These devices include a variety of psycho-sociological and pharmacologi-
cal “treatments” for the “pathology” of political resistance that French psychiatrists
found among the Algerians. Echoing Freud’s description of the unconscious as the
“internal foreigner” in consciousness, the term used for this resistance is a “corps
étranger,” or “foreign body.” A variety of methods of torture, mockeries of free speech,
were intended to “liberate” the victim from the foreign body of politics that had in-
vaded his consciousness. These methods included injections of pentothal, or “truth
serum,” and the play-acting of intellectual communities, in which torturers would
engage in debate with suspected members of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN)
to convince them of their errors in judgment. According to Fanon, these tortures had
the effect of leaving the victim with the feeling that he could no longer trust himself to
keep confidences or engage in properly private conversation.
The induction of truth into the body of the prisoner and its consequent ex-
traction by force is, according to classicist Page du Bois, a time-honored practice at
the heart of the Western concept of truth.27 Long before the Algerian war—or, for that
matter, psychoanalysis—the Greek practice of slave torture established the powerful
fiction of the body of the testimonial subject as the origin and container of a truth
unknown to that subject. Torture appeared to press this truth out of the body through
the mouth, in speech. The fiction of a physiological location of unconscious truth is
engaged by Freud when he decides that, rather than treating the “mind” for which
the patient’s testimony serves as evidence, he will work on the patient’s words them-
selves (the event of the dream, for instance, is fabricated in a conversation about it).
With rueful sarcasm, Fanon captures the cynical force of this obvious fiction when
he observes that there are two categories of people who undergo torture in Algeria,
“those who know something” and “those who know nothing.”28 In both cases, torture
is intended to turn the victim’s own voice against him: the confession beaten out of
him demonstrates to him—and to those among whom his treatment will be broad-
cast—that one’s own statements (“I know nothing,” “I will never tell what I know”)
must not be trusted.
The brilliance of Fanon’s analysis of Algerian radio is in his noticing how indige-
nous practices of listening not only resist this violence, but also submit the concepts
of “native” and “traditional” culture to a deconstructive reversal. In A Dying Colonial-
ism, in the chapter called, in the English translation, “This Is the Voice of Algeria,”29
Fanon describes how the opposition, set in place by the European bourgeoisie in
 F Jonathan Kahana

Algeria between the modern and the traditional, the civilized and the primitive, plays
out along the lines of a linkage of property and cultural value specific to the colonial
situation:
For a European to own a radio is of course to participate in the eternal round of West-
ern petty-bourgeois ownership, which extends from the radio to the villa, including
the car and the refrigerator. It also gives him the feeling that colonial society is a living
and palpitating reality, with its festivities, its traditions eager to establish themselves,
its progress, its taking root. But especially, in the hinterland, in the so-called coloni-
zation centers, [radio] is the only link with the cities, with Algiers, with the metropo-
lis, with the world of the civilized. It is one of the means of escaping the inert, passive,
and sterilizing pressure of the “native” environment. ()

The counterpart to this colonial fear of contamination by native language and culture
is the indigene’s “traditional” modesty, which compels him to avoid listening to or even
owning a radio so as to avoid “sex allusions, or even the clownish situations meant to
make people laugh,” elements of French broadcasts that might “cause an unendurable
strain in a family listening to these programs” (). This concern for respectability is,
according to Fanon, a tactic of resistance; when the FLN began broadcasting news of
the revolution with its own transmitters, Fanon observes, sales of radios among the
native population soared. Similarly, the ability of the colonized to resist the official
truths broadcast over Radio-Alger, the organ of the occupying force, with news broad-
casts on the Voice of Fighting Algeria had the effect of contaminating this singular
truth: “The ‘truth’ of the oppressor,” writes Fanon, “formerly rejected as an absolute lie,
was now countered by another, an acted truth. . . . Because it avowed its own uneasi-
ness, the occupier’s lie became a positive aspect of the nation’s new truth” (). This
contamination or hybridization of the official truth extended even to the phenome-
nology of listening. Since the French jammed and distorted the Algerian broadcasts,
groups of listeners relied on a single “interpreter” sitting close to the receiver to tell
them what the broadcasts said. These listeners were often forced to imagine they had
heard the news they wanted to hear: “Under these conditions, claiming to have heard
the Voice of Algeria was, in a certain sense, distorting the truth” ().30
This critique of the originality or authenticity of the voice, or of audible truths
more generally, is echoed in Julien’s own use of sources, both testimonial and textual.
Both Fanon’s writing and Julien’s film rework metaphors of the voice—the “voice of
the people,” authorship—to reduce the phenomenal character of speech. The acts
of speech and listening that Fanon describes are beset by what Jacques Derrida,
describing the “writing machines” in Freud, calls différance: a way of recording “living,
full speech, master of itself and self-present” that is less a transcription than a trans-
lation.31 The metaphors Freud has to reach for to describe the unconscious intro-
duce into this “full speech” a delay or discrepancy that makes speech into writing, a
“non-origin which is originary.”32 If scenes of listening (to torture, to the radio) are
Fanon’s versions of these “writing machines,” their echoes in Julien are less the literal
 “Other Languages” f 

transcriptions of these scenes than the air of fantasy, simulation, misrecognition, and
error that makes us question their accuracy. Julien’s way of responding to Fanon’s call
for an art that corrects cultural errors is, in other words, to make his own.
To borrow the term Olivier Fanon uses in the film to describe his father, I am
suggesting, in other words, that we are compelled to read the film’s depictions of oral
testimony, both documentary and fictive, as attempts to derange cinema.33 Julien’s
attempt to be faithful to his subject while obeying that subject’s revolutionary appeal
results in a curious mixture of aural and visual figures. Rather than viewing these
instances as errors, however, I suggest that they should be regarded as attempts, con-
sistent with Fanon’s dialectical analysis of technological culture, to jam the apparatus
of visually based film theory, and to replace the “delirium of clinical perfection” in
apparatus theory with the transferential, intermittently successful model that Mary
Ann Doane discovers in Freud.34
As the story of Fanon’s work on behalf of the Algerian cause unfolds, the film’s
own voice becomes less and less coherent: contradictions in Fanon’s theory and char-
acter are expressed in offsetting interviews with followers and critics. But rather than
pursuing a purely characterological explanation for these contradictions, Frantz Fanon
uses them as an opportunity to examine the relation between film theory and film
practice. The mirror-stage thesis, for instance, becomes a visual trope in the film,
sometimes quite literally (as when a mirror appears in the background of the interview
with Françoise Vergès about Fanon’s interpretation of the mirror-stage: when Vergès
explains that misrecognition prevents the white subject from seeing his black other,
Julien places himself, out of focus, in the mirror behind her). Although Julien is clearly
indebted to Laura Mulvey’s use of the Freudian lexicon of vision in her foundational
essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” the film is at least ambivalent about
Mulvey’s assertion that cinema is defined by the question of “the look,” its narrative
structure, and its psychic function.35
Julien is occasionally so insistent on “visualizing” Fanon that he overstates Fanon’s
relation to the theory of the look. One of these moments is the film’s interpretation of
Fanon’s “phobia” of male homosexuality. Fanon’s attitude to homosexuality, as Diana
Fuss observes, conforms to his own definition of phobia: “When Fanon confesses, ‘I
have never been able, without revulsion, to hear a man say of another man: “He is
so sensual!’ the very form of the enunciation obeys the terms of Fanon’s own earlier
definition of phobia as ‘terror mixed with sexual revulsion.’”36 When this scene is
presented in Frantz Fanon, however, this expression of desire is mute and visual, and
the aural formulation of the phobia’s etiology—“I have never been able to hear a man
say of another man”—is lost. Fanon is in the foreground watching a male couple kiss-
ing, returning his look.
This staging misses the opportunity to link it to Fanon’s anxiety about another
community from which he was excluded: speakers of Arabic. As Fanon did not speak
Arabic well enough to conduct his psychiatric interviews in that language, he was
 F Jonathan Kahana

forced to converse with his patients through translators. The film renders this rela-
tionship in ways that again suggest that this trauma of hearing has effects that make
sense only in visual terms. A later series of dramatizations of case studies from The
Wretched of the Earth shows Fanon listening to the dreams and symptoms of the
French torturers. Julien stages some of these interviews as relations between three
bodies, with the Arabic-speaking male nurse present at the rear of the shot and Fanon
and his patient arranged in the foreground and middle distance of the shot, Fanon
listening to testimony entirely in English (which stands in for French). By rendering
Fanon’s response to this testimony as a horrified stare back into the camera, Julien
forces these moments to resonate with the traumatic scene in Fanon’s biography,
rather than exploring more fully the comparison between the violence of torture and
the violence of testimony.37
But what appears to be a simple mistranslation of the text (of Fanon’s life and
theory) into visual language can be regarded, from another perspective, as an attempt
to remind the viewer of the capacity of the apparatus to break down. (It is not enough,
after all, to notice that Julien has translated a scene of listening into an illustration of
the mirror-stage thesis central to psychoanalytic film theory; the viewer has to recall
as well that earlier in the film Stuart Hall has interpreted Fanon’s rendering of this
theory as critical of its Hegelian and Lacanian sources.) If it seems that Julien has, at
times, simply displaced the question of listening onto stock figures of “the gaze,” he
seems at other times to take seriously Mulvey’s challenge to construct a material,
dialectical cinema.38 For Mulvey this radical act consists in materializing two looks
denied or subordinated by the fantasy structure of classic narrative cinema: the cam-
era’s and the spectator’s. For documentary filmmakers, the radical act consists of just
the opposite: shattering the illusion that the spectator’s perception and the recording
capacity of the apparatus are engaged, and turning evidentiary or indexical signs (par-
ticularly the signs of the voice) into textual figures. One of the film’s final interviews is
a good example of Julien’s attempt to effect this documentary unpleasure.
The uncanny assonance between the issue of translation in Fanon’s practice, as
a problem of colonial relations, and the film’s effort to find an appropriate audio-visual
expression for this problem, is amplified in the climactic interview with Joby Fanon,
close to the end of the film, where testimonial speech is given the form of a visual
fetish. In this densely textured scene, Julien evokes the difference between the subject
of film’s speech and its speaking subject.39 Sitting at a table covered with photographs
of Fanon, Joby is being interviewed about Fanon’s death. He introduces an object,
which turns out to be Frantz’s last letter, written as he was receiving treatment for
leukemia in Washington, D.C. As the camera pans from Joby’s face to his hands and
the letter, he fiddles with the letter, which is in a clear plastic cover, and explains its
significance in a voice-over delivered from just outside the frame: “When I received it
he was already dead.” Joby then speaks of the letter in terms that describe it simulta-
neously as a lens and a voice: “In it you see the very lucid side of Frantz,” and “It is
 “Other Languages” f 

almost an appeal.” In close-up, Joby’s hands withdraw the letter from its cover, and
he lays his glasses on the table. Finally he begins to read: “I’m writing to give you
some news”—and then he can go no further. Overcome with the memory produced by
this act of ventriloquism, Joby experiences the rush of visible emotion that documen-
tary filmmakers value so highly, the reason that they bother at all to accompany speech
in the interview with a visual record. He waves off the camera, and the scene fades
to white.
The film could be understood here simply to return the aural and visual signi-
fiers to their proper places in the cinematic hierarchy, relegating speech to a lifeless
corporeality. After all, Julien is making use of a cliché of documentary: crying, and
the interruption of “lucidity” that accompanies it. The performance conventionally
accompanying the emotional display of this effort to remember posits the source of
the interviewee’s speech in the closet of the body, returning to it an interior cavity that
the scopic drive can then appear to unfold. Is Julien aware that he restages here one
of the pernicious traditions of documentary, a trope that connects the form to a very
ancient justification for torture? Perhaps it is in response to this question that, after
the fade to white, the film turns from authentic speech to the idiom of the revolution-
ary martyr. Fanon’s death is signified by a series of highly conventional images: first,
a staged sequence of funereal clichés (the single tear on the face of an FLN soldier
bearing a flag-draped coffin, lilies, mist), and then a newsreel sequence of Algerians
casting votes, indicating the passage of the leader into the popular will.
This recourse to a commonplace, exhausted iconography of martyrdom seems
designed to highlight, by comparison, the power of the interview as a cinematic device
that invents its own iconography. When we return to Joby, after the funereal interlude,
he has composed himself and continues to read from the letter. Joby’s emphasis on
the letter’s transparency as a record of Fanon’s final words—a transparency described
in terms both visual (“lucid”) and aural (“appeal”)—makes this scene especially diffi-
cult to read, since it gives to a document within the scene the transcendent capacity of
film itself. Indeed, the final words Joby reads are “I was between life and death. . . . “
Does cinema here confront a mirror of its own, the image of a voice, a call, with the
power to bring the past—and the dead—to life?
When Roland Barthes describes psychoanalysis as the auditorium in which “lis-
tening speaks,” he means to capture its intersubjectivity, the reversibility of the un-
conscious “structured like a language”: “The psychoanalyst, attempting to grasp the
signifiers,” Barthes writes, “learns to ‘speak’ the language which is his patient’s uncon-
scious. . . . Listening is this means of trapping signifiers.”40 Under these conditions, “I
am listening” can be translated as “listen to me.” If its technological character prevents
cinema—even a film practice based, as documentary is today, on acts of listening—
from fully effecting this reversal, this very failure nonetheless provides a language
for Julien’s portrait of Fanon: a theorist, as the film reminds at its close, of the irreduci-
ble corporeality of “questions,” and questions, above all, of the symbolic function of
 F Jonathan Kahana

bodies. The various errors, displacements, reversals, and infidelities the film commits
with respect to its sources are the marks of Julien’s commitment to a dialectical art of
documentary, and to the oscillatory dialogue between film theory and practice.

Notes
1. Shoah, directed by Claude Lanzmann, Aleph/Historia, ; Nuit et Brouillard [Night
and Fog], directed by Alain Resnais, Argos/Como, .
2. Theodor Reik, Listening with the Third Ear: The Inner Experience of a Psychoanalyst
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Company, ), .
3. The phrase is from Joan W. Scott’s essay, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical
Inquiry  (Summer ): –.
4. See Gaines’s “Introduction: ‘The Real Returns,’” in Collecting Visible Evidence, ed.
Jane M. Gaines and Michael Renov (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), –.
5. André Bazin, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” in What Is Cinema? trans.
Hugh Gray (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, ), : –.
6. The quotation is from Joan Copjec’s  essay, “The Delirium of Clinical Perfection,”
quoted in Mary Ann Doane’s essay, “Remembering Women: Psychical and Historical Con-
structions in Film Theory” (in Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, and Psychoanalysis
[New York: Routledge, ]), . Doane generously points out that it is she herself, along with
Patricia Mellencamp and Linda Williams, her co-editors of Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film
Criticism (Frederick, Md.: University Publications of America, ), who are being corrected
by Copjec.
7. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis in the Cinema, trans. Celia
Britton et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), .
8. Doane, “Remembering Women,” .
9. Ibid., .
10. André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema? : –.
11. Doane, “Remembering Women,” .
12. André Bazin, “The Myth of Total Cinema,” in What Is Cinema? : –.
13. Little Dieter Needs to Fly, dir. Werner Herzog, Werner Herzog Filmproducktion, .
14. Bazin, “Ontology,” .
15. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Christian Lam Markmann (New York:
Grove Press, ), .
16. Christian Metz, “Aural Objects,” trans. Georgia Gurrieri, in Film Sound: Theory and
Practice, ed. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (New York: Columbia University Press, ),
–.
17. Ibid., .
18. It should be noted that I will be referring here to the -minute version of Frantz
Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask (dir. Isaac Julien, ) and not to the -minute, mm version
of the film.
19. Young Soul Rebels, dir. Isaac Julien, BFI/Film Four/Sankofa Film and Video, ;
Looking for Langston: A Meditation on Langston Hughes (–) and the Harlem Renais-
sance, dir. Isaac Julien, Third World Newsreel, .
 “Other Languages” f 

20. In “The After-life of Frantz Fanon: Why Fanon? Why Now? Why Black Skin, White
Masks?” in The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation, ed. Alan Read (Seat-
tle: Bay Press, ), –. Hall asserts, somewhat more strongly than he does in his interview
in Julien’s film, that he considers Fanon to be distancing himself from Lacan, even as Lacan
distinguishes his concept of mirror-identification from Hegel’s notion of “recognition.” See
“The After-life of Frantz Fanon,” –.
21. Julien makes this claim in an interview with Coco Fusco (“Visualizing Theory: an
Interview with Isaac Julien,” NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art –7 [Summer/Fall
]: –) and repeats it in a later essay co-written with the film’s producer, Mark Nash,
“Frantz Fanon as Film,” published in The Film Art of Isaac Julian (Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.:
Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, ), –. Although Julien claims to be visu-
alizing Fanon’s theory, the sequence of images just described can be read as an illustration of
classic statements in film theory on the construction of the spectator’s position, such as Jean-
Louis Baudry’s “The Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematic Apparatus” (Film Quarterly .
[Winter –]: –) or Nick Browne’s “The Spectator-in-the-Text: The Rhetoric of Stage-
coach” (Film Quarterly . [Winter –]: –).
22. Rosolato is quoted by Kaja Silverman in The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in
Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), .
23. Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York:
Columbia University Press, ), .
24. Paul Willemen, “Cinematic Discourse: The Problem of Inner Speech,” in Looks and
Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory (New York and London: Routledge, ),
–.
25. Ibid., .
26. As has been frequently noted, a number of references to optical technologies appear
in The Interpretation of Dreams. One of Freud’s references to aural technologies appears in
his  observations on analytic technique, where he suggests that the analyst “turn his
own unconscious like a receptive organ towards the transmitting unconscious of the patient.
He must adjust himself to the patient as a telephone receiver is adjusted to the transmitting
microphone. Just as the receiver converts back into sound waves the electric oscillations in the
telephone line which were set up by sound waves, so the doctor’s unconscious is able, from
the derivatives of the unconscious which are communicated to him, to reconstruct that uncon-
scious, which has determined the patient’s free associations” (SE XII, –).
27. See duBois’s remarkable book, Torture and Truth (New York and London: Routledge,
), which begins with a description of torture devices—“macchine atroci”—at an exhibition
duBois visited in Rome. One of these devices stands out from the rest by its “graceless, banal,
ugly” modernity. Unlike the others, its function is not immediately apparent, though it appears
to have some connection to listening, since it looks “something like a microphone, with elec-
trodes dangling from it” (). Although she recognizes the device from accounts of torture in the
Americas and “films of the Algerian war” (), duBois purposely leaves its identity obscure, in
part to allow it to function as an emblem for her entire study of the Greek concept of basanos,
a term which meant “a test or trial to determine whether something or someone is real or gen-
uine” and then, some time later, “comes to mean also inquiry by torture, ‘the question’” ().
28. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove
Press, ), .
29. John Mowitt (“Breaking Up Fanon’s Voice,” in Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives, ed.
 F Jonathan Kahana

Anthony C. Alessandrini [London and New York: Routledge, ]) notes that the translation
of this chapter title, which appears in A Dying Colonialism (trans. Haakon Chevalier [New
York: Grove Press, ]) without the quotation marks that accompany it in the original
French, where it appears as “Ici la voix de l’Algérie,” loses the “conspicuously cited character” of
the phrase (). My reading of Fanon’s chapter is indebted to Mowitt’s own.
30. Fanon also notes changes in the psychotic reception of voices, changes he links to the
use of radio by the revolutionary forces: “Before , in the psychopathological realm, the
radio was an evil object, anxiogenic, accursed. After , the radio assumed totally new mean-
ings. The phenomenon of the wireless and the receiver set lost their coefficient of hostility, were
stripped of their character of extraneousness, and became part of the coherent order of the
nation. In hallucinatory psychoses after , the radio voice became protective, friendly. Insults
and accusations disappeared and gave way to words of encouragement” (Dying Colonialism, ).
31. Jacques Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” in Writing and Difference, trans.
Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), –. In “Me-Psychoanalysis: An
Introduction to the Translation of ‘The Shell and the Kernel’ by Nicolas Abraham” (trans.
Richard Klein, Diacritics , no. [Spring ]: –), Derrida uses the concept of translation
to describe psychoanalysis. “Psychoanalysis,” Derrida writes, “stakes out its domain precisely on
the unthought ground of phenomenology” (). In doing so, psychoanalysis raises a question
about discourse itself: “[H]ow to include in a discourse—in any one whatever—that very thing
which in essence, by dint of being the precondition of discourse, escapes it? If non-presence,
the kernel and ultimate ground of all discourse, is made to speak, can it—must it—make itself
heard in and through presence to self?” ().
32. Derrida, Writing and Difference, .
33. Déranger is usually translated as “to disturb,” but can also mean mixing or disorder-
ing, terms with a particular relevance to Julien’s own cinematic craft.
34. On the technological character of Fanon’s revolutionary persona, see Mowitt, “Break-
ing Up,” especially –. My analysis of the contradictions in Frantz Fanon’s “voice” applies
some of the arguments that Bill Nichols makes about interview-based documentary in his
useful essay, “The Voice of Documentary” (in Movies and Methods, ed. Bill Nichols, vol. 
[Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, ]: –), where Nichols deals
at length with the work of Emile de Antonio, a filmmaker from whose style Julien’s editing
draws, even if the citation remains unconscious in Julien’s work.
35. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Visual and Other Pleasures
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ): –.
36. Diana Fuss, “Interior Colonies: Frantz Fanon and the Politics of Identification,” Dia-
critics , no. – (Summer-Autumn ): –.
37. The longer mm version of the film does make an emblematic reference to torture,
according to Julien and Nash’s essay “Frantz Fanon as Film,” by ending with a passage from
Black Skin, White Mask on the resistance that the body of the interrogated subject offers the
torturer ().
38. Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure,” .
39. Or, in the terms Paul Willemen uses in his essay on cinematic “inner speech,” “the dif-
ference between the subject-image produced by a text and the historical, biological subject
which presided over its manufacture” (“Cinematic Discourse,” ).
40. Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Rep-
resentation, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, ), –, , .
 R . Wondrous
Objectivity
Art History, Freud,
and Detection
Andrew McNamara R

The “Two-Sidedness” of Art History: Hegel, Podro, and Bois

While outlining a philosophy of “fine art,” Hegel offered some advice to the nascent
discipline of art history. It could be summed up, more or less, as “stick to the facts.” Of
course philosophy would forge the aesthetic-theoretical hardwiring of the field. If
there had been a sufficient number of art historians at that time to constitute a disci-
pline, this intellectual division of labor might have been understood as a grievous
insult. The subsequent formation of the discipline shows that many art historians have
indeed treated this as exemplary advice, and thus an extensive arm of art history has
concerned itself exclusively with what has been termed its “archaeological inquiry.” Yet
this focus upon realia, document, and data collection only served to reveal a schism at
the core of art-historical investigation. Another arm of the discipline, in contrast, has
encroached on the philosophical terrain of aesthetics to develop its critical creden-
tials. That this aesthetic inquiry today forms an integral feature of the tradition of art-
historical investigation is evidenced by the fact that Michael Podro could produce a
study exclusively devoted to a critical art history. While the archaeological inquiry
delves into “historical facts, into sources, patronage, purposes, techniques, contem-
poraneous responses and ideals,” the critical history, as Podro shows, remains at odds
with the seemingly tangible criteria of the archaeological inquiry because it “requires
us to see how the products of art sustain purposes and interests which are both irre-
ducible to the conditions of their emergence as well as inextricable from them.”1
The very existence of a critical art history reveals that Hegel’s good counsel
did not fully guide the development of the modern discipline of art history. What art
history ended up with, thus, was a dichotomy in its inquiry. As Podro outlines in his


 F Andrew McNamara

study, a cleft appears in art history between its archaeological and its critical inquiry—
they are related, even intrinsically linked, but nonetheless irreducible to one another.
Increasingly what has become an issue is the ambivalence of its inquiry, and to com-
pound this, the fraught, elusive nature of its object. Already, in his “Lectures on Fine
Art,” Hegel noted the conflictual pattern in the “scientific” treatments of art and beauty.
If the empirical is, as he suggests, the “indispensable route for anyone who thinks
of becoming a scholar in the field of art,” this scholarship nonetheless produces oppos-
ing treatments:

On the one hand we see the science of art only busying itself with actual works of art
from the outside, arranging them into a history of art, setting up discussions about
existing works or outlining theories which are yet to yield general considerations for
both criticizing and producing works of art.
On the other hand, we see science abandoning itself on its own account to
reflections on the beautiful and producing only something universal, irrelevant to the
work of art in its peculiarity, in short, an abstract philosophy of the beautiful.

A genuine scholarship, of course, “must be of many kinds and of wide range,” he con-
tinues, but the difficulty occurs when the characteristics observed “in their universal-
ity make no advance toward establishing the particular.” The ensuing prescriptions
that the “art-doctors wrote to cure art,” Hegel notes wryly, “were even less reliable than
those of ordinary doctors for restoring human health.”2
The good health of art scholarship seems just as fraught today—Hegel’s remedies
notwithstanding—and the issue of art-historical objectivity remains a contentious and
thus perilously elusive terrain. Hegel thus bequeaths to art history not a prescription
for the good health of the discipline, but an enduring analysis of the fraught con-
dition of art-historical objectivity. Take the protests on behalf of art history and its
disciplinary objectivity. What would unhinge an art history forged on such contrary
principles? Well, surprisingly enough, art history is unhinged, if we are to believe
David Carrier, by a lack of footnotes—footnotes, that is, containing relevant references
testifying to the history of art-historical inquiry. What would an art history without
footnotes be? An unhinged art history? One without anchor, it appears. David Carrier
once suggested that the lack of footnotes signals the province of the amateur art his-
torian: “The amateur believes that the artwork can be adequately described without
exploring all of the earlier attempts to contextualize it.”3 These “amateurs” are writers,
critics, or philosophers who project indiscriminately onto the artwork in an effort to
display their critical self-sufficiency, as well as their intellectual-cultural scope, and
thus they happily ignore the history of art-historical interpretation. Art historians, in
contrast, are more meager souls, and they studiously make reference to a history of
prior interpretation and deeds of fact finding. “Amateur” readings are impertinent,
devoid as they are of any art-historical reference. No footnotes can be found in such
texts—hence, no prior interpretations, no acknowledgments, no debts, no constraints
 Wondrous Objectivity f 

at all. Carrier is not an art historian, either. He, too, speaks on behalf of art history, and
of its disciplinary objectivity displayed in and by footnotes; more properly, he defends
his own definition of art history as a relative field of interpretations that more or less
subsume one another. There seems something roundabout here: we have Hegel, who
would commit art history to fact finding, despite the confused sense of objectivity that
ensues from this limitation, and the philosopher who would speak on behalf of the
value and merit of art-historical objectivity in somewhat Hegelian tones.
Is this the type of surrogate advocacy that drove Yves-Alain Bois to his intem-
perate outbursts in Painting as Model of ? Bois’s complaint also lies with the text
about art by a literary writer or philosopher. He pulls no punches: each example, he
chides, does “his little number” (reading art) as an obligatory step to “reach the pan-
theon of letters or of thought.”4 It is not a question of merely being about a work, but
more an issue of a certain appropriative violence, an a priori subjection that knows no
bounds. The artwork becomes simply the screen for the projection of an unsubstanti-
ated theoretical speculation. So Bois, in turn, asks: “[C]an one designate the place of
the theoretical in painting without doing violence to it . . . ?”
The pacific alternative that Bois annunciates in Painting as Model is a “material-
ist formalism,” grasping the “means of production in its slightest detail” (xix). A mate-
rialist formalism would never amount to instrumental theory, because it will never
foreclose what remains (citing Hubert Damisch) “without assignable end” (). To
adhere to the requirements of this fastidiously detailed and endless inquiry, “concepts
must be forged from the object of one’s inquiry or imported according to that object’s
specific exigency” (xii). This endeavor would sidestep two major impediments: “the
stamp collecting approach of traditional art historians” (that is, “the gibberish of doc-
umentalists and antiquarians”) and “the ineptitude of art criticism” (–). Its course
of inquiry becomes evident in the passage from reading about an artwork to reading
from or according to an artwork. Hence Bois refuses Hegel’s advice too; he would
somehow like to revive the archaeological endeavor—with its vigorous, but ultimately
myopic, attention to detail—by linking it to a critical inquiry.
But how does one know when the “means of production in its slightest detail”
has been grasped, especially when it occurs in a process without an “assignable end”?
In Bois’s own excruciatingly long and detailed readings—hence extremely thorough,
rigorous, and highly illuminating readings—a question always niggles away in the back-
ground of these fine elaborations: when is this “slightest detail” granted its due? The
reading of the slightest detail without assignable end is the antithesis of the archaeo-
logical reading, with its limited antiquarian zeal for the accumulation of facts; every-
thing is kept open by a materialist formalism as compared with the finitude of closure
and exhaustion. Perhaps for this very reason the very materiality of art history seems
a foreign intrusion within such a critically attentive material formalism. Art history
remains without end because this “means of production in its slightest detail” inhab-
its a parallel realm—always approximated but never quite grasped, as though the art
 F Andrew McNamara

historian runs along a glass barrier, seeing his or her object in proximity but never quite
able to broach that other realm without violence. Yet the situation is more complicated
than this: as Bois acknowledges, every new interpretation that has critical force “re-
shuffles the cards, discovers new aspects that previously had been left unnoticed.”
Artists, too, contribute to these reshufflings, because they “often provide extremely
precise analyses of works of other artists, past or contemporaneous, in their works.”5
Yet what remains critically untenable is the fact that the specificity of reading unique
to art history operates within a critical economy stretched between immanence and
violence—in which the value of each is unstable and inconsistent as they differ accord-
ing to circumstance—as well as between what stems from a given context and that
which defies all efforts to determine the work as part of that same context.
In this regard Bois touches on something intriguing: that the fate of a critical
inquiry within art history lies with its attentiveness to production in its slightest detail.
With this attentiveness to detail, Bois seeks to evade both the idle details of the anti-
quarian as well as the reading about an artwork (whether proposed by the literary
writer, the philosopher or, in more recent times, cultural studies).6 This materialist
formalism grapples with the “object’s specific exigency,” but the exigency that propels
this critical inquiry is, Bois concedes, a singular event that bursts forth like some un-
fathomable explosion from a particular set of circumstances (whether they be social,
biographical, artistic, or political), which no longer account for this eruptive event.7
This admission about the exigency of the “event” brings the discussion back to where
it began: to Podro’s dichotomy between work and a critical “event” simultaneously
inextricable from and irreducible to a critical context—a volatile combination that
constitutes the unstable foundation of art-historical inquiry.
A few years further on, Bois’s fellow author at October, Hal Foster, admits he has
come to champion the disciplinary specificity of art-historical inquiry because he now
realizes that “to move beyond these disciplines in a truly interdisciplinary way, it has
become clear that one has to know them, to be grounded there first.” Disciplinary
grounding, he makes clear, does not mean upholding the specificity of “painting or
sculpture or an orthodoxy of Marx or Freud,” but more an “attention to the historicity
of artistic practices and critical discourses—how they develop, under what pressures,
into what forms.”8 In making this important point, Foster reiterates Bois’s strong state-
ment on behalf of the critical capacities of art-historical inquiry. At the same time,
must one not ask more about these orthodoxies that have the potential to become dis-
ciplinary fortresses?
As we have seen, disciplinary grounding within art history necessitates being
attuned to a fraught structure of specificity—one that is forever subject to erosion,
to the impertinent violence of outside or “amateur” readings, to an identity forever
compromised as it pursues specificity down to the slightest detail. Its greatest critical
challenges may well be found, as Foster now claims, within its own, grounded critical
discourse; but that grounding is constantly prone to being lost outside of itself, that is,
 Wondrous Objectivity f 

outside of this grounding. Yet the issue of art history’s grounding is more unsettling
than even this suggests. The presumption of art history is that its critical inquiry con-
stitutes a harmonious rendezvous with its objects, which, in turn, compose the self-
validation of its grounding and its inquiry. What critical art history attempts to fathom
is an analytic scene in which a wondrous object appears that is inextricable from this
grounding, yet at once is such that it always takes leave of this scene. Bois’s own force-
ful argument declares nothing less: a “materialist formalism” grasps “the means of
production in its slightest detail,” but that production is a singular, irruptive event that
unhinges its very grounding. To be true to the adventure of its disciplinary grounding,
art history then must remain attentive to that which constantly leaves its ground. One
of those “orthodoxies” Foster lists shares a common fascination with this wild analytic
scene that elicits so much “by never being itself, by always being the promise (the bud
or the echo) of some other scene”—and that is the scene of the Freudian circuit of
analysis, which has much to say about this critical undertaking.9

Wallowing in Details: Freud, Connoisseurship,

and the Pursuance of Analytic Clues
Long before he had heard of psychoanalysis, as Freud remarks at the outset of section
 of “The Moses of Michelangelo,” his attention had been drawn to the odd aspects
of the analysis of art history. What had caught Freud’s attention was an outpost of
art-historical connoisseurship promoted by the Italian physician, Giovanni Morelli.
Freud’s interest was sparked by the manner in which Morelli’s method of identifying
paintings directed attention away from the general impression of the work to inciden-
tal features. One could distinguish a forgery from the genuine article, according to
Morelli’s method, “by laying stress on the significance of minor details, of things like
the drawing of the finger-nails, of the lobe of the ear, of halos and such unconsidered
trifles which the copyist neglects to imitate.” For Freud, the correlation of this method
of inquiry with psychoanalysis was readily evident: “It seems to me that this method
of inquiry is closely related to the technique of psychoanalysis. It, too, is accustomed
to divine secret and concealed things from despised or unnoticed details, from the
rubbish heap, as it were, of our observations” (SE XIII, ).
Freud’s account of the significance of Morelli’s method recalls Walter Benjamin’s
espousal of Karl Kraus’s dictum: “The more closely you look at a word, the more
distantly it looks back.” Benjamin ruminates on the distance posed and assumed by
intense scrutiny, noting to himself: “How things withstand the gaze.”10 Freud, oriented
in a different direction, peers intently to find what is unnoticed in the most intent ob-
servations and reflections. In such remarkable formulations, intense observing elicits
something—but not quite what was observed. The unnoticed reveals the despised,
and the genuinely revealing is discovered only in the rubbish heap of observation.
 F Andrew McNamara

If credit should go to anyone for installing in him the value of observation, then
Freud states it should go to Charcot, because it was Charcot—his “master”—who
sees, a “visuel.” In an upright scientific manner, Charcot defended the importance of
clinical observation, which, as Freud notes, “consists in seeing and ordering things,
against the encroachments of theoretical medicine.” Against the latter encroachment,
Charcot advised that one should “look at the same things again and again until they
themselves begin to speak.”11 Long before he came across psychoanalysis, as Freud
puts it—as if to suggest he himself had just stumbled across it—Freud found some-
thing uncannily familiar in Morelli’s distinctive version of art-historical detection. The
affinity was due to the manner in which both paid attention to a detailed observation
touching upon the disguised or untoward. While Charcot’s example may have been
pivotal to Freud, what became most significant for Freud the pupil is an attentiveness
not only to the point where things speak, but where things speak, almost in the vein
of Kraus, of what is not discernible—even of the genuinely revealing as indiscernible.
How does one divine what is unobservable, secret, and concealed? These ques-
tions touch upon Bois’s concern for an art-historical practice that uncovers the “object’s
specific exigency.” What a detour to Freud provides is an insight into managing an
untenable situation: how one must attend to what is both (necessarily and simultane-
ously) graspable and ungraspable in pursuing singular exigency. Freud starts out by
dismissing two interpretative methods (in regard to dream analysis) that share much
in common with the methods Bois opposes. These methods are the cipher and the
symbolic methods of interpretation, which both search for an assignable meaning that
might situate itself in a chain linking interpretation and meaning, the part with the
whole.12 The “symbolic method” of interpretation “considers the content of a dream as
a whole and seeks to replace it by another content which is intelligible and in certain
respects analogous to the original one” (SE IV, –). Art historians would recognize
an affinity between this method and the footnote-less, “amateur” reading of art, which
ignores a history of interpretation in order to transpose another hypothesis, often
viewed as a completely fanciful projection. Yet, at the same time, the symbolic mode
presumes a certain intuitive knack essential to the connoisseur: “Success must be a
question of hitting on a clever idea, of direct intuition, and for that reason it was pos-
sible for dream-interpretation by means of symbolism to be exalted into an artistic
activity dependent on the possession of peculiar gifts” (SE IV, ).
The second method, the cipher or “decoding” method, “treats dreams as a kind
of cryptography in which each sign can be translated into another sign having a known
meaning, in accordance with a fixed key.” But this relies on the supposition that such
a “key” is reliable or trustworthy, and, for Freud, all guarantees for this are lacking (SE
IV, ). The essential point is that the work of interpretation is applied not to the
entirety of dream, “but on each portion of the dream’s content independently, as though
the dream were a geological conglomerate in which each fragment of rock required a
separate assessment” (SE IV, ). This complaint about the limitations of the cipher
 Wondrous Objectivity f 

method accords with the argument raised most frequently against the archaeological
inquiry: its critical myopia. The cipher method in art scholarship merely amounts to
a piecemeal conglomeration of factual details without the benefit of a guidebook.13
The symbolic method proves equally limited insofar as it is unable to be “laid down on
general lines” (SE IV, –).
If there is a Freudian orthodoxy lurking within art history, as Foster suggests,
then it is ironic that a “Freudian reading” has come to be associated with either a sym-
bolic or a cipher method of analysis. Art history fails to heed Freud’s challenge to
interpretation just as it remains reticent about what is truly radical and disturbing
within art-historical interpretation. This misconstruing of the Freudian challenge is
odd, given that the expressed value of the artwork as an object of inquiry is that it
simultaneously sustains and eludes reading. Bois’s formulation of a materialist for-
malism is crucial to a disciplinary grasp of this precarious situation; yet, as we have
seen, Bois himself focuses his considerations upon whether art history can produce a
nonviolent critical speculation. What is at stake is a certain connoisseur-like knack or
intuition that depends on different ways of considering its actions as “divining.” The
challenge of a psychoanalytic “divining” is that it undermines the distance one seeks
to establish between a detached, clinical observation and an object to be uncovered
more or less untouched and intact. Freud, of course, is personally preoccupied with
the recognition and eliciting of something new, but uncovering something “new”
relates precisely to the “unseen” and the frequently passed over, often leading to the
uncovering of something unsavory.14 As Carlo Ginzburg aptly suggests, what would
have attracted Freud to Morelli’s work is the “identification of the essence of artistic
individuality with elements outside conscious control.” Ginzburg goes on to link this
intriguing element with the significance of discarded information or marginal data to
an evidential paradigm that emerged in the nineteenth century and which encom-
passed many newly emerging disciplines. “In each case,” he writes, “infinitesimal traces
permit the comprehension of a deeper, otherwise unattainable reality: trace—more
precisely, symptoms (in the case of Freud), clues (in the case of Sherlock Holmes), pic-
torial marks (in the case of Morelli).”15
Ginzburg notes that with time, Morelli’s system fell into disrepute because “it
came to be judged mechanical, crudely positivistic.”16 The latter rebuke still echoes
today: it is readily evident in Bois’s jibe about “the stamp collecting approach,” “the
gibberish of documentalists and antiquarians,” or even in Benjamin’s dismissal of the
archaeological art history because it provided merely a “patchwork diagnosis of data”
or a positivist amalgamation of odds and ends (die positivistische Kunstklitterung).17
Archaeological inquiry accumulates data for which there is no comprehensive grasp,
only an intuitive knack for yielding analogies here and there or, alternatively, for dis-
covering some fanciful meaning for the agglomeration of details built up like a jig-
saw puzzle (albeit a puzzle without a handy guidebook to decipher it). Above all, its
limitation is its lack of willingness to confront what withstands critical scrutiny—it
 F Andrew McNamara

has no knack for the indiscernible. The critical inquiry faces similar difficulties; but
on the other hand, like psychoanalysis it pursues a wondrous objectivity that is pro-
pelled by, and propels, interpretation, all the while defying these efforts to reach a set-
tled meaning. In this sense, the work of art operates in a way suggestively similar to
Freud’s description of the neurotic’s dream. In dreams of motion, Freud contends,
sensations of flight or of descent do not derive from tactile feelings while asleep. They
are more apt to derive from the memory of such events. Even so, he declares himself
unable “to produce any complete explanation of this class of typical dreams,” a con-
clusion that leads Freud both to emphasize the importance of detailed individual
analysis and to stress the utter futility of this endeavor when it comes to unpacking the
neurotic’s dream:
I am not be able to say, however, what other meanings may become attached to
the recollection of such sensations in the course of later life—different meanings, per-
haps, in every individual case, in spite of the typical appearance of the dreams; and I
should be glad to be able to fill up the gap by a careful analysis of clear instances. . . .
The dreams of neurotics, moreover, of which I might otherwise avail myself, cannot
always be interpreted—not, at least, in many cases, so as to reveal the whole of their
concealed meaning; a particular psychical force, which was concerned with the orig-
inal constructing of the neurosis and is brought into operation once again when
attempts are made at resolving it, prevents us from interpreting such dreams down to
their last secret. (SE IV, )

The dream of the neurotic defies detailed analysis right down to their last secret. Yet
divining secrets from “despised or unnoticed details” is an activity psychoanalysis
shares with Morelli’s art history. A work of art is not exactly a neurotic’s dream, yet
the genuine artwork, as Bois suggests, is at once like the wild flight of singularity. Art
history and psychoanalysis do share a fascination for this radical exigency. It is just
that psychoanalysis finds its provocation in the more disturbing aspects of such a pur-
suit—and what disturbs most is this neurotic trajectory of interpretation, which lacks
a chain of fully assignable meaning.
The uncanny wonder that provokes Freud’s attention takes critical analysis far
from the affirmative wonder of aesthetics. The aesthetic treatise, as he suggests, is
concerned with feelings of a positive kind—that which can be considered beautiful,
sublime, or attractive—whereas topics such as the “uncanny” provoke repulsive or
embarrassing preoccupations (abstoßenden, peinlichen beschäftigen) (SE XVII, ). It
is perhaps for this reason that from time to time Freud expressed reticence about the
tenor of his discovery, and even “longed to be away from all this grubbing about in
human dirt.”18 Who would lay claim to these tawdry “new” discoveries unearthed in
repulsive, embarrassing preoccupations? As Lacan suggests, transgressing the limits
of expectation entails guilt.19 The question is not just one of guilt, but also the thrill of
transgression, a guilty thrill that prompts a sequence of authorial elisions and scenes
of subterfuge. Thus, for example, we find that Morelli covertly publishes his findings
 Wondrous Objectivity f 

on art-historical scholarship under the Russian pseudonym of Ivan Lermolieff. Freud

is fascinated to discover that the Italian physician Morelli is the real author. Yet in turn
Freud himself felt compelled to deflect his authorship of the essay on Michelangelo.
Assuming a veil of anonymity meant that Freud, while unearthing a precursor “closely
related to the technique of psychoanalysis” within backwaters of art-historical inquiry,
sidesteps acknowledgment for his essay in referring to an author whose “mode of
thought has in fact a certain resemblance to the methodology of psychoanalysis.”20
And yet, as John Forrester has shown, Freud also took recourse to such deflection
of the discovery of psychoanalysis on other occasions. He suggested that Breuer found
the key to psychoanalysis when Anna O. (Bertha Pappenheim) exclaimed that she had
become pregnant by him—Breuer, the physician treating her—except that Breuer took
fright at her declaration and fled the scene. Freud was left holding the baby, as it were,
and was thus left to work out the knot of transference-countertransference. But Freud,
obsessed as he was with discovery, also felt obliged to sidestep acknowledgment for
opening this can of worms. Breuer discovered it, it’s just that he did not recognize
it. There are many such instances of the repetition of the “founding scene of psy-
choanalysis,” as Forrester notes (the Dream of Irma’s injection, Breuer’s treatment of
Anna O.) and these constitute “an attempt to avoid repeating Breuer’s flight in the face
of the anxiety of responsibility, medical, marital and otherwise.” But psychoanalysis
avoids that repetition—that flight of fright—by placing the onus of responsibility for
founding psychoanalysis elsewhere. In avoiding that responsibility, Freud could thus
discover the sexual transference: “[H]e could rename the moment when a patient (or
his wife) said ‘Dr. Freud’s baby is coming!’ as nothing to do with him. Someone else’s
responsibility. Whose?”21
The trajectory of psychoanalysis is discovered in the realization that things
observed intently do not simply look back more distantly; indeed they can “speak”
with malevolent effect. Such discoveries perplex the discoverer precisely because
one expects a good return from one’s critical endeavors. That this may not be the case
is shocking, because one hopes to have one’s pursuits, one’s efforts, and one’s gifts
of analysis confirmed in some way. The Freudian scene is disturbing because critical
observation is not necessarily validated; things look back malevolently because they
did not verify one’s starting position. Here the anxiety of critical responsibility arises—
but responsibility for what? For something that defies one’s grasp? This is an untenable
breach and it must be compensated for—even overcompensated for. This is precisely
what the art historian does. If the work of art bears an affinity with the neurotic’s
dream, then the art historian, fueled by aesthetic wonder, possesses affinities with the
neurotic, insofar as the critical trajectory is plotted in advance to coordinate with its
objects, but also with the paranoid: nothing is irrelevant, nothing evades one’s grasp,
nothing remains too inconsequential.
Together the paranoid and the neurotic, as Freud hints, suggest the epitome of
interpretative zeal. Nothing is indifferent or can be left out, and in the end everything
 F Andrew McNamara

is accounted for in advance. Why? The affinity with both these predispositions in art-
historical scholarship rests with their shared orientation to the future: “The idea of
dreams being chiefly concerned with the future and being able to foretell it—a rem-
nant of the old prophetic significance of dreams—provides a reason for transposing
the meaning of the dream, when it has been arrived at by symbolic interpretation, into
the future tense” (SE IV, ). A similar transposition occurs in books offering to decode
dreams: “If I consult a ‘dream-book’, I find that ‘letter’ must be translated by ‘trouble’
and ‘funeral’ by ‘betrothal.’ It then remains for me to link together the key-words which
I have deciphered in this way and, once more, to transpose the result into the future
tense” (SE IV, ). Art history might seek to avoid the pitfalls of the symbolic mode
of interpretation—which it might equate with a reading oblivious to the specific exi-
gencies of the work—but most forms of interpretation tend to surmise an imminent
future in which the coincidence of interpretation and of its object are realized in har-
monious resolution: a transposition that leaves each intact but unified together. The
rendezvous of art history with its elusive objects sustains itself as a vision of a fulfilled
inquiry. In concluding The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud rounds in on this very
issue of a rendezvous with the future:

[T]he ancient belief that dreams foretell the future is not wholly devoid of truth.
By picturing our wishes as fulfilled, dreams are after all leading us into the future.
But this future, which the dreamer pictures as the present, has been moulded by his
indestructible wish into a perfect likeness of the past. (SE V, )

Only the paranoid disposition finds everything has significance right down to the last
detail. It is also a feature of paranoia that nothing lacks relevance to the subject of it.
Nothing remains indifferent. For Freud it is in fact essential to compare everything
with oneself, but this is in order to understand “something other than oneself.” For the
paranoid there is no distance, no irrelevance, nothing that escapes being plotted into
the big picture. But it is the neurotic who lives life as mapped out in advance. Our most
cherished modes of interpretation follow a similar path—though not always, we might
hope, in such a delirious fashion—as Freud suggests: “There is an intellectual function
in us which demands unity, connection and intelligibility from any material, whether
of perception or thought, that comes within its grasp; and if, as a result of special cir-
cumstances, it is unable to establish a true connection, it does not hesitate to fabricate
a false one” (SE XIII, ).
Where every detail is relevant, nothing is left to chance. Everything must be
allocated meaning. But what becomes of that which one fails to grasp? The greatest
tragedy is the situation in which we find that everything speaks to us and tells us every-
thing there is to know, already in advance. “The aim of psychoanalysis,” as Forrester
asserts, “is to undo such identifications. In this sense, its aim is to unwrite the future,
which the neurotic lives as already written, structured by the words and deeds of those
he or she has identified with.” It is precisely the determination of this already ordained
 Wondrous Objectivity f 

future that is unwritten. Hence psychoanalysis will seek to deliver one into an un-
scripted realm “in which there are no rendez-vous, planned or unplanned, in which
there is no diary by which the future is arranged. The aim of analysis, basing itself on
premonitions, prophecies and whatever, is to unwrite the future, to erase the future.”22

Two Unhinged Examples

If the paranoid and the neurotic dispositions form aberrant but nonetheless ideal mod-
els of interpretation, then it is because the paranoid-neurotic interpretive zeal fills all
gaps in knowledge—any and every gap. If something cannot be grasped, then a link
will be fabricated and the script scripted in advance. Concern only arises when delib-
erations touch on something that cannot be contained and incorporated, “something
other than oneself.” Grasping not only becomes apprehensive, it unleashes a volatile
engagement. Persecutory paranoids, as Freud notes, “take up minute indications with
which these other, unknown, people present them, and use them in their delusions
of reference. The meaning of their delusion of reference is that they expect from all
strangers something like love.” But the “enmity which the persecuted paranoid” ob-
serves constitutes the “reflection of his own hostile impulses against them.”23
If “things” remain capable of “speaking” with malevolent effect, of “speaking”
otherwise, and perhaps never ever fully down to the last detail, then why pursue them
so vigorously? Two concluding examples might help tease these issues out further.
The first is drawn from a James Ellroy novel, Clandestine, which deals with the malev-
olence of fascination—a close scrutiny that bites! This work explores a theme that is
elaborated more explicitly in his subsequent nonfiction account, My Dark Places, which
deals with the murder of his mother, which happened when the author was a young
boy in Los Angeles. In this subsequent account, Ellroy and a detective reopen the long-
distant murder case, only to finish with inconclusive findings and a still unsolved mur-
der. During the course of the investigation, Ellroy frankly depicts his Oedipal delirium
in relating his dream of having sex with his mother, now long dead. Possession in this
case is a fraught exercise that serves to highlight the chasm—but also the nexus—
between knowing, desire, loss, and longing. Other than in this dream, Ellroy can only
engage with his mother by means of the remnants of forensic evidence: samples of
fingernails, hair and pubic hair, a dress and a bra. “I held them and put them to my face.
I couldn’t smell her. I couldn’t feel her body in them. I wanted to. I wanted to recog-
nize her scent and touch her contours.”24
Clandestine, the novel in which Ellroy first rehearses these issues, revolves
around a young cop, Underhill, who is compelled by “wonder,” which is described as a
desire to know fuelled “on the track of the immutable yet ever-changing.”25 As a raw
recruit, Underhill differentiates himself from all the other cops solely on the basis of
a capacity for wonder: “Physically, they were splendidly equipped for fighting crime,
 F Andrew McNamara

what with their great size and illegal dumdum bullets, but there their efficacy ended. . .
They had no capacity for wonder, only a mania for order” (). These are men attuned
only to physical discipline; they are not prone to speculative flights of reason. Yet
Underhill is no bastion of Enlightenment reflection, either. An imposing physical
distinction similarly differentiates the tall, athletic Underhill from his love interest,
Lorna, “a crippled Jewish attorney” (). More important, extending this difference
further, Underhill is willing to indulge in the unseemly in order to pursue “wonder”:
he’ll let it take him anywhere, he’ll follow it wherever. The entire novel portrays a
moral universe in which there are no ordering principles of justice, only wonder. Won-
der propels people, but it is not a neutral, aloof mix of observation and interpretative
skill. It contains these elements, but it also contains something obsessive, even illu-
sory. The contrast between the policeman fueled by wonder and the lawyer is further
delineated in terms of their attitudes to law and justice. When told that the wonder is
“just the wonderful elliptical, mysterious stuff that we’re never going to know com-
pletely,” the lawyer, Lorna, is exasperated; she wants something more concrete, she
wants justice:

The wonder is for artists and writers and other creative people. Their vision gives
us the compassion to face our own lives and treat other people decently, because we
know how imperfect the world is. But I want justice. I want specifics. . . . I want to be
able to see results, not wonder.26

Underhill’s aesthetic sense, if he has one, is less affirmative. Instead he avers that
wonder underpins and undermines everything: “the grand jury system is predicated
on people, and people are imperfect and wonder-driven; so justice is no kind of abso-
lute—it’s subservient to wonder” ().
Like many of Ellroy’s tales, Clandestine is a squalid account of confused cross-
roads of frantic ambition, desire, and knowledge—a world of “lonely juiceheads” ().
Ambition is always contaminated. Wonder, much like Freud’s disclosures, produces
embarrassing disclosures all along the way. In Clandestine, the protagonist, propelled
by wonder, explores the wastelands of aspirations, which involves a string of furtive
sexual encounters with women picked up at bars around L.A.—among them one who
is murdered soon afterward. In rapid succession, the narrative speeds up to run through
a succession of colliding, related events: Underhill rockets to promotion in the police
force by helping frame a purportedly homosexual suspect for this murder; the sus-
pect commits suicide in his cell; the now dead suspect is soon shown to have been
framed for the crime; Underhill, the boy-wonder, is then kicked off the force for rea-
sons that relate both to the frame-up and certain Communist links going back to an
earlier “pick-up.” Only long after this expulsion from the police does the sense of
“wonder” propel Underhill to return to this still unsolved murder—this time outside
his former framework within the legal system. His delving into the case of the second
murder victim, Marcella de Vries, exposes a complex web of tormented family and
 Wondrous Objectivity f 

sexual relationships that had been concealed by the opportunistic, careerist-inspired

framing of the initial suspect many years earlier.
Given the obsessions of My Dark Places and Ellroy’s contorted emotions in first
despising his murdered mother and then wishing to be reunited with her, Clandestine
presents a virtuoso case of wish fulfillment, as the fictional cop, Underhill, adopts the
troubled son of this second murder victim (after contributing to the death of the boy’s
fascist, homicidal father). Underhill feels redeemed; he finds happiness again, recon-
ciles with his wife (the crippled Jewish lawyer), solves a murder, and finds “closure” by
operating outside the law (and participating in the murder of a murderer). In the first
case, the mode of resolution is akin to the symbolic method of inquiry discussed
above: the crime is “solved” by transposing a plausible meaning, even if fabricated, and
Underhill rockets to promotion. Wonder propels inquiry, even if it is not containable
within a satisfied meaning. It elicits the requirement for a knack, or intuition, in analy-
sis, and it can do so without foreclosing on the possibilities of meaning. This is at least
one side of the unseemly or embarrassing side of our reflections, the side that fails to
grant any distance from what the inquiry pursues. Nothing withstands the gaze, noth-
ing remains indiscernible—for this admission alone, one may soar through the ranks.
But what does compel inquiry after all? A driven fascination. In comparison, the
archaeological side of detection is too reticent. True inquiry emerges from the wanton
pursuit of that which permits no fully discernible chain of meaning to the last detail.
It is a wanton responsibility because, just as in Breuer’s case, one must claim respon-
sibility where recognition is not quite adequate. Is “justice” achieved in grasping some-
thing pristine or in coming full circle to verify one’s initial presumptions? Justice of
the singular is always to be achieved, and that may only be possible if one admits that
one seeks to annihilate both that wondrous objectivity that triggers fascination and
that sense of self-justification and self-knowledge in pursuit of it. Only by holding
these two incompatible possibilities together can one further critical interpretation. It
is triggered by the fascination that involves both love and enmity; fascination incites
an inquiry that amounts to an apprehensive grasping. Connoisseurs, like Ellroy’s de-
tective, find themselves already driven amidst their objects of inquiry—driven by their
fascination for them. They are both obligated in advance and tarnished by that obli-
gation. The connoisseur pursues an object that will never submit; but it is only in that
pursuance that one gauges that this will ever be so and that anything ever happens.
But what has all this to do with art history, where this discussion began? It would
be remiss not to return to what triggered these thoughts in the first place. Let’s finish
with Bois, who furnishes us not with a complaint about the violence of critical inter-
lopers, but with a counter-example garnered from within modern art practice. If the
tenor of art-historical method is strife caused by irresolute outcomes, then the rela-
tion of opposites is where de Stijl, the Dutch avant-garde idea, begins its deliberations.
And it is in fact primarily an idea—de Stijl—Bois tell us, an idea that engaged with
the two contradictory principles informing both art-historical method and modernist
 F Andrew McNamara

avant-garde practice. These principles invoked both a quest for ontology—the attempt
to secure the specificity of each medium—and they foresaw an eventual universal
unfolding of monumental art, couched in a quasi-Hegelian historicism, which “proph-
esied . . . the inevitable dissolution of art into an all-encompassing sphere (‘life’ or
‘environment’).” This two-sidedness is summed up in the guise of the grid—an ambiva-
lent site of action that suggests a centripetal and a centrifugal movement. Mondrian
eventually rejects the centrifugal grid because it is too static—it only engenders “uni-
vocal rendering”—and he gives up on attempting to yield the specificity of painting as
the ambivalent site of the centrifugal and centripetal. Instead he employs a centripetal
grid format that aims to secure painting by means of a “dynamic equilibrium”—a
dynamic display that is not prone to stasis, but still remains within the frame.
Van Doesburg’s deployment of the oblique, which runs right out of the frame
(and so triggered an irredeemable dispute with Mondrian) touches on one of those
great modernist controversies that seems to hinge on the most finicky distinctions and
propositions. Transferred into another context, the oblique underwrites the presump-
tion of specificity—that is, it strives to uphold the specificity of painting in the painting-
architecture nexus by ensuring that painting is not subordinated to a decorative role.
Painting gains a more active role in this interrelation, but its role is that of camou-
flage. Van Doesburg’s device aimed to work against the stasis of symmetry and repeti-
tion in architecture (Oud’s in particular). Furthermore, to this development Huszar
and Rietveld began to explore the corner as a “visual agent of spatial continuity” in
their Berlin Pavilion of . The final feature stemming from de Stijl’s idea was that
of the screen—an axiomatic hinge in the exploration of planarity. The screen resides
on an undecidable relation between two contradictory functions, as Bois testifies: “[I]n
profile it appears like a vanishing line, frontally it is a plane that blocks spatial reces-
sion.”27 With this employment of the screen, the nexus between painting and archi-
tecture is unfathomably tight. Volumes become more dynamic and intersperse with
one another, confronting each other and interjecting into one another. Rietveld again
developed this particular feature to explore the relevance of this insight regarding the
screen to that last solid bastion of architecture, its frame.
Bois concludes his incisive discussion of the de Stijl idea by arguing that Rietveld
shifts the parameters here from a functionalist ethic to something akin to Baudelaire’s
“Ethic of Toys.” What he draws out from this conclusion is that this procedure elicits
a thought more akin to a child’s desire to pull a toy apart in order to find what makes
it tick—in other words, to discover its “soul.” However, according to Bois, Rietveld’s
architectural operations uncover nothing essential, nothing like a soul. Dismantling
the components proves fruitless; for the “soul” instead resides, in Rietveld’s case (to
quote Bois’s conclusion) “in the articulation of these elements, in their integration.”28
Hence, Rietveld provides the best insight into and articulation of the de Stijl idea. Yet
even this very intriguing conclusion remains somewhat tentative because, while clearly
we can agree with Bois, this purported integration articulates elements that camouflage
 Wondrous Objectivity f 

and unhinge other elements. There is, therefore, no question of resorting to an entity
that might be reassembled and secured, for this very integration brings together two
forms that were once distinctive but which, in their combination, operate to blur the
boundaries of one another so that it becomes difficult to distinguish them. De Stijl
articulates a new relation of painting-architecture: one in which painting camouflages
architecture. Rietveld develops this initially by playing off one specified medium
against another to unhinge what is hinged within architecture by means of an un-
settling articulation of the supporting-supported relation. The result? An unhinged
hinging—or the hinging of what is unhinged. De Stijl formulates a practice in which
the end result is not the ontological specificity of each medium as such, but the spe-
cific capacity of each medium to transform the other. It integrates in order to propel a
whole series of transformations.
De Stijl deploys elements in tension, but does not fabricate a connection, a “soul.”
Art history arises from the deployment of conflictual features, but it cannot envisage
itself as such. Instead it always seeks to remain on the positive side of discourse away
from the more sordid, conflictual, and even destructive forces of interpretation. The
tawdry example might suggest to us another art history: an apprehensive art history
that is always committed to grasping the individual case, but one that will unwrite its
goal of a history with the perfect end, culminating in an attained, perfect, subsumed
fulfillment. Its history is always yet to come in the script that unravels that history
already written—and written in advance—in order for it to be pursued again ever
so rigorously.

Notes
1. Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art (New Haven and London: Yale Univer-
sity Press, ), xvi.
2. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, ), :–.
3. David Carrier, “Review of Norman Bryson, ed., Calligram: Essays in New Art History
from France,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism , no.  (Summer ): .
4. Yves-Alain Bois, Painting as Model (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press–October
Books, ), .
5. Yves-Alain Bois, quoted in A. McNamara and R. Butler, “All about Yves: An Interview
with Yves-Alain Bois,” Eyeline  (Autumn/Winter ): .
6. “I think that if you want to write something about works of art then you better see the
ways they have been made and the way they function in themselves first. . . . What I’m criticiz-
ing in a lot of cultural studies is the lack of mediation. It’s a model that says ‘go from here to
there’! It doesn’t work like that for any of us, why should it be sufficient for an artwork? We don’t
start doing something bizarre because of what we have just read in the newspaper. No, there
are mediations. Things are filtered in a very strange way. An artist is never a polygraph test”
(ibid., ).
 F Andrew McNamara

7. “I believe that there are such things as ‘events’ and that things emerge, which are sin-
gular, out of a larger context. This is not to say that these are transcendent or that they break
away easily in any way. I do think that, out of a field of possibilities, things emerge and even vio-
lently burst out. To try to understand the singularity of such an emergence, once it has struck
me, once it has caught me (more than not, unawares) is what excites me” (ibid., ).
8. Miwon Kwon, “The Return of the Real: An Interview with Hal Foster,” Flash Art,
March–April , .
9. John Forrester, “Who Is in Analysis with Whom? Freud, Lacan, Derrida,” in The
Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan, and Derrida (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, ), .
10. Benjamin himself returns to this reference on more than one occasion. See Walter
Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of
High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Verso, ), n; and “Hashish in Marseilles,”
in One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (London: Verso, ), .
11. Cited in Paul Roazen, Freud and his Followers (London: Allen Lane, ), .
12. “My presumption that dreams can be interpreted at once puts me in opposition to
the ruling theory of dreams and in fact to every theory of dreams with the single exception of
Scherner’s; for ‘interpreting’ a dream implies assigning a ‘meaning’ to it—that is, replacing it by
something which fits into the chain of our mental acts as a link having a validity and importance
to the rest. As we have seen, the scientific theories of dreams leave no room for any problem of
interpreting them, since in their view a dream is not a mental act at all, but a somatic process
signalling its occurrence by indications registered in the mental apparatus” (SE IV, ).
13. Hegel, too, suggested this might be the case. For him, such connoisseurial ambition
has a positive side insofar as it “concerns a thorough acquaintance with the whole sweep of the
individual character of a work of art.” It has the defect, however, of having little concept of what
is actually art, and so it can only compile information: “For connoisseurship, and this is its
defective side, may stick at acquaintance with purely external aspects, the technical, historical,
etc., and perhaps have little notion of the true nature of the work of art, or even know nothing
of it at all; indeed it can even disesteem the value of deeper studies in comparison with purely
positive, technical, and historical information” (Hegel, Aesthetics, –).
14. Freud candidly notes his trepidation after coming across an earlier account of
Michelangelo’s Moses: “My first feeling was one of regret that the author should have antici-
pated so much of my thought, which seemed precious to me because it was the result of my own
efforts; and it was only in the second instance that I was able to get pleasure from its unexpected
confirmation of my opinion” (SE XIII, ).
15. Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John and Anne C.
Tedeschi (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, ), .
16. Ibid., .
17. Walter Benjamin, “Strenge Kunstwissenschaft: Zum ersten Bande der Kunstwissen-
schaftlichen Forschungen (Erste Fassung)” (), in Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp Verlag, ), :. Thomas Y. Levin translates this term as “positivist art chatter.”
See also Benjamin, “Rigorous Study of Art: On the First Volume of the Kunstwissenschaftliche
Forschungen,” October  (Winter ): .
18. Cited in Roazen, Freud and His Followers, .
19. Lacan makes this point while hypothesizing about Freud’s dream-wish regarding
Irma’s injection: “I am he who wants to be forgiven for having dared to begin to cure these
 Wondrous Objectivity f 

patients, who until now no one wanted to understand and whose cure was forbidden. I am he
who wants to be guilty of it, for to transgress any limit imposed up to now on human activity is
always to be guilty.” Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, vol. , The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the
Technique of Psycho-Analysis, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –.
20. Note accompanying the anonymously written essay (SE XIII, ).
21. Forrester is also precise in allocating responsibility: “[I]t is only because Freud could
convert this question of personal and medical ethics into one of theoretical significance that he
was able to found psychoanalysis, through separating out the dimension of transference-coun-
tertransference” (Forrester, “The True Story of Anna O.,” in Forrester, Seductions, , ).
22. Ibid., –.
23. Roazen, Freud and His Followers, .
24. James Ellroy, My Dark Places (London: Arrow Books, ), .
25. James Ellroy, Clandestine (London: Arrow Books, ), .
26. Ibid., .
27. Bois, Painting as Model, .
28. Ibid., .
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R
Thoughtful
Articulations
R
This page intentionally left blank
 R . Marx, Condensed
and Displaced
A. Kiarina Kordela R

I
n this essay I advance the thesis that there is a structural homology between
economic and semantic systems of exchange—two systems that in the secular
capitalist era cover nothing less than the fields of capital, sign, and subject. By
claiming a structural homology among these three fields I also mean to place
them on the same epistemological level, whereby none of these fields can be consid-
ered to be the cause of the other fields. Rather, all three are caused and determined by
a function of different ontological and epistemological status: surplus.
This surplus is ontologically different from capital, sign, and subject identity in-
sofar as it does not manifest itself empirically as such and, hence, pertains in Lacanian
terms to the status of the real. Though in itself empirically transcendent, the surplus
gives signs of its existence through its two empirical effects. In the field of economy,
where surplus coincides with what Marx called “surplus-value,” the two manifest effects
of surplus are “exchange-value” and “use-value.” In the fields of semantic exchange as
well, the surplus makes itself manifest within experience in two forms, respectively:
metaphor and metonymy within the field of the signifier, condensation and displace-
ment within the field of the Freudian subject; and enjoyment of meaning (jouis-sens)
and enjoyment (jouissance) within the field of the Lacanian subject. Though linguis-
tics and Freudian psychoanalysis have always observed the distinction between these
two empirical forms of surplus, they have largely neglected surplus in itself, as the
empirically nonmanifest real. The importance of the Lacanian intervention largely lies
in his introduction of surplus enjoyment (plus-de-jouir), that is, the introduction of
the function of the real or surplus into the field of psychoanalysis—a function hitherto
acknowledged only within the field of economy, as surplus-value.


 F A. Kiarina Kordela

Thus the epistemological significance of my argument is threefold. First, it at-

tempts to overcome the impasse of the two dominant alternatives offered since Marx
regarding causal relations between material and economic conditions (base) and cul-
ture (superstructure), namely traditional Marxism itself, in which the base determines
the superstructure, and the bourgeois inversion of this causal relation. Crucially, my
argument differs from the contemporary reevaluations of Marxism in the aftermath
of Croce’s and Gramsci’s theories of hegemony and Althusser’s theory of ideology. I
do not wish simply to argue that the distinction between base and superstructure is
untenable since they are overdetermined or, to put it in Spinozian terms, they relate
to one another in terms not of transitive, but of immanent causality (with the cause
indwelling, and existing but in its effects). Rather, I argue that if this position of much
contemporary Marxism (a position to which the field of contemporary cultural stud-
ies owes its emergence) is true, this is due to the fact that both material-economic
conditions and culture (including both artifacts and subject identities) are caused
and determined by their surplus, which is a third function that transcends them and
is simultaneously their effect and cause.
Second, my argument attempts to offer a long-awaited justification of a central
assumption underlying the theories of thinkers whose work has contributed to the
constitution of cultural studies, such as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques
Lacan, and which, consequently, informs the theory and practice of cultural studies
itself. Though never systematized into a coherent theory, the assumption that, their
ontological differences notwithstanding, the structures and functions of capital and
the sign epistemologically coincide, underlies the work of these thinkers. In Barthes’s
words:

In the past . . . money “revealed”; it was an index, it furnished a fact, a cause, it had a
nature; today it “represents” (everything): it is an equivalent, an exchange, a repre-
sentation, a sign. . . . Shifting from a monarchy based on land to an industrial monar-
chy, society changed the Book, it passed from the Letter (of nobility) to the Figure (of
fortune). . . . The difference between feudal society and bourgeois society, index and
sign, is this: the index has an origin, the sign does not.1

Barthes’s statement, which can be read as a paraphrase of Marx’s notorious citation

of the two French proverbs—“Nulle terre sans seigneur” (no land without a lord)—
and “L’argent n’a pas de maître” (money does not have master) —testifies not only to
Barthes’s own conception of the structural parallelism between capital and signifier,
but also to the fact that this parallelism is already entailed in Marx’s account of capi-
tal.2 In fact, we could say that Marx defined capital as a signifier avant la lettre, that
is, prior to the moment at which linguistics defined the signifier as such (that is as
having no other value than the one differentially defined in relation to other signifiers).
Similarly, Foucault’s work presupposes this Marxian homology between capi-
tal and signifier. In The Order of Things, the economic shift from feudal to capitalist
 Marx, Condensed and Displaced f 

economy and the corollary shift from money of precious metal to money of symbolic
value (paper money) parallels the discursive shift from the ternary, representational
sign—the authority of which derives from the assumption that, in whatever distorted
ways, it ultimately represents both the world and God’s Word—to the binary, differ-
ential, and arbitrary sign of the secular modern era.3 Thus Foucault can refer to both
money and the sign as the manifestations of one and the same epistemic configuration:

Money does [no longer] draw its value from the material of which it is composed . . .
money (and even the metal of which it is made) receives its value from its pure func-
tion as sign. . . . Things take on value, then, in relation to one another . . . but the true
estimation of that value has its source in human judgment. . . . Wealth is wealth
because we estimate it, just as our ideas are what they are because we represent them.
Monetary or verbal signs are additional to this. (–)

Finally, with Lacan and his definition of the subject as the subject of the signifier,
the homology between capital and sign presupposed by Barthes and Foucault extends
to comprise the constitution of subjectivity. Hence, when we speak of a structural and
functional homology between economic and semantic exchange, we are effectively
speaking of a homology among three fields: economy, linguistics, and the constitution
of the subject.
Turning now to cultural studies: Its fundamental assumption—that discursive
practices are effectively political practices, being effected by and effecting power
dynamics—also presupposes a homology among the fields of capital, sign, and subject.
This assumption allows for the interdisciplinary approaches that characterize such
studies. However, cultural studies does not provide an epistemological theory that
justifies its reliance on this homology. Is this homology due to some causal hierarchy
among these fields—that capital determines the sign, and the latter the subject, or that
the sign is the determinant factor for both capital and subject, and so on? Or is such
a homology to be conceived in an entirely different way? This question is crucial, for,
if the response to the above question is the former, then cultural studies (whatever
causal hierarchy among these three elements it may opt for) inevitably reverts to either
classical Marxism (economy determines the world) or to bourgeois explanatory mod-
els, whether of the classical type (the subject determines the world) or of the postlin-
guistic type (the sign determines the world). Thus the third upshot of my argument
concerns the possibility of grounding cultural studies epistemologically.
In addition, I address a core opposition between, on the one hand, deconstruc-
tion and the epistemological assumptions shared by both mainstream and much aca-
demic postmodern discourse —notably the trend under the rubric of “postideology”—
and, on the other hand, Lacanian psychoanalysis: the acknowledgment of a real,
which, being a surplus effect of signification, transcends and determines it. A recur-
rent strategy by which deconstruction has argued against the Lacanian concept of
the real is its challenge to the epistemological tenability of the distinction between
 F A. Kiarina Kordela

metaphor and metonymy (and their linguistic or rhetorical cognates)—a distinction

that, as I will show, amounts, in Freud, to that between condensation and displace-
ment, and in Marx, to that between exchange value and use-value.4 The obliteration
of these distinctions prevents any possibility of even approaching the function of the
real or surplus. My argument will foreground the difference between the political and
ideological implications of the postmodern and deconstructive resistance to the real,
and the Lacanian insistence on it and persistence with it.

The Future Revision of The Interpretation of Dreams

(Freud and Jakobson)
To trace the discursive articulation of the aforementioned homology between the fields
of economic and semantic exchange, I will map the itinerary of certain major concepts
and structures common to the fields of economy, linguistics, and psychoanalysis.
Specifically, I will focus on the conceptual vicissitudes that lead from Marx’s tripartite
distinction—use value, exchange value, and surplus value—through Freud’s binary
distinction between displacement and condensation in The Interpretation of Dreams
to Jakobson’s binary distinction between metonymy and metaphor, and finally back to
Lacan’s tripartite distinction—enjoyment, enjoyment of meaning, and surplus enjoy-
ment.5 I argue that Lacan’s ternary scheme can be thought of as a properly Marxian
corrective to Freud’s and Jakobson’s binary formulas, and thus as a Marxian interven-
tion within psychoanalysis and linguistics.
In keeping with Freud’s principle of belatedness or deferred action (Nachträg-
lichkeit), we can narrate the development of his theory of the interpretation of dreams
as follows. At the time The Interpretation of Dreams is first published, Freud overlooks
two decisive obstacles to his theory, which would retroactively ascribe a pathogenic
(i.e., false or untenable) meaning to certain of its concepts, and lead him to rework the
theory over many years.
First, in maintaining his thesis that all dreams function as wish fulfillments,
Freud was limited to the insight that anxiety dreams “form a marginal case [Grenzfall]
in the function of dreaming” (GW II/III, ; , ; , ).6 After World
War I, however, Freud could not ignore the apparent anomaly to his theory presented
by the recurrent anxiety dreams experienced by shell-shocked soldiers. It was not
until Beyond the Pleasure Principle () that Freud would overcome the apparent
contradiction between his theory and his experiences treating traumatized soldiers
by developing the concepts of repetition compulsion and the death drive as sup-
plements to the pleasure principle, which dreams, now as then, satisfy by remaining
wish-fulfilling.7 Misunderstandings of the relation between the death drive and the
pleasure principle persisted until Daniel Lagache and, more effecively, Lacan and De-
leuze, helped clarify things by stressing that the death drive and repetition compulsion
 Marx, Condensed and Displaced f 

are not the disobedient exception to the pleasure principle, but rather its logically nec-
essary precondition.8
To recapitulate the debate over these psychoanalytic concepts, the relevant ques-
tion is not, as Edward Bibring asks, whether repetition compulsion, albeit disobedient
to the pleasure principle, is nevertheless used by the restitutive tendency of the latter
in the service and benefit of the I. As Daniel Lagache argues, alongside the repeti-
tion of needs triggered by the pleasure principle, we should assume the existence of
another, more fundamental need: a need to repeat. Lagache, however, does not go
far enough. Like Bibring, he assumes that this transcendental need does not obey the
rules of the pleasure principle. We must assume that repetition compulsion and the
death drive are of an order transcendental to that of the pleasure principle, but not
because they defy its rules; rather, these two principles must be considered the very
instance that determines these rules and renders the pleasure principle possible in the
first place. For to say that a dream induces pleasure by fulfilling a wish presupposes
knowledge of what is pleasurable for the subject. But what is perceived as pleasurable
is itself something mediated by several layers of ideological assumptions. A quasi-
hedonistic biological and procreational pragmatism, for instance, perceives as plea-
surable that which both offers sexual pleasure and leads, according to what Freud called
the “principle of constancy,” to the release of tension, as well as to the propagation of
the species (GW XIII, ; , ). On the other hand, the retributive and redemptive
justice that equally marks Western Christianity, any economy of exchange, and the
notorious will to power, perceives as pleasurable any sacrifice (sexual, personal, or
material) that promises future redemption (metaphysical or economic) or proximity
to power (such as potlatch, exhibitionism of disposable wealth in media). Sometimes
it takes millions of dollars or lives to fulfill a wish; and much of the time, the repetition
of what can be perceived as destruction, waste, and sacrifice can be as pleasurable and
as natural as sex is for biological pragmatism. It was because of this insight, made so
glaringly evident in the wake of the carnage of World War I, that Freud was forced to
write, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, that “[m]ost of the unpleasure that we experi-
ence is perceptual unpleasure” (GW XIII, ; , ). Death drive is that which deter-
mines what is pleasure and what is “unpleasure” for the subject. In other words, “by
the ‘beyond’ of the title,” as Deleuze writes, Freud does not mean “the exceptions to
that principle,” but “a residue that is irreducible to [the pleasure principle]” without
“contradict[ing] the principle—in short, “a second-order,” “transcendental” principle,
which is epistemologically presupposed in order to “account . . . for the necessary com-
pliance of the field [of life] with the empirical [pleasure] principle.”9 It is therefore qua
transcendental critique, in the Kantian sense, that the deferred action of Beyond the
Pleasure Principle supplements The Interpretation of Dreams.
A second obstacle that would have ramifications for Freud’s theory of dreams
came in the form of his own theories of the Oedipus complex and the hysteric’s resis-
tance. These theories forced Freud to supplement his psychoanalytic edifice with the
 F A. Kiarina Kordela

concepts of transference and transferential resistance, which are in evidence from

their initial, unpolished manifestation in the  Studies in Hysteria through his final
writings. This particular amendment of Freud’s runs as follows: Even if no conceivable
interpretation can explain the dream as fulfilling one of the analysand’s wishes, it
nonetheless fulfills the hysteric’s wish (emerging in the process of her transferential
resistance to the analyst) to repudiate Freud’s theory of dreams. As Freud writes in
“Analysis Terminable and Interminable” (), “the defensive mechanisms directed
against former danger return in the treatment as resistances against recovery. It fol-
lows from this that the ego treats recovery itself as a new danger” (Gesammelte Werke
XVI, ; SE XXIII, ). Of course, in terms of countertransference, as Lacan says,
“the patient’s resistance is always your own, and when a resistance succeeds it is
because you are in it up to your neck, because you understand. You understand, you
are wrong.”10 But by supplementing the theory of the interpretation of dreams with a
transference, which authorizes the emergence of wishes regarding the analytic theory
itself, you wipe out the chances that you’ll ever be wrong again. Transference is there-
fore the deferred supplement, which, among other things, guarantees that, one way or
the other, at the end of the day, the theory of the interpretation of dreams is irrefutable
(as many a critic of psychoanalysis has argued).
Keeping these two deferred supplements (death drive or repetition compulsion
and transference) in mind, we can now return to The Interpretation of Dreams to see
how they effect the theory there advanced. In  Freud had already identified con-
densation (Verdichtung) and displacement (Verschiebung) as the major, complemen-
tary processes through which the unconscious manifests itself in dreams, albeit only
in a disguised and distorted way. Condensation is an image or concept (Vorstellung)
in which various associative chains intersect, so that the image or concept is in fact
overdetermined by all these chains, just as these chains may also intersect at other
images and concepts manifest in the dream. In other words, as has been pointed out,
condensation is the psychoanalytic equivalent of the linguistic metaphor, postulating
that there is no one-to-one correspondence between signifier and signified, since
both slide in theoretically infinite chains of substitution. Because they are exclusively
motivated by the sliding of signifiers and signifieds, it follows that metaphor and con-
densation are always motivated semantically, independent from physical or pragmat-
ically determined experience. Displacement, by contrast, is the sliding or transfer, not
of meaning, but of affects and intensities, from the initial concept or image that pro-
duced them to other images or concepts that are less invested emotionally and are
in some way associatively linked to the initial, overinvested concept or image. It fol-
lows that, while metaphor and condensation are always motivated semantically, and
hence independently from actual, pragmatically determined experience, metonymy
and displacement are also determined by pragmatic and affective factors. This is a
crucial point to which we shall return shortly.
To complete this brief recapitulation of Freud’s account of condensation and
 Marx, Condensed and Displaced f 

displacement, these two functions are complementary mechanisms of the dream-

work process, whereby displacement facilitates condensation by producing, through
the transfer of affect from one associative chain to another, the intersections required
for condensation to take over. As functions of the primary processes of dream-work,
condensation and displacement are the precondition for the constitution in the first
place of latent dream thoughts out of free, unbounded energy. As functions of the sec-
ondary process, on the other hand, condensation and displacement, in Freud’s words,
“censor” and “interpret” the “absurdity and disconnectedness” of the raw, latent, dream
thoughts, so that they become a manifest dream content that already “approximates to
the model of an intelligible experience” much “before being submitted to waking inter-
pretation” (GW II/III, ; , ). Condensation and displacement unveil truth
only inasmuch as they veil it.
Crucially, it is clear in Freud’s rhetoric that condensation and displacement qua
processes of the dream-work extend in awakened life to the transference qua process
in the analytic experience. By allowing repressed affects to bind themselves to less
disturbing images, displacement qua dream-work contributes as much to their mani-
festation as it conceals their meaning by causing, in Freud’s words, confusing “reeval-
uations of the psychic valence” that ultimately derail us out of the path of the dream’s
truth (Über den Traum, GW II–III, ; SE V, ). Similarly, transference with the
analyst can be positive, allowing the analysand to revive repressed affects by displac-
ing them onto the analyst, or can be negative, as in transferential resistance, impeding
the analyst’s discovery of truth. In The Interpretation of Dreams it is not an accident
that Freud often calls the former function of displacement transference (Übertragung),
just as he defines transference in the analytic situation as the displacement of affects
from one’s past experiences onto the analytic experience (Affektverschiebung). Conden-
sation, too, is similarly constitutive of transference, insofar as the revived experience
is not repeated literally, but as a metaphorical equivalent of what is supposed to be
revived. The fact that the revival of affects in transference is triggered by the mere ver-
balization of one’s past experiences makes its metaphorical nature particularly con-
spicuous. As Freud writes in the Studies on Hysteria, “language serves as a substitute for
action; by its help, an affect can be ‘abreacted’ almost as effectively” (emphasis mine).11
Let us now return to the crucial distinction between condensation, which is
motivated purely semantically, and displacement, which is always motivated by a real
affective analogy between the substitute and the real, empirical cause of the repressed
affect, so that the analogy cannot be explained purely semantically. Linguistic meton-
ymy, too, is motivated by cultural knowledge of pragmatic relations—power, conven-
tion, possession, etc.—that also cannot be explained purely semantically.12 When
somebody is metaphorically called a “swine,” and when we metonymically refer to the
cautiousness of the U.S. government by saying, “the White House is cautious,” the ref-
erent of the metaphor “swine” is free to be me as much as the U.S. government is; but
it’s safe to say that I will not be the referent of the metonymy “White House” unless
 F A. Kiarina Kordela

certain pragmatic relations change rather drastically. In accord, therefore, with Lacan’s
argument in “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason since Freud,”
and against Derrida’s and de Man’s systematic attempts to render metaphor and
metonymy conceptually indistinguishable, I would insist that only metaphor and con-
densation (Verdichtung) enjoy the arbitrary licenses of poetry (Dichtung). Far from
indulging in this free play of metaphor and condensation, metonymy and displace-
ment, on the other hand, are restrained by pragmatic limitations.
If this distinction is true, then, contrary to the prevailing postmodern conviction,
neither the constitution of meaning and truth, nor the constitution of subjectivity and
identity—phenomena involving both metaphor and metonymy or condensation and
displacement—can be reducible solely to a “free play” of signifiers. Finally, if the homol-
ogy among the fields of the signifier and subjectivity, on the one hand, and that of
economy, on the other, is also true, then economy must also involve both metaphor-
and metonymy-like aspects, so that it, too, could not be legitimately reduced solely to
a “free play” of exchange values. We shall return to this point in the last section.

Ethical Arbitrariness against Cognitive Commodities

To return momentarily to the status of the psychoanalytic interpretation of dreams,
Freud’s future revision of the theory of dream interpretation belatedly affirms that the
process of dream interpretation operates by means of displacement and condensation,
and that, like the dream itself, analysis can approach the truth of the dream only inas-
much as it moves away from it. In fact, as is known, the reason that deconstruction so
consistently targets the distinction between condensation or metaphor and displace-
ment or metonymy is not its concern with dreams and their interpretation; rather, it
is precisely that these pairs of concepts function well beyond dream-work, permeat-
ing—through transference, which, as we know, is experienced not only in analysis—
waking life, including, not least, the activity of analyzing texts, whether these texts are
dreams, literature proper, or any other cultural artifact. To be sure, there is one point
of agreement between the deconstructionist and the psychoanalytic approaches to this
issue. Both assert that, far from being a progressive, enlightening process moving uni-
directionally toward truth, textual interpretation is nothing more or less than another
dream that reveals only as much as it conceals. Thus the oneirically radical arbitrari-
ness that extends beyond the constitution of the text itself so as also to be involved in
the process that interprets it, far from containing the text’s limits of disguise and dis-
tortion, extends them infinitely. This also reconfirms Freud’s thesis in Totem and Taboo
that there is an inherent “intellectual function in us which demands unity, connection
and intelligibility from any material” and which, “if . . . it is unable to establish a true
connection . . . does not hesitate to fabricate a false one” (SE XIII, ). Falsity and arbi-
trariness pertain equally to the text and to its interpretation. Taken to its logical climax,
 Marx, Condensed and Displaced f 

then, even the founding thesis that dreams are manifest, distorted contents of un-
conscious thoughts will—by dint of its own logic, once it has been retroactively sup-
plemented by its future revision—always already have become no less arbitrary and
ungrounded than any other wish-fulfilling interpretation of dreams, including the in-
creasingly popular behaviorist assumption that dreams are meaningless, mechanically
and chemically determined biological reactions to environmental stimuli.
If we want to play according to the rules of what is often called “postmodern”
epistemology—an epistemology largely articulated through the insights brought about
by linguistics and psychoanalysis—we have to admit that the psychoanalytic and the
biologistic takes on dreams are equally arbitrary and ungrounded. But, as is always the
case with arbitrary and ungrounded hypotheses, each serves a distinct political pur-
pose. However arbitrary the truths of the psychoanalytic interpretation of dreams may
be, by turning dreams into a signifier of the subject’s truth about its relation to itself,
others, and society, interpretation is inherently forced (that is, it is inherently free)
to offer either a social reconfirmation or a critique. By contrast, the biologistic reduc-
tion of dreams to chemistry and mechanics deprives dreams of all semantic function—
except, of course, that of repetitively signifying the steady progress of science, which
can reduce ever more dreamt images to mechanical and chemical reactions, thus
invariably reconfirming a technocratic society and its status quo.
It follows (and this has implications extending far beyond Freud’s work and
beyond psychoanalysis itself ) that, at the present, post-Freudian epistemological junc-
ture, social critique can emerge only where arbitrariness is admitted and interpretative
choice is openly relegated to an extra-rational, and hence nondeconstructible, ethical
and political certainty. In other words, for social critique to be possible, some form of
interpretation and certainty must be recognized as both irrational and necessary.
Leaving aside the current dominance of technocracy and positivism, both of
which deny arbitrariness, I focus here on the interpretative line within the nonposi-
tivist, post-Freudian field of psychoanalytic or literary and cultural analysis that, on
the contrary, admits to the arbitrariness of interpretation, but denies this necessary
moment of an interpretative certainty that is not rational, but ethical. It is this trend of
thought that I call deconstruction and “postideology.”
For I wish to argue that, by reducing interpretative arbitrariness to yet another
reason why we should deem all truths to be merely equal, potentially exchangeable
and marketable, like any other market commodity, this nonpositivist but radically rel-
ativist, “postideological” line of thought empties arbitrariness of its political potential.
It reduces the function of all discourse to that of technology—the latter producing and
circulating technological commodities, and the former interpretative and cognitive
commodities—and in the process the possibility of challenging this global economy of
truths and other commodities rapidly disappears. Freud’s epistemological contumacy
enables effective social critique and political intervention only if the ungroundedness,
arbitrariness, and exchangeability of deconstructible truths necessarily presupposes
 F A. Kiarina Kordela

some other, nondeconstructible, and hence nonexchangeable truth, which, though

equally arbitrary, functions as absolute. After all, while semantic condensation allows
pain to displace its cause onto some arbitrary concept, leaving this cause unknown
and subject to arbitrary interpretation, the pain itself reconfirms that some real, albeit
elusive, cause must nevertheless have induced it in the first place. Similarly, in capital-
ism, labor-power qua objectified exchange-value freely circulates and substitutes for
any other commodity within the force of self-propelling and self-generating capital—
but only under the precondition that labor-power is also a value of a radically different
kind, a unique and nonexchangeable use-value, which does not profit from the surplus
value produced by its aspect as exchange-value. In Marx’s words, although value is a
“self-moving substance” that “throws off surplus-value from itself,” nevertheless value
“must have its origin both in circulation and not in circulation,” both in exchange-
value and in use-value.13 The same principle applies to semantic value: even though
the signifier is also a self-moving, self-referential and differential substance, content in
its own free play (the aspect of the signifier foregrounded by deconstruction), seman-
tic value must have its origin both within this free circulation of exchangeable signi-
fiers and, at the same time, outside of it: in the realm of affect and pragmatic relations.
Two major denials on the part of deconstruction, therefore, prevent any possi-
bility of it challenging the order of late capitalism. First, there is the denial of two ho-
mologies: one among use-value, displacement, and metonymy, and the other among
exchange-value, condensation, and metaphor. Second, there is the denial of the concep-
tual distinction between the above two aspects of capital (use as opposed to exchange),
signifier (metonymy as opposed to metaphor), and subject (displacement as opposed
to condensation). The vehement repudiation of this homology among these three fields
and of this distinction within each of these fields is a forceful political act, intended to
sustain a capitalist circulation, economic and semantic, that does not want to know
anything about use-value and metonymic relations. To deny the conceptual distinc-
tion between metaphor and metonymy or condensation and displacement amounts to
denying that exchange- and use-value are conceptually distinguishable—just as they
are not distinguishable in liberal economic ideology, where every concrete social ill
can be solved by the introduction of increased commodification. Finally, the combi-
nation of these denials amounts to abandoning both Marxism and psychoanalysis.

The Future and Past Revision of The Interpretation of Dreams

(Freud, Lacan, Marx, Hegel)
I now argue—against the aforementioned anti-Marxian and anti-psychoanalytic trend
of denying the conceptual distinctions between metaphor and metonymy, conden-
sation and displacement, and exchange-value and use-value—that Lacan’s concept of
enjoyment ( jouissance) signals an attempt, at once within and against postmodernism,
 Marx, Condensed and Displaced f 

to perform a restitution of absolute truth or certainty, affect, and use-value (in one
word, the real) in their (its) proper field: the field of the subject as a subject of the
signifier, and hence of capital. In this context it is helpful to conceive of the signifier as
something that, as Paul Ricoeur puts it, has a “split reference,” referring both to other
signifiers and to the realm beyond signification.14 To sustain both affect and pragmatic
relations within the field of signification as one aspect of its split reference, and to
bring them to bear on the constitution of the subject as the subject of the signi-
fier, Lacan introduces and distinguishes between enjoyment of meaning (jouis-sens)
and enjoyment (jouissance).15 Enjoyment of meaning, like Freud’s condensation and
Jakobson’s metaphor, is motivated by the semantic aspect of signification. Enjoyment
(jouissance), as we shall presently see, extends beyond this aspect to involve and be
motivated both by affects (like Freud’s displacement) and pragmatic relations (like
Jakobson’s metonymy).
Set against the pleasure principle, as the tendency to go beyond it and its pro-
hibition of enjoying, enjoyment, in Lacan’s  words, is “the path to death” and its
anticipated pain.16 By this assertion, enjoyment points not only to the mortal body,
as opposed to the immortal signifier, but also to pragmatic and power relations. For
when Lacan refers to death in the context of enjoyment, he means it precisely in the
Hegelian sense, as that which one must defy to become a master. To renounce death
or enjoyment amounts to becoming master. In Lacan’s words from the same seminar:
“[T]he master . . has renounced everything, and above all enjoyment, since he has
exposed himself to death, and . . . he stays well fixed in that position, of which the
Hegelian articulation is clear. No doubt, he has deprived the slave of the disposition of
his body, but this is nothing, [the master] has conceded to him enjoyment.”17 The slave
cannot dispose of his body as he wishes, nor has he any control over it, but he, un-
like the master, feels its pain and fear in the face of death. By contrast, the master has
no access to enjoyment, since enjoyment is conceded to the slave. This state of affairs
seems to entail that any speaking subject is in the position of the master insofar as
“jouissance is forbidden to him who speaks, as such.”18 Castration and the entry into
the symbolic order, as Lacan writes, “means that jouissance must be refused.” But this
is not the end of the story: jouissance must be refused initially, Lacan continues, “so
that it can be reached on the inverted ladder . . . of the Law of desire.”19 It is due to the
mechanisms of this level that every speaking subject is in fact in the position of the
slave. The impossibility of language to encounter jouissance or death initially allows
the subject to identify with the immortal signifier and thus to become the master. Sub-
sequently, however, the “Law of desire” in language transforms the impossibility of
encountering death into a prohibition, that is, into the illusion that, were it not forbid-
den, jouissance, or the encounter with death, would be accessible to the speaking sub-
ject. Thus the speaking subject is trapped between language’s masterful and psychotic
impossibility to access jouissance and the docile, neurotic illusion that jouissance is
accessible—an illusion that forces the subject into the position of the slave. This is the
 F A. Kiarina Kordela

split reference of the signifier, which, by prohibiting death, points to death and makes
it desirable, as the prerequisite encounter through which the subject can defy it, and
thus cease to be a slave.
This promise or hope, however, is doomed to remain an asymptotically remote
limit. The speaking subject, so long as it lives, can encounter death only through the
signifier, that is, in the mundane world of promise and prohibition, and hence as some-
thing always mediated through desire. The speaking, living subject never encounters
death on the level of the real, but only as a cultural, mythic and imaginary construc-
tion—something that now links enjoyment and death to meaning and its enjoyment
[jouis-sens]. While the subject is on the one hand drawn by bodily and pragmatic
enjoyment toward its own inevitable demise, it is, on the other hand, also pulled by
the signifier toward the heavens of immortality. There, far from being the end, death
becomes the source of immortal fables, it is woven together with all other collective
fables that have existed since eternity, and it binds together the entire community and
all time—past, present, and future. In commemoration and mourning—the realm of
the signifier and culture—the subject enjoys death qua immortality. Thus the split ref-
erence of the signifier corresponds to the central split of the speaking subject: on the
one hand, the speaking subject is the master—insofar as it speaks and identifies itself
with the signifier—and, on the other hand, it is also the slave—insofar as it is some-
thing more than the signifier, a surplus that exceeds the determinations of the signi-
fier: a body, death, the real.
In the above relation of the subject to the signifier, the paradoxes of the Hegelian
dialectic between master and slave are particularly pronounced. The speaking subject
is master (immortal) only insofar as it is subject to the signifier; and it is slave (mortal)
only insofar as it evades and transcends the signifier’s determinism.
Thus, having passed through enjoyment and the enjoyment of meaning, we arrive
at the third concept of the ternary cluster of enjoyment: surplus enjoyment (plus-de-
jouir). This emerges out of the paradoxical fact that even though enjoyment belongs
to the slave and enjoyment of meaning to the master, both death and the immortal
signifier, Lacan argues, in the last analysis fulfill the function of the master in the field
of speech. This function consists in having something owed to the master in return
for having conceded enjoyment to the slave. In Lacan’s words, “The master, in all this,
makes a small effort so that everything works, that is, he gives the command. Simply
in order to fulfill his function as a master, he loses something. It is at least due to this
lost something that something of jouissance must be returned to him—specifically,
surplus enjoyment (plus-de-jouir).”20 By his reference to surplus enjoyment, Lacan
makes explicit that his sources for the cluster of concepts pertaining to enjoyment
extend beyond Hegel and Kojève to Marx. Lacan’s argument in his seventeenth semi-
nar implies that surplus is a function that marks not only economy, but all aspects of
society, because of the simultaneous emergence of capitalism and secular modernity,
including discourse, truth, and the subject. The shift to secular capitalism is the shift
 Marx, Condensed and Displaced f 

to an economy and a discourse, in which, again citing Lacan, “the impotence of ad-
joining the surplus enjoyment to the truth of the master . . . is suddenly cancelled,”
becoming the potency by means of which “surplus value adjoins capital—no problem,
everything is homogeneous, we are in the realm of values.”21 The transformation of
everything—means of economic exchange (commodities and money) and signs—into
“value” is the decisive moment that marks the passage into capitalist, secular moder-
nity. Henceforth, since both capital and sign are values, their respective fields become
porous, and intercourse between them is free: surplus value can be adjoined to the sig-
nifier, just as surplus enjoyment can be adjoined “to the truth of the master,” capital.
Thus begins the era of ideology, an era in which mastery and authority can support
themselves not only through actual power, but through making use of the signifier.
From now on, it is not only actual power (Spinoza’s potentia) that makes power power,
but also its imaginarily mediated, distorted representations (Spinoza’s potestas).22 We
are in the era of capitalism and hegemony.
As far as the circulation of exchange value and signifiers is concerned, neither
labor qua use-value, nor pragmatic power relations, nor the mortal body and its affects,
nor enjoyment exists. The phenomenologically given chain of exchange-value consists
of and recognizes only exchange-value on the economic level, or enjoyment of mean-
ing on the semantic level. It is pure differentiality, totally oblivious to the commod-
ity’s use-value or the body’s affects and mortality, and, hence, to linear, historical and
finite time, including all historically determined pragmatic limitations. As Marx him-
self argued, the “tendency of capital is circulation without circulation time.”23 Never-
theless, as Marx, Freud, and Lacan all argue, although use-value, affect, and enjoyment
do not exist as such within the chain of circulation of exchange and semantic values,
they exist in their effects upon this circulation—in fact, they are its very precondition.
To repeat: although value is a “self-moving substance” that “throws off surplus-value
from itself,” value, nevertheless, “must have its origin both in circulation and not in cir-
culation,” both in exchange- and in use-value.24 And the same applies to semantic
value: even as it also is a self-moving, self-referential and differential substance, it
nevertheless “must have its origin both in circulation and not in circulation,” that is,
also in affect and enjoyment.
To say that use-value, affects, and enjoyment do not exist within the phenome-
nologically given chains of circulation of capital and the signifier, respectively, is not to
say that use value or affects and enjoyment are not part of human experience. Rather
it is to say they are not part of the phenomenologically given mechanisms of capital
or of human experience as represented by the signifier. Just as use-value is not part of
the representable aspect of the circulation of capital (M—M´), affects and enjoyment
are not part of the circulation of the signifier. It is the perspectives of capital and the
signifier themselves that are blind to use-value and affects or enjoyment. In contrast,
the perspective of production and consumption, as well as that of finite human his-
tory—as opposed to the “circulation without circulation time” of the chain of capital—
 F A. Kiarina Kordela

are blind to the infinite or synchronic circulation of both capital and signifiers, having
eyes only for use value and affects or enjoyment. In other words, the empirical world
consists of two distinct phenomenological universes corresponding to two distinct
modes of temporality: the one comprises production and use-value, and the affects
and enjoyment of the subject that transcend discursive determinations, and operate
according to a linear and finite time; the other comprises exchange-value, signifiers,
and discursively constituted subject identities, and operates according to a temporal-
ity in which infinity and absolute synchronicity or instantaneity coincide. Finally, the
sole function that transcends both universes is in itself manifest in neither, and is the
cause and effect of both: surplus.
To ignore, therefore, that use-value, pragmatic or metonymic relations, and abso-
lute truth behind displaced affect are the very presupposition of the arbitrary circu-
lation of capital, the signifier, and unfixed subject identities is to remain blind to one
of the two universes comprising the modern, secular, capitalist world and subject. To
repeat: this self-imposed blindness, in turn, amounts to abandoning both Marxism
and psychoanalysis. What is worse, to abandon both is to give up not the possibility for
the slave, in Lacan’s words, to “show in time his truth to the master,” as “Hegel dixit”—
this truth being, in Hegel’s scheme, that the slave is actually the real master because
it is only he who labors, and through the “formative activity” of this labor, through
“fashioning the thing” or product of his labor, “he becomes aware that being-for-
self belongs to him, that he himself exists essentially and actually in his own right.”25
Such possibility does not exist from the outset, for Hegel’s argument rests on a tricky
slippage of concepts. The precondition for attaining self-consciousness, according to
Hegel’s own argument, is the incorporation of the other and its consciousness. “Self-
consciousness achieves its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness”—but one that
is of a dead subject, so that this external consciousness can be internalized by the sur-
viving subject (master) as its own self-consciousness.26 In Hegel’s own words: “[J]ust
as each [subject] stakes his own life, so each must seek the other’s death, for it values
the other no more than itself; its essential being is present to it in the form of an ‘other,’
it is outside of itself and must rid itself of its self-externality.”27 Only when this occurs
is consciousness complete, Hegel continues, for only then does consciousness have

the experience of what Spirit is—this absolute substance which is the unity of the
different independent self-consciousnesses which, in their opposition, enjoy perfect
freedom and independence: “I” that is “We” and “We” that is “I.”28

When, however, the slave attains self-consciousness by means of the otherness of the
fashioned thing, the product of his labor—as opposed to by means of the otherness of
the master—it can at most be argued that the thereby produced I-We is one shared by
the laborer and the product of his labor, but not by the master, who is entirely left out.
Hence this I-We is not truly universal, nor can it, consequently, be “Spirit.” Which is
why, as Lacan concludes and as “Marx dixit,” in opposition to Hegel, the laborer’s
 Marx, Condensed and Displaced f 

alleged self-consciousness is rather the very precondition for the laborer to be “during
all this time occupied with fomenting [the master’s] surplus enjoyment.”29 And it is the
possibility of interrupting this perpetual fomentation of the master’s surplus value, I
argue, that is abandoned when we ignore the very preconditions of the arbitrary cir-
culation of capital and the “free play” of the signifier.

Notes
1. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, ), –.
2. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowke (London: Pen-
guin Classics, ), :.
3. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New
York: Vintage Books, ). See, in particular, chapter , “The Prose of the World,” –.
4. The most notable of such attacks include Derrida’s critique of Lévi-Strauss’s distinc-
tion between third term and real opposition—a distinction already intimated in Kant by the
pair contrary versus opposite—first presented in  as a lecture at The Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity, and subsequently published as “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human
Sciences” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (; Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, ) (see chapter , –, and for Lévi-Strauss’s argument, see Structural Anthro-
pology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Schoepf [New York: Basic Books, ]). Derrida’s
critique of Austin’s distinction between serious and nonserious performative speech acts was
presented in “Signature Event Context” (first published in French in  and subsequently in
English in Glyph  []: –), then in Margins of Philosophy (trans. Alan Bass [Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, –) in , and then in Limited Inc. in  (trans. Alan Bass
[Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, ], –); and Paul de Man’s attempt, at the
first diacritics symposium at Cornell University, to render indistinguishable metaphor and
metonymy or rhetoric and grammar (published in diacritics , no. : []: –) as “Semi-
ology and Rhetoric.”
5. Lacan offers an explicit account of the genealogy of surplus enjoyment out of Marx’s
surplus value in his seventeenth seminar (Le Séminaire. Livre XVII. L’envers de la psychanalyse,
–, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller [Paris: Seuil, ]). Žižek has placed all due emphasis on
the derivation of Lacanian surplus enjoyment from Marx’s surplus value (see, for example,
“How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?” in Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology [Lon-
don: Verso, ], –). My argument, however, goes beyond this genealogy into the broader
structural homologies among semantics, psychoanalysis (as the field of the constitution of the
subject as the subject of the signifier), and economics.
6. Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition (London: Hogarth Press, –).
7. In spite of my critique of deconstruction, I use the Derridean concept of the supple-
ment in the context of Freud’s retroactive articulation of the theory of dream interpretation
because it accurately describes the constitution of what appears to come first (or to be the cause
of a further effect), by what appears to come second (or to be the effect of this cause). This mode
of causality characterizes any system of differential and retroactive constitution of meaning or
values, and hence is appropriate for describing the chain of circulation of exchange values or
signifiers. My critique of deconstruction concerns its nonacknowledgment of another aspect
 F A. Kiarina Kordela

always presupposed by such systems, whose mode of causality, as I argue, cannot be subsumed
under the concept of supplementation. In economy, as we shall see, this is the aspect of pro-
duction, and, in the fields of the sign and the subject, it is the aspect of pragmatic determi-
nations, affects, and mortality. This aspect operates according to a linear and finite mode of
causality. I return to this point toward the end of this paper. Note that the distinction between
these two modes of causality converges with Spinoza’s distinction between immanent and tran-
sitive causality (see Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics, in The Collected Works of Spinoza, ed. and
trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ).
8. Gilles Deleuze, Masochism, Coldness, and Cruelty (New York: Zone Books, ).
See particularly the chapter “The Death Instinct,” –.
9. Ibid., .
10. Jacques Lacan, Book III. The Psychoses, –, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Rus-
sell Grigg (New York: W. W. Norton, ), .
11. Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria, trans. James Strachey (New
York: Basic Books, ), .
12. See Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” in Ha-Sifrut Literature: Theory-
Poetics-Hebrew and Comparative-Literature  (): –; and Fundamentals of Language,
th ed. (The Hague: Mouton, ).
13. Marx, Capital, , , and .
14. Paul Ricoeur, “The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling,”
Critical Inquiry : (Autumn ): –, cited in Critical Theory Since , ed. Hazard
Adams and Leroy Searle (Tallahassee: University Presses of Florida, ), –. By this
remark I do not mean to construe either affect or truth as what Paul Ricoeur called a “new kind
of intuitionism—and the worst kind!—in the form of a new emotional realism.” The invocation
of something that transcends representation makes sense, to continue with Ricoeur’s words,
“only to the extent that it is paired with [an analysis] of split reference both in verbal and imag-
inative structures.” In other words, it makes sense only to the extent that imagination and affect,
far from being severed from verbalization and cognition, are considered as one of their con-
stituents and references. In his attempt to link not only metonymy but metaphor to feelings,
Paul Ricoeur made this self-reflective caveat when he invoked Heidegger’s “being-there” (under
its mode of Befindlichkeit) to argue as follows: “Because of feelings we are ‘attuned to’ aspects
of reality which cannot be expressed in terms of the objects referred to in ordinary language”
(). I leave aside Ricoeur’s argument that metaphor refers to affects, since this is effectively
always the case insofar as metaphor and metonymy, like condensation and displacement, are
always mutually implicated. My emphasis lies rather in maintaining the conceptual distinction
between metaphor and metonymy.
15. Lacan fashioned jouissance by drawing heavily on Kojève’s rereading of Hegel’s dia-
lectic of master and slave, on Marx’s labor-power as use-value, Freud’s displacement of affect,
and Roman Jakobson’s metonymy.
16. “[L]e chemin vers la mort” (translation mine).
17. “[L]e maître . . . a renoncé à tout, et à la jouissance d’abord, puisqu’il s’est exposé à la
mort, et . . . il reste bien fixé dans cette position don’t l’articulation hégélienne est claire. Sans
doute a-t-il privé l’esclave de la disposition de son corps, mais, c’est un rien, il lui a laissé la
jouissance” (translation mine). Lacan, Le Séminaire, .
18. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton &
Co., ), .
 Marx, Condensed and Displaced f 

19. Ibid., .

20. “Le maître, dans tout ça, fait un petit effort pour que tout marche, c’est-à-dire donne
l’ordre. A simplement remplir sa fonction de maître, il y perd quelpue chose. Ce quelque chose
de perdu, c’est par là au moins que quelque chose de la jouissance doit lui être rendu—
précisément le plus-de-jouir” (translation mine). Lacan, Le Séminaire, .
21. “[L]’impuissance à faire le joint du plus-de-jouir à la vérité du maître . . . est tout d’un
coup vidée. La plus-value s’adjoint au capital — pas de problème, c’est homogène, nous sommes
dans les valeurs” (translation mine, ibid., ).
If (Lacan continues in order to stress further the homology between surplus value and
surplus enjoyment) Marx “had not made surplus enjoyment a matter of accountancy, if he had
not made out of it the surplus value, in other words, if he had not laid the ground of capitalism,
Marx would have realized that surplus value is surplus enjoyment” (ibid., ). To clarify fur-
ther the homology among Marx’s account of capital, the linguistic account of the signifier, and
the psychoanalytic account of subjectivity, let me briefly recapitulate the relevant part of my
argument. For all three systems—economy, language, and the speaking subject—to sustain
themselves, each must give the appearance that there is nothing outside the chain of circulation
of capital or signifiers. Enjoyment—like metonymic, pragmatic relations, and the real cause of
displaced pain—must be denied for the circulation of metaphors or condensed images to
appear free, and for truth to become the truth of the master, that is, yet another commodity so
that “everything goes” and is equally deconstructible. Similarly, in economy, to recall Marx, the
formula of the circulation of capital, M—C—M´ (money—commodity—more money) must
appear as M—M´ (with the moment of the exchange between commodity and money effaced)
for capitalism to sustain itself. The denial of the moment of the exchange between capital and
commodity is analogous to the denial of enjoyment, metonymy, pragmatic relations, and the
existence of a real cause for one’s affect within displacement. All that remains visible, by anal-
ogy to Marx’s free play of exchange values (M—M´), is the free play of metaphors, condensa-
tions, and enjoyment of meaning.
22. For the distinction between potestas and potentia, as deriving from Spinoza’s distinc-
tion, in his Ethics, between God’s potestas and God’s potentia (prop. -), see Michael Hardt,
“Translator’s Foreward: The Anatomy of Power,” in Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly: The
Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, ), xi–xvi.
23. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough
Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin Books, ), . For Marx’s argument that
capitalism annihilates historical time by producing the illusory coincidence of infinity and no
time, see the section “Difference between Production Time and Labor Time—Storch. Money.
Mercantile Estate. Credit. Circulation,” –.
24. Marx, Capital, , , and .
25. “Hegel dixit, l’esclave avec le temps lui démontrera sa vérité . . .” (translation mine).
G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
), .
26. Ibid., .
27. Ibid., .
28. Ibid., .
29. “Marx dixit, il sera occupé tout ce temps á fomenter son plus-de-jouir” (translation
mine). Lacan, Le Seminaire, .
This page intentionally left blank
 R . The Substance
of Psychic Life
Karyn Ball R

O
ver the years, the perceived impropriety of Freud’s emphasis on the sex-
ual dimension of the unconscious has, in the United States at least,
sometimes led to a complete negation of the value of his thought. The
controversy in – over plans for a national exhibit devoted to
Freud’s work and influence is a telling instance of this suppression in the public sphere
both within and beyond academia. To be sure, Freud himself sometimes felt com-
pelled to qualify a few of the more scandalous aspects of his own thinking on sexual-
ity, such as his initial belief in his patients’ statements that they had been seduced into
sexual acts as children by adults, including family members. As is well known, he
later relinquished this hypothesis in favor of the theory that these confessions re-
flected fantasies about incest and seduction.1 In addition, his  rejoinder to C. G.
Jung in the “Introduction: On Narcissism” awkwardly guards an increasingly unten-
able distinction between the “nonsexual” ego-drives and the sexual drives proper in an
attempt to separate his theory of the libido from his former disciple’s more general-
ized understanding of its primal character. It is, of course, significant that despite his
various protests to the contrary, Freud’s subsequent descriptions of the libidinal econ-
omy in , , and  will tend rather to confirm than to undermine Jung’s
revised concept.2
In Life and Death in Psychoanalysis (), Jean Laplanche observes that “it is
sexuality which represents the model of every drive and probably constitutes the only
drive in the strict sense of the term.”3 Laplanche’s New Foundations for Psychoanalysis
() is partly devoted to retrieving the significance of the libidinal economy as the
disavowed foundation of psychoanalytic discourse.4 From Laplanche I take the lesson


 F Karyn Ball

that to ignore the drives is to disavow the status of the sexual and the biological
valences of Freud’s thought and to attenuate the specificity of psychoanalytic inquiry.
My affinity for Laplanche is not merely polemical and conceptual; with an eye to
Freud’s later theory of the libido, I also want to follow through on the strategic direc-
tion of Laplanche’s return to Freud, which reclaims the radicality of his concepts from
and against Freud himself for a post-Freudian intellectual milieu distinguished by the
confluence of structuralism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and antifoundationalist philos-
ophy. In adopting this strategy, my intention is to retrieve the speculative scientism
that saturates Freud’s theory of the libidinal economy in order to recover a foundation
more radical still: his metaphysics of the drives in Beyond the Pleasure Principle as
metapsychological and economic mediations of biological forces that emanate from
the primordial “substance” of psycho-physical life.
It is significant that this centuries-old metaphysical figure of substance “persists”
(as substance is prone to do) in Freud’s revised theory of the drives in Beyond the
Pleasure Principle (). Substance is a phylogenetic figure in a work that is prone to
flights of speculative fancy, drawing on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
theories about the evolution of basic organisms. To the extent that Freud seeks a cor-
poreal, biochemical, and scientifically “substantive” basis for neurotic and pathological
behavior, his recourse to this figure provides him with a metaphysical foundation for
an evolutionist staging of the emergence of conscious life.
In what follows, I shall consider Freud’s recourse to the figure of vital substance
(lebende Substanz) as a biological origin and foundation for his account of organic and
psychic evolution. One dimension of this figure is manifestly phylogenetic, but im-
plicitly metaphysical in narrating the development of a split psyche. Another dimen-
sion is metaphysical and topological insofar as it delineates a transcendental basis for
the split between conscious and unconscious contents and functions. These phyloge-
netic and metaphysical formulations of substance attest to the strength of Freud’s
investment in pinpointing the origins of psychic life. What is more, they indicate the
rhetorical value of this figure for Freud, in his schematism of the interrelations among
biological, economic, and structural determinisms. My analysis of this trope will seek
to demonstrate how the metaphysics of substance informing psychoanalytic praxis
constitutes a condition and limit of the process of working through neurotic repres-
sion and traumatic fixation.
Laplanche’s perspective is borne out by Freud’s recurrent speculations about the
status of sexuality for his theory of the unconscious, speculations that show how the
overdetermined functioning of the libido remains a focal object of Freudian psycho-
analysis. According to a  essay, libido “is a term used in the [theory of drives] for
describing the dynamic manifestation of sexuality.”5 Freud places the emergence of
the libido with the discovery of hysteria and obsessional neuroses. He notes that the
symptoms of these “transferential neuroses” result from the ego’s rejection or repres-
sion of the drives, which “then find circuitous paths through the unconscious.”6 The
 The Substance of Psychic Life f 

concept of sublimation will then allow Freud to account for drives the aims of which
do not appear to be sexual.7
Freud proposes various versions of the libidinal economy, in which ego or nar-
cissistic drives are opposed to sexual or object drives before arriving at the duality
of the life and death drives in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (). Prior to ,
“[Drives] and Their Vicissitudes” () maps the “destinies” of the drives as the paths
that interrelate four essential components. According to this map, each drive is dif-
ferentially determined by its respective source (Quelle) as the “region or zone of the
body from which it derives.” In addition, every drive is theoretically distinguishable on
the basis of its pressure (Drang), aim (Ziel), and object (Objekt).
Reading the  article in light of Freud’s Three Essays on Sexuality (),
Laplanche delineates different definitions for the Quelle, or source, in Freud’s theory
of the drives. In its concrete, local, and “strictly physiological” sense, the source is an
“erotogenic zone” understood as a privileged site of sexual stimulation. The implica-
tion here is that sexual tension is exclusively a property of the oral, anal, urethral, and
genital loca. In a broader sense, however, the source may refer to any organ or body
part that becomes the vehicle of stimulation. This is to suggest that the term erotogenic
may alternately describe corporeal tension in general.8
In Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, Laplanche’s identification of the progres-
sively diffuse character of the source has significant implications for Freud’s economic
theory of the psychic apparatus. For it suggests that the source “is nothing but the
transcription of the sexual repercussions of anything occurring in the body beyond
a certain quantitative threshold” (). This is to attribute a polymorphous autoeroti-
cism to the body and its organs, a condition that the privileging of genital sexuality
both inhibits and aggravates. In addition, because autoerotic sexuality is generalized
through the whole of the body, it encourages a more abstract understanding of sexual
energy, which must therefore be said to precede object orientations.9
Laplanche’s reading of the source of the drives invites us to understand auto-
eroticism in Freud’s work as both a dynamic nexus of tensions and as an impetus
of libidinal investment. Libidinal investment, or cathexis (Besetzung), is a term that
would then describe a subject’s sexually charged captivation with an object that
thus provides an orientation for generalized sexual tensions. To the extent that the
quantity of tension determines the intensity of investment, the libidinal economy can
be viewed as a figuration of a systematic interrelation among differential degrees of
cathexis along with shifts in the measure of stimulation that must be regulated and/or
released by the psychic apparatus.
Laplanche notes that “the most frequent model used by Freud to account for
the relation between the somatic and the psychical employs the metaphor of a kind
of ‘delegation’ provided with a mandate that need not be absolutely imperative. Thus
a local biological stimulus finds its delegation, its ‘representation’ in psychical life
as a drive” (–).10 This characterization of the drive emphasizes its status as a
 F Karyn Ball

metapsychological figure for an autoerotically charged compulsion to obtain satisfac-

tion in relation to an object; yet the object is, significantly, a figure in its own right,
insofar as it is a displacement or condensation of sexual and/or sublimated tensions.
This double figuration is manifest in fantasy, which visually dramatizes the otherwise
obscure trajectory of the drive as an economic and mechanical motility of unbound
energy. This is to suggest that the drives are interwoven with fantasy as an imaginary
elaboration of the path between a drive’s object and its aim.
In the last instance, however, Laplanche identifies the instinct as the ultimate
source of the drive, which “mimics, displaces, and denatures it” (). The instinct is
a trace of primal forces, which persist throughout evolution. The source of the drive
so conceived exceeds psychology insofar as it incorporates the history of organic life
().11 It therefore comprises the biological substrate of the human organism as a
psycho-physical system. This is confirmed by a reading of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure
Principle, where he defines a drive as a derivative of a repressed instinctual urge
(Drang) that has been refracted through socializing constraints. In that context, he
argues that drives are essentially conservative in nature, because they aim to return the
organism to a “prior” state. In Freud’s words: “[A] [drive] is an urge inherent in organic
life to restore an earlier state of things which the living entity has been obliged to
abandon under the pressure of external disturbing forces; that is, it is a kind of organic
elasticity, or, to put it another way, the expression of the inertia inherent in organic
life” (SE XVII, ).12 This prior state expresses itself in the so-called return of the re-
pressed as an uncanny resurgence of earlier phases of organic and psychic develop-
ment—those repudiated primal instincts and infantile beliefs or fears that could be
said to lie at the root of “irrational” behaviors and that seem “mechanical” in their non-
voluntary relentlessness when they reemerge in a “rational” and thus unhomelike space.
Though Laplanche is committed to reinstating the foundational status of the
sexual drives for psychoanalytic praxis, he nevertheless retains a critical distance in
relation to Freud’s account on the grounds that Freud remains captive to biological
and phylogenetic determinisms. Indeed, Laplanche seems to feel compelled to atten-
uate Freud’s scientism by reading his theory of the drives as a poetics of the psychic
apparatus. In drawing from various discourses and models, this poetics offers an inter-
disciplinary topography and an explicit tropology for the biological, economic, and
structural mechanisms that distinguish Freud’s metaphysics of the drives.
In this context, when Laplanche speaks of Freud’s biologism, he is not only
underscoring the ways in which biological motifs provide a poetic means for Freud
to conceptualize the physical bases of human behavior. He is also emphasizing the
“impurity” of Freud’s speculations, which typically draw on late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century pre-quantum-theory, pre-relativity-theory, and macroscopic sci-
entific hypotheses.13 Laplanche notes that Freud tended to favor the hypothetical
formulations of figures identified with the Physicalist school, whose members were
committed to bracketing out “everything in psychology that cannot be reduced to
 The Substance of Psychic Life f 

the sciences of physics and chemistry.”14 Yet this principle was attenuated by their
acknowledgment that there were phenomena that exceeded the physical-chemical
level. In these instances, it would become necessary to introduce a Physicalist model
“into psychology.” Such an importation would entail treating the new phenomena with
a “dignity” equal to the chemical-physical energies inherent in matter, energies the
Physicalists believed were “reducible to the forces of attraction and repulsion.”15
My own analysis follows Laplanche’s with one difference. To understand Freud’s
rethinking of the libidinal economy and the unconscious in Beyond the Pleasure Prin-
ciple, I want to take the profound implications of Freud’s scientism and metaphysics
seriously—to believe in them at least provisionally, rather than to dismiss them out
of turn because “we know better now.” Freud’s borrowings from various disciplines,
coupled with his faith in science, allow him systematically and poetically to represent
inner experiences that would otherwise lack intelligibility. The rhetorical efficacy and
radical openness of this contradictory effort, which hinges on the honesty of the spec-
ulative as if, will only become evident from a standpoint that embraces the same spirit
of openness, but that nevertheless acknowledges the limits placed on psychoanalytic
praxis by Freud’s peculiar assimilation of his scientific and philosophical references.
In their various conjunctures, the biologist and economic motifs that organize
Beyond the Pleasure Principle portray the psyche as a thermodynamic system, which
binds self-preservation and sexual reproduction with death. These motifs emerge
through Freud’s recourse to an interdisciplinary vocabulary that draws on models
taken from the physical and life sciences. Mixed in with speculations on the evolution
of protista are metaphors of an overtly metaphysical—and perhaps even cosmological,
inasmuch as they map the “universe” of the mental apparatus—character. This uni-
verse remains, invariably, a Manichean battleground for libidinal agencies and forces
linking the economic with the biological, and the biological with the primal. The split
between unconscious (primary) processes and conscious (secondary) processes is just
one of several divisions organizing the psyche as a functionally differentiated homeo-
static system.
The term living substance provides Freud with a metaphysical symbol on which
to base his narrative about the psyche’s functional differentiation. Vital substance
obtains an originary status in Freud’s phylogenetic narrative, which constructs it as
the most basic component of organic existence. Consequently it serves as the figura-
tive locus of what is, developmentally speaking, “primal” and “primordial” in humans.
This primordial living substance predates and founds the possibility of species life in
general. It not only precedes the genesis of humans, but also furnishes a departure
point for Freud’s speculations about sexual differentiation in higher animals. Freud
comes to perceive the fundamental capacity for protista to reproduce themselves
through mitosis as a phylogenetic antecedent for the development of separate sexes.
The sexual tension that spurs the drives is hereby posited as an evolved form of this
basic cellular impetus to divide.
 F Karyn Ball

It is no coincidence that these observations arise in the midst of Freud’s specu-

lations about the role of death in the evolution of organic life forms in the sixth chap-
ter of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Drawing here principally on the writings of
A. Weismann, Freud synthesizes the implications of various theories of his day, which
tie the impetus for cell division to the senescence of protista.16 The implication of his
synthesis is that reproduction and death converge at the most fundamental level of
organic life. On the one hand, vital processes are conceived as exhausting the organ-
ism, which divides in order to replenish its energies and thus to escape death. On the
other hand, death is figured as a determinism that is built into every living organism.
Vital substance is the paradoxical source of this determinism, which prefigures
Freud’s theory of the death drive as an extimate as well as a dystopic figure in his
thermodynamics of the psyche. In its initial formulation, the death drive serves the
principle of constancy by defusing excess stimulation. In its radical register, however,
the drive represents a fundamental urge to return the psycho-physical organism to a
state of inorganic calm. This destructive modality of the death drive aims to neutral-
ize the tensions affected by the life drives. It is this primal longing for death, inherent
in and spurred by vital substance, that goes “beyond” the pleasure principle.
Within Freud’s topography of the psychic apparatus, the conflicting demands
of life and death also determine the parameters of consciousness as a system geared
toward filtering perceptions. This perceptual-consciousness system (Pcpt.-Cs.) lies
“on the borderline between outside and inside” and is “turned towards the external
world” (SE XVII, ). In contrast, “all excitatory processes that occur in the other sys-
tems leave permanent traces behind in them which form the foundation of memory”
(SE XVII, –). Freud notes that such memory traces might never be involved in
the process of becoming conscious; indeed, “they are often most powerful and most
enduring when the process which left them behind was one which never entered
consciousness” (SE XVII, ). The implication of these speculations is that memory
traces cannot remain constantly conscious because they would then curtail the sys-
tem’s ability to receive fresh excitations. This leads Freud to suspect that “becoming
conscious and leaving behind a memory trace are processes incompatible with each
other within one and the same system” (SE XVII, ). In other words, memory traces
persist, but in another system, where they cannot interfere with the functions of the
perceptual-conscious.
To explain the “division of labor” suggested by this topography, Freud looks
toward the discipline of biology to plot the phylogenesis of a split consciousness. His
speculations focus on the development of a basic living organism “in its most simpli-
fied possible form” (SE XVII, ).17 This organism consists of an “undifferentiated vesi-
cle of a substance that is susceptible to stimulation.” The outer surface of this vesicle
serves as an organ for receiving stimuli; it is thereby differentiated from the “deeper
layers” wherein excitatory processes would “run a different course” (SE XVII, ). Freud
suggests that the “ceaseless impact of external stimuli on the surface of the vesicle”
 The Substance of Psychic Life f 

produces a protective “crust” (Rinde). This crust, in its turn, “would at last have been
so thoroughly ‘burned through’ [durchgebrannt] by stimulation that it would present
the most favourable possible conditions for the reception of stimuli and become inca-
pable of any further modification” (SE XVII, ).18
It is this hardened and unalterable protective crust that represents Freud’s phy-
logenetic precursor for the perceptual-conscious system. This analogy has significant
repercussions for his understanding of the mental apparatus: for it suggests that the
elements of the conscious system “could undergo no further permanent modification
from the passage of excitation” because they had already been modified in this respect
to the fullest possible extent. Furthermore, Freud’s description of the “burned through”
layer of the cortex implies an additional function for the perceptual-conscious system,
that of protecting the “inner layers” of the psyche as a fragment of vital substance:

This little fragment of living substance is suspended in the middle of an external

world charged with the most powerful energies; and it would be killed by the stimu-
lation emanating from these if it were not provided with a protective shield against
stimuli. It acquires the shield in this way: its outermost surface ceases to have the
structure proper to living matter, becomes to some degree inorganic and thence for-
ward functions as a special envelop or membrane resistant to stimuli. In consequence,
the energies of the external world are able to pass into the next underlying layers,
which have remained living, with only a fragment of their original intensity; and these
layers can devote themselves, behind the protective shield, to the reception of the
amounts of stimulus which have been allowed through it. By its death, the outer layer
has saved all the deeper ones from a similar fate—unless, that is to say, stimuli reach
it which are so strong that they break through the protective shield. Protection against
stimuli is an almost more important function for the living organism than reception
of stimuli. (SE XVII, )19

It is worth noting that Freud assumes the existence of a deadened inorganic protective
layer that is “proper to living matter” (die dem Lebenden zukommende Struktur). By
the same token, the subsequent metamorphosis of the receptive cortex into a protec-
tive layer represents a transformation of a properly living substance into a semi-
inorganic shield. On the one hand, Freud describes the result of this petrification as
a “death” of the living external layer. On the other hand, this death is also a systemic
sacrifice for the sake of the greater good. In effect, the “living death” of the cortical
membrane is crucial to the organism’s survival, which is to say that this “death-in-life”
is essential to the continuity of organic existence.
Freud’s narrative about the “death” of the outer layer has far-reaching implica-
tions, for it compels him to speculate on the necessary role of destructive elements
in the economic balance and health of the psycho-physical system. His speculations
ascribe to this desensitized membrane the task of maintaining the resiliency of the
receptive system, which must remain open to the flow of energies. Freud thereby im-
plies that, because it is deadened, the surface crust of the receptive layer acts as a
 F Karyn Ball

buffer zone between external stimuli and the vital interior layers, thus palliating the
impact of the world on the organism’s inner core.
Freud revises Breuer’s distinction between quiescent or bound energy and mobile
or cathecting energy to propose that the perceptual-conscious system is limited to
the function of mediating the flow of mobile energies. In contrast, bound energies
will need to be “stored” in the unconscious, where they subsist in the form of memory
traces. This is to suggest that the stimuli that pass through the first system undergo a
transformation whereby their mobile energies are translated into bound or quiescent
contents. The question is how to understand the character of this transformation in
light of Freud’s metaphysics of substance.
Freud notes that the main purpose of receiving stimuli is to discover their “direc-
tion and nature.” It suffices, then, for the sense organs to “sample” the world in small
quantities or specimens to determine their character. In addition, these organs include
“special arrangements” for protecting the organism against excessive exposures or
“unsuitable kinds of stimuli” (unangemessener Reizarten). In other words, reception is
circumscribed by protective reactions against overpowerful external pressures.
Freud’s description of the protective shield implies that the selective function it
performs for the basic organism is at once natural and necessary to its survival. As the
psychic analog for this shield, the perceptual-conscious system would also carry out
this filtering process; however, the limits of this system necessitate the existence of a
contiguous psychic dimension, which serves a different function from the conscious
realm. This unconscious dimension would fulfill the psychic need to store the residues
and excesses of the perceptual material, which is either received and processed, or
bypassed by the Pcpt.-Cs. By virtue of this division, the traces of events that bypass
perception are removed to this indeterminate, internal locus wherein they persist in a
potential state. A further implication is that perceptions leave traces that become per-
manent once they enter the “timeless” unconscious.
In pursuing this claim, it is perhaps not surprising that Freud invokes a revised
version of Immanuel Kant’s theorem respecting time and space as “necessary forms
of intuition” in order to reformulate his own distinction between unconscious and
conscious functions:
As a result of certain psycho-analytic discoveries, we are to-day in a position to
embark on a discussion of the Kantian theorem that time and space are “necessary
forms of thought.” We have learnt that unconscious mental processes are in them-
selves “timeless.” This means in the first place that they are not ordered temporally,
that time does not change them in any way and that the idea of time cannot be applied
to them. These are negative characteristics which can only be clearly understood if a
comparison is made with conscious mental processes. On the other hand, our abstract
idea of time seems to be wholly derived from the method of working of the system
Pcpt.-Cs. and to correspond to a perception on its own part [Selbstwahrnehmung] of
that method of working. This mode of functioning may perhaps constitute another
way of providing a shield against stimuli. (SE XVII, )20
 The Substance of Psychic Life f 

Freud vigorously insists here on the atemporality of unconscious contents to the

extent that “the idea of time cannot be applied to them” (dass man die Vorstellung
nicht an sie heranbringen kann). He nonetheless goes on to allude to the prospect that
such an abstraction is itself potentially a defense mechanism that derives from the
perceptual-conscious, whose selective “mode of working” by extension also encom-
passes Freud’s own in this instance. This honest admission appears to undermine the
statement about the atemporal unconscious as a whole by calling it a “perception” and
perhaps, more precisely, an introspection or self-perception (Selbstwahrnehmung)
produced by the perceptual-conscious system. He ends this line of discussion with a
caveat: “I know that these claims must sound very obscure, but I must limit myself to
these hints” (Ich weiß, daß diese Behauptungen sehr dunkel klingen muß, muß mich
aber auf solche Andeutungen beschränken) (SE XVIII, ; GW XIII, ).
What is particularly evocative about the qualifying gesture that jumps from Selb-
stwahrnehmung to Beschränkung, from self-perception to self-limitation, restriction,
or confinement, is that it echoes and deepens the implications of Kant’s own fluctu-
ations on the spatio-temporal relativity of determinations of change. This relativity
emerges in Kant’s delineation of a transcendental need to construct a figure of sub-
stance that abides in space and time as a vehicle of temporal-inner orientation. It is
important that the subject’s recourse to this figure is itself bound to the structure
of intuition, a point mirrored by the self-consciousness of Freud’s move to question
the unconscious motivations informing his abstract idea of time. To understand the
“obscurity” that nevertheless troubles Freud, it is worth briefly revisiting Kant’s ref-
erences to substance in his explanation of the ineluctably spatial and temporal forms
of intuition (for which Freud substitutes “thought” or Denken, thereby stipulating a
conscious perception).
For Immanuel Kant, time is the condition of all empirical and immanent deter-
minations (as opposed to space, which is initially identified as a condition of outer
experience).21 In the Critique of Pure Reason, he elaborates on this thesis in the con-
text of a discussion about the relation between substance and appearance. Substance
is, in the “Analogies of Experience,” “the substratum of all that belongs to the existence
of things” (). This definition of substance supports Kant’s commitment to inves-
tigating the prospect of ascertaining the transcendental conditions for a unified con-
sciousness. He requires this transcendental schematism to address the question of
whether it is possible to ground the succession of differential cognitions.
It is this question that propels Kant’s move to distinguish between the permanent
and the transitory in order to characterize the experience of change. Accordingly,
while the permanent is associated with the qualities of substance, the transitory des-
ignates a “mere determination” of any object. Temporal relations become possible only
in the domain of the permanent as “the substratum of the empirical representation of
time itself ” (). The permanent is the “object itself, that is substance as phenome-
non” (). It cannot in its essence be affected by change, but only by appearances in
 F Karyn Ball

time. This is the case insofar as alteration “presupposes one and the same subject as
existing with two opposite determinations” (). Change is (merely) the successive
being and not-being of any phenomenon in relation to the permanence of substance.
Alteration can only be perceived by virtue of the permanent as a valence of the
figure of substance—that which not only “remains and persists,” but is also the site
of all transitions and determinations (and existence as such). Ultimately, then, the
permanent is “what alone makes possible the representation of the transition from one
state to another” (). It is, thus, the permanent against which temporal relations
become intelligible within the manifold of appearance ().22 Determinations of
changing appearances therefore depend on the figuration of the relatively permanent
as a condition of inner and outer orientation.
Kant’s identification of time as the a priori condition of inner experience sheds
light on Freud’s delimitation of the atemporal unconscious. This delimitation effec-
tively idealizes the traces residing in the unconscious, thereby freeing them from the
time-bound necessity of dispersing to “make room” for newer material. By virtue of
this liberation, Freud implicitly ascribes the figurative continuity of metaphysical sub-
stance to the contents of the unconscious. Henceforth these contents assume their
relative permanence, in contrast to the transitory excitations that pass through the
pressured scope of the perceptual-conscious system.
It is noteworthy that Freud’s division between the unconscious and the perceptual-
conscious systems posits the coexistence of two realms wherein an event respectively
persists and ceases to be simultaneously. Kant has taken pains to demonstrate that
this kind of temporal simultaneity is “absurd,” given his stipulation that succession is
actually the alteration “of a substance which abides” (–). Kant writes: “If some of
these substances could come into being and others cease to be, the one condition
of the empirical unity of time would be removed. The appearances would flow in two
parallel streams—which is absurd. There is only one time in which all different times
must be located, not as coexistent but as in succession to one another” (). This is a
stipulation Freud finesses with his theory of memory traces that are alleged to persist
in the unconscious without interfering in the work of the perceptual-conscious. For
to suggest that the unconscious is timeless, is, in effect, to claim that memory traces
abiding therein play the figurative role of the permanent as a mode of metaphysical
substance in relation to the contents of the perceptual-conscious. In this respect,
Freud effectively bypasses the principle of temporal noncontradiction upon which a
transcendental “unity of apperceptions” (and a unified self-consciousness) might rest.
There are two permutations of Freud’s functionally differentiated psychic econ-
omy. First, it spatializes the unconscious by converting it into a timeless repository for
memory traces. Second, it raises the question as to whether these traces are them-
selves idealized pieces of substance that serve figuratively as the inner psychic equiv-
alents of Kant’s objects in “outer experience” that persist in space and thereby provide
a relatively continuous backdrop for the recognition of change. This permutation
 The Substance of Psychic Life f 

suggests that the unconscious comprises an atemporal admixture of images. It re-

mains to be seen whether such images might nevertheless retain the historicity of their
respective contexts.23
In exploring the first permutation here, my reading of Freud’s metaphysics in
light of Kant implies that unconscious memory establishes a spatialized, substantial
background against which changes in the external world are measured.24 By extension,
then, memory traces would assume the form of apperceptions upon (re)entering the
perceptual-conscious wherein they also obtain the force of excitations. This “reactiva-
tion” of memory traces thus entails their conversion into mobile transitory contents.
In short, memories emerging from the unconscious must lose their ideality when they
become subject to the pressured and selective function of the perceptual-conscious
system, which is vexed by the spatio-temporal flux of the external world. This is to
suggest that fixated memories will be at least provisionally spatio-temporalized as they
take on the disposition of perceptual phenomena. Of particular interest for psycho-
analytic praxis is whether this spatio-temporalization permanently changes their con-
tent and libidinal charge if or when they “return” to (unconscious) storage.
A standard reading of Freud’s etiology of neuroses suggests that the repressed
is an anxiety-causing childhood experience, which establishes the libidinal precondi-
tion for the subsequent development of neuroses. In other words, libidinal fixation
establishes a foundation in the past for a subject’s neurotic future. The term fixation
in this context implies a deterministic understanding of identity, according to which
early childhood experiences produce a seemingly entrenched libidinal character that
typically manifests itself as an anxious disposition. The aggravation of this anxious
disposition by a distressing accident or situation mobilizes a defensive reaction, thus
precipitating the onset of neurotic symptoms. Neurotic fixation is subsequently evinced
through a subject’s cathected misrecognition of memories, as the spurs of present anx-
iety and as fragments of an imaginary self that must be preserved against the flux of
perception and the guilt or shame of perverse enjoyment. Neurotic subjects would
then be defined by their tendency to idealize their memories when they grant them the
stability of substance. In metaphysical terms, this is to construct libidinal fixation as
the persisting substance of a neurotic disposition, which would then be activated by a
traumatic event. Neurotic symptoms are henceforth to be read as resurgences of this
“libidinal substance” located at the putative origins of repression.
I mention this account of the development of neurosis because it sheds light on
the paradoxical character of Freud’s recourse to a metaphysics of substance in Beyond
the Pleasure Principle, where he theorizes the relationship between compulsive repe-
tition and the libidinal economy. The success of the analytical encounter is, in part,
measured by its efficacy in undoing a neurotic subject’s narcissistic fixation on mem-
ories of the events that set into motion overdetermined processes of warding off and
regulating anxieties. An analysand’s investment in his or her neurosis is reflected in
the “hardening” of these processes into a symptomatology, which is experienced as the
 F Karyn Ball

“substance” of his or her being. This figuration of neurotic experience explains why
the neurotic clings to his or her symptoms or, as Slavoj Žižek has argued, enjoys them.
Yet on a logical level, such a figuration also falls prey to circular reasoning to the
extent that it appears to confirm the priority of Freud’s phylo- and ontogenetic narra-
tive of the libidinal economy. In effect, the metapsychological figures and scientific
references that serve to represent a neurotic’s experience of his or her own neurosis
naturalize the metaphysics of substance Freud employs to configure the economic and
primal dimensions of psycho-physical life. The question remains as to whether a
conceptual system dependent on the trope of substance belies a therapeutic commit-
ment to defuse an autoerotic and ultimately masochistic fixation sustained by the
narcissistic libido.
The implication for psychoanalytic praxis is that an analysand’s ability to work
through neurotic repression and fixation would depend on the possibility that an
unconscious element, presumably atemporal, can become an object of knowledge in
time by entering the realm of perceptual-consciousness. I would like to venture the
claim that Freud’s understanding of working through depends on this theoretical
possibility. For if anxious memory were to retain its figurative character as a timeless
substance impervious to change, then neither psychoanalytic therapy nor critical re-
flection would have any efficacy as processes that presumably bring about a decathexis
from and corresponding integration of an overcharged ideation of an event, feeling, or
belief for the neurotic or traumatically fixated subject.
To summarize, my analysis has touched on the phylogenetic and metaphysical
permutations of substance in the context of Freud’s speculations about the develop-
ment of a divided psyche. In the first instance, vital substance is figured as the pri-
mordial origin of organic life as well as in the intertwined destinies of sex and death.
In the second instance, Freud turns toward Kant to specify the timelessness of the
contents of the unconscious in relation to the ephemeral quality of the perceptual-
conscious. This move establishes the topographical and metaphysical conditions for
the simultaneity of consciousness and repression. It also idealizes memory traces and
other repressed elements by attributing to them the permanence of substance.
Ultimately, then, it is worth pointing out that substance also carries an ontolog-
ical significance when it refers to the fundamental essence of a person or group’s char-
acter. This usage attests to an investment in the ideal of a stable and unified identity,
which, in societies that prize dependability, productivity, and efficiency, may obtain
the status of a social norm. From a “post-metaphysical” perspective, Freud’s recourse
to the trope of substance might cast doubt on his conceptualizaton of the libidinal
economy and, more generally, on the psychoanalytic account of the development of
neurotic repression and fixation. Writing in the wake of the deconstruction of West-
ern metaphysics, it is difficult to return to the ideal of substance without a certain
degree of ironic distance. Yet critical suspicions regarding the ontological dimension
of this ideal should not prevent us from recognizing its importance in the Freudian
 The Substance of Psychic Life f 

topography of the psyche. Freud is committed to establishing a scientific foundation

for neurotic behavior. The phylogenetic and metaphysical trope of substance allows
him to deploy the discourses of thermodynamics and biology in order to speculate on
a corporeal and biochemical basis for psychic phenomena that seems consistent with
Physicalist principles. It also provides him with a conceptual anchor for the compo-
nent systems of the psychic apparatus. This is an apparatus that is split between the
unconscious and the conscious systems with the preconscious as a variable border
between them. It is also an apparatus that is overwrought with the very mechanisms
that reproduce its ability to function as a thermodynamic economy. Psychoanalysis
might be most effective when it counters an analysand’s ontological investment in
neurotic or traumatic substance with a different set of metaphors. But perhaps the
radicality of psychoanalysis derives from its very circularity: from its power to assume
such a metaphysics while simultaneously anticipating its death-driven destruction
through the determinisms that define the neurotic subject as an object of psychoana-
lytic reflection.

Notes
I am grateful to Bettina Bergo and John Mowitt for their helpful comments on prior versions of
this essay.
1. For a critical account of the history of this thesis in Freud’s theory, see Jeffrey Mous-
saieff Masson’s The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory (New York:
Pocket Books, ). See also The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess –
, trans. and ed. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ),
–.
2. Freud provides a brief historical clarification of his revised understanding of the drives
in a footnote appearing at the end of the sixth chapter of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. There
he restates his finding that the narcissistic ego drives that he had earlier opposed to reproduc-
tive or object drives are also libidinal (i.e., sexual) in nature. This insight has led him to posit a
“fresh” opposition between the libidinal (ego- and object-) drives and the “destructive” drives,
an opposition that he translates into an antagonism between life drives (Eros) and death drives
(Thanatos). Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, SE XVII, –; Gesammelte Werke XIII, –.
3. Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, ), ; Laplanche’s emphasis.
4. Jean Laplanche, New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, trans. David Macey (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, ).
5. Sigmund Freud, “The Libido Theory,” SE XVIII, ; “‘Psychoanalyse’ und ‘Libidothe-
orie,’” Gesammelte Werke XIII, . Where necessary, I am substituting drive for instinct, which
is the translation employed for Trieb throughout the SE.
6. Freud, “The Libido Theory,” .
7. In “The Libido Theory,” Freud suggests that sublimation might replace “sexual” objects
with ostensibly “nonsexual” ones, which may, nevertheless, retain a libidinal charge. What is
 F Karyn Ball

crucial to both instances is how these objects remain embroiled in a fantasy about their con-
tents, as well as the requirements for achieving satisfaction.
8. LaPlanche, Life and Death, .
9. Ibid., –. Laplanche is attempting to redeem Freud’s thought from the “errors”
committed by theorists (such as M. Balint) who assert that sexuality has an object from the
beginning. By emphasizing the abstract character of sexuality in Freud’s writings, Laplanche
effectively repudiates the idea that a fixation on certain objects is a “refinding” of a lost object
(e.g., the lost breast of the mother); instead, he underscores the object’s partiality as a metonym
or metaphorical condensation of diffuse sexual tensions in search of an object.
In this respect, a broader definition of the source implies an abstraction of the drive, and
this allows Laplanche to delineate a revised understanding of the libidinal object. This object is
hereafter conceivable as a condensation or displacement of autoerotic stimulation deriving
from the tension exerted by repressed instincts. Indeed, the implication is that the object will
actually be constituted by the drive as a vehicle of residual instinctual energies that pressure
the psyche to seek a locus of investiture and release. Sexual fantasies offer an obvious forum for
this constitutive investiture, whereby an object is bestowed with its focal status. Significantly,
Laplanche also identifies intense intellectual activity as a potential impetus for sexual stimula-
tion. This identification anticipates a theory of objects of inquiry as sublimated and socially
acceptable loca for the drives ().
10. This observation pertains to Freud’s mapping of the libidinal economy in “[Drives]
and Their Vicissitudes,” which is explicitly metapsychological to the extent that he breaks down
the four components of the drive (impetus, aim, object, and source) as a configuration of psy-
chic operations themselves figurative in character.
11. Laplanche writes that insofar as instincts are biological, the source, as Freud indi-
cates, lies “outside the scope of psychology” (Life and Death, , citing Freud, “Instincts and
Their Vicissitudes,” in SE XIV, ).
12. “Ein Trieb wäre also ein dem belebten Organischen innewohnender Drang zur Wieder-
herstellung eines früheren Zustandes, welchen dies Belebte unter dem Einflusse äußerer Stö-
rungskräfte aufgeben mußte, eine Art von organischer Elastizität, oder wenn man will, die
Äußerung der Trägheit in organischen Leben” (Jenseits des Lustprinzips, , Freud’s emphasis,
GW XIII, ).
13. Laplanche writes: “[T]he intervention of the life sciences in psychoanalysis is fre-
quently invoked by Freud as decisive, notably in reference to the theory of drives, but the fact
that that invocation most often refers to the speculative or poetic demons of biologism should
give us pause” (Life and Death, ).
14. Laplanche, New Foundations, . The Physicalist reference that constitutes the initial
departure point for the mechanical, thermodynamic, and economic lines of speculation that
intermingle in Beyond the Pleasure Principle is G. T. Fechner’s Einige Ideen zur Schöpfungs- und
Entwicklungsgeschichte der Organismen (; Tübingen: Edition Diskord, ).
15. LaPlanche, New Foundations, . It is as if Freud’s key scientific references (and par-
ticularly to Fechner, whose work verged into vitalism, Wilhelm Fließ, A. Weismann, and Ewald
Hering) seem to cull their major hypotheses from Goethe’s Elective Affinities (), which,
along with Schiller, Schopenhauer, and Plato, would have also served as a literary and philo-
sophical source of inspiration for the metaphysical theses in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Cer-
tainly Freud’s speculations move in this direction when he cites Fließ () on the completion
of fixed periodizations of organic life that reveal the interdependency of “male” and “female”
 The Substance of Psychic Life f 

modes of living substance. Freud brings the implications of these associations to bear on his
reflection on the life and death drives in chapter  of Beyond the Pleasure Principle by extrap-
olating from A. Weismann’s “morphological” theory of the mortal and immortal divisions of
germ cells. Notably, such imagery anticipates Freud’s reference, later in the same chapter, to
Aristophanes’ myth of sexual division from Plato’s Symposium to suggest that when it came into
being, living substance was torn apart into little particles that the sexual drives strive to rejoin.
16. Apart from A. Weismann’s Über die Dauer des Lebens (), Über Leben und Tod
(), and Das Keimplasma (), Freud also cites Hartmann (), Lipschütz (), Goette
(), Woodruff, Doflein (), Hering, Maupas, and Calkins in this connection before turn-
ing to Barbara Low’s concept of the Nirvana Principle (), which becomes the touchstone
of his radical formulation of the death drive as the avatar of primal masochism.
17. For an incisive analysis of Freud’s discussion of the single-celled organism and related
concepts, see Judith Roof ’s “From Protista to DNA (and Back Again): Freud’s Psychoanalysis of
the Single-Celled Organism,” in Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, ed. Carey Wolfe
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), –.
18. Translation modified; Jenseits des Lustprinzips, .
19. Freud’s emphasis; Jenseits des Lustprinzips, –.
20. Jenseits des Lustprinzips, –. In keeping with the German edition, I have removed
the italicization of conscious in the phrase “conscious mental processes” in this passage.
21. Kant initially generalizes time as the condition of all experiences while restricting
space to outer experiences. He subsequently recognizes that outer determinations are essential
to an inner sense of identity and change; there is, in effect, a reciprocity between the temporal
and the spatial, and between inner and outer determinations. He writes: “Not only are we
unable to perceive any determination of time save through change in outer relations (motion)
relatively to the permanent in space (for instance, the motion of the sun relatively to objects on
the earth), we have nothing permanent on which, as intuition, we can base the concept of sub-
stance, save only matter; and even this permanence is not obtained from outer experience, but
is presupposed a priori as a necessary condition of determination of time, and therefore also as
a determination of inner sense in respect of [the determination of ] our own existence through
the existence of outer things. The consciousness of myself in the representation ‘I’ is not an
intuition, but a merely intellectual representation of the spontaneity of a thinking subject. This
‘I’ has not, therefore, the least predicate of intuition, which as permanent, might serve as cor-
relate for the determination of time in inner sense—in the manner in which, for instance,
impenetrability serves in our empirical intuition of matter.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure
Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, ), –.
22. In Kant’s words, “Without the permanent there is therefore no time-relation.”
23. I have found evidence for this second prospect in my analysis of the German recep-
tion of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. See Karyn Ball, “Remediated Memory in German De-
bates about Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List,” at www.kakanien.ac.at/beitr/fallstudie/kbal.pdf.
24. My reading here draws on the implications of Matter and Memory (), where
Henri Bergson argues that perceptions contingently reactivate “virtual” memories, which recip-
rocally attenuate the quality and force of perception (Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory,
trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer [; New York: Zone Books, ]).
This page intentionally left blank
 R . Young Mr. Freud;
or, On.the
Chapter
Becoming
Title
of an Artist
Chapter
Freud’s Various Paths to
Subtitle
the Dream Book, –
Author
Klaus Theweleit

Translated by Thomas Pepper with the help of an

earlier version by Jason Peck R

T
he starting material of this piece is stone—the different kinds of marble
of which statues are made. Readers of the T-Deutung, as Avital Ronell
has called it, will be familiar with this complex: Freud’s wish to stand on a
monument at the University of Vienna as something like “the Habsburg
Kaiser.” From his early youth on, Freud is convinced that the figure of a great explorer
or inventor is hidden in his body, and that his life is aimed at the task of working this
figure out. Let’s say just like Elvis: his mother told him every day he would be King, the
new Jimmy Rogers to come—until he was. Or Bob Dylan at seventeen, who had the
certain feeling that he would be greater than Elvis. Andy Warhol, who saw himself on
top of the art state of New York City—it took him fifteen years of hard work and then
he was there. Hochenergetiker: bodies running on high energy. I used to write about
quite a number of them: Warhol, Gottfried Benn, Ezra Pound . . . H.D. . . . Jean-Luc
Godard . . . Freud . . . I still am.
T-Deutung: I love that little invention by Avital. It’s more than just caprice;
it expresses the feeling of a certain unfittingness of the term “interpretation.” I have
never accepted this translation of the German Deutung into the French and Anglo-
Saxon spheres. “Interpretation” in German is reserved for the discourse on the poetic
word: “Man interpretiert Gedichte”: poems, novels, stories. Not even films—there you
say “critique.” And in the case of legal texts you say Kommentar or Auslegung, just as
you do in the theological context. Deutung, deuten, is a word much more mysterious,
a loaded word from the German Romantics: “ich weiß nicht, was soll es be-deuten”
(“das ich so traurig bin”) (I don’t know what it should mean [that I’m so sad], Clemens
von Brentano, or, ironically Heinrich Heine). Things have a Bedeutung, they have a


 F Klaus Theweleit

meaning, a signification that goes far beyond any “interpretation.” Interpretation has
something arbitrary about it in German, even if it is done well. Traumdeutung means
more; it means “getting at the core,” finding out about the very secrets, at least the
secrets of your own individual life—and who or what could compare with that? So I’ll
stick with this T-Deutung vehicle as a new word of art, a new invention.
Just as Traumdeutung, in fact, has been understood as something like a work of
art by many analysts, and still is. A very short while ago I came across a passage on this
subject in Germany’s most important psychoanalytic periodical, Psyche. There I read:

As you all know, there is just a handful of rules you have to consider [when deuting
Ts]. At first you have to give the dream a really big kick in its guts. Then I advise you
to grab it, whirl it around, and throw it up high into the air, and then let it fall down
to the ground, so that it will burst, sparkling with fire, into its single parts. If you don’t
dare to perform this piece of art, you will never be able to deuten a dream. T-Deutung
is a violent business. To catch a hidden or latent thought, or at least to get a glimpse
of it, you have to invest the same active, aggressive energy that was invested by the
dreamer in order to repress just that thought. So . . .1

And then the Deutung of the T is begun by the author. This is not, as you might think,
an aggressive, brutish analyst from the German backwoods. She is a civilized young
lady from Zurich, even if she goes under the militant name of Judith Le Soldat. She has
had her proper swim in the Lacanian seas as well. So we’re back at the point of energy.
T-Deutung is some high-energy work, dealing as it does with a certain aggressiveness
on the part of the dreamer. High-energizer Freud, playing with explosives, and in the
end leaving the scene under the self-given title of “conquistador” of this New World of
Traum-violence, having started out as only a poor Jewish boy from the East. Thus I
have made my choice to tell you this story of young Mr. Freud—or of younger Mr. Freud
on his way to the “Dream Book,” as he himself liked to call it—as a sort of bildungsro-
man of a marble-monument seeker on his way into the great Western world. For me the
best way to convey an idea of what this Traumbuch is all about is to describe the tracks
the book moves down—and this is the story of different kinds and pieces of marble.

In May , in the eighth year of their correspondence, Dr. Sigmund Freud in Vienna
and Dr. Wilhelm Fliess in Berlin were united, as Sigmund’s letters to Wilhelm show,
in a radical search for fame, fortune, and, ultimately, immortality. At this point it
appeared that Dr. Fliess, the otolaryngologist from Berlin, was in the lead. Through his
calculation of women’s biorhythms on the basis of the menstrual cycle, he believed
that he had found the way to determine a woman’s fertile days with certainty. In May
 he informed Freud that he had solved “the problem of conception.” Freud excit-
edly and unstintingly applauds his friend:

Your news was enough to make me shout for joy. If you have really solved the prob-
lem of contraception, the only thing left for you to do is to make up your mind what
 Young Mr. Freud f 

kind of marble you prefer. For me your discovery is a few months too late, but it may
come in useful next year. In any case, I am burning with curiosity to hear more about
it. (May , )

By “next year” Freud means the period after the undesired pregnancy of his wife,
Martha Bernays. It was the sixth time in nine years. The weak disposition of the “city
woman” is a constant theme in Freud’s letters; it refers—among other things—always
to Martha’s pregnancies. The Freuds would so much have loved to have an infallible
remedy for this cyclic disease.
Sigmund himself was after something else in Vienna. He wanted to discover the
cause behind the fin-de-siècle sickness that befell so many upper- and middle-class
women, namely neurasthenia or hysteria. Neurologists had not been successful in
finding any causes for this illness. Here medicine was confronted with such a mysteri-
ous aggregate of symptoms—headaches, dizziness, weakness, high blood pressure, loss
of appetite, nervousness, irregular menstruation, cramps, as well as already known
and newly discovered sexual disturbances—that a monument would be the smallest
reward to be offered to this cultural hero, this wistfully awaited savior, who might solve
the whole complex of hysteria and give women back to their work of procreation and
social representation.
In the case of his friend, Freud is skeptical: “Your discovery. . . does credit to your
name. You would be the strongest man; would hold the reins of sexuality in your hand;
rule the people; you could achieve it all and prevent it all” (May , ). The slightly
ironic tone is unmistakable. Freud doubted the validity of his friend’s numbers game,
even though he played it along with him for years.
For Freud, contraception was written in the stars. After the birth of their daugh-
ter, Anna, on December , , the Freuds put a stop to procreation by means of sim-
ple sexual abstinence. Freud was in a dilemma. He, for whom sexuality “held the reins,”
was also a contemporary “nerve doctor,” who was convinced that the contraceptive
practice of coitus interruptus, “the only certain method,” was psychically dangerous.
He was not recommending it to his patients. Unwanted pregnancies would be prefer-
able to the nervous illness resulting from “interruption.” But the solution of the prob-
lem of conception would still have been as great an epoch-making event as the inven-
tion of psychoanalysis, which itself was still to come.

There is no single founding date of psychoanalysis. The anniversary texts of the speak-
ers here at this conference cover the space of several years—just as we have seen with
the parallel celebrations of the hundredth anniversary of the movies. Ilse Grubrich-
Simitis, one of the experts most knowledgeable in the field of Freud’s development,
sees in Freud’s and Breuer’s Studies in Hysteria () the Urbuch, the cornerstone
of the experience of psychoanalysis. In it can be found “a quality of seeing and hear-
ing unknown up until that point, the transformation of the doctor-patient relation-
ship, the establishment of a new form of case presentation, and the development of the
 F Klaus Theweleit

original form of psychoanalytic theory and technique.”2 This is certainly correct; but a
necessary step beyond the Studies had yet to be taken, one that only Freud’s Dream
Book took. This is the step I attempt to retake here.
Die Traumdeutung was published in the autumn  by the publisher Deuticke,
of Vienna and Leipzig, and was relatively unnoticed. It took several years to sell those
famous six hundred copies of the first run of the book. The story of its success starts
only some years later, when Carl Gustav Jung, a young doctor at the Burghölzli,
Bleuler’s famous psychiatric hospital in Zurich, reads the book and decides to become
Freud’s follower.
Up until the T-Deutung, when “lightning struck,” there were those common
zigzag points along the way in Freud’s life, which are so well known from the lives of
many other inventors or conquistadors. The most important stations must be out-
lined—also to counter the impression that Freud’s works, each on its own, can be taken
as something like one in a series of individually canonical texts. Everything surround-
ing this inventor is in flux, is changing, and is still being constantly revised, even up
until his sixty-fifth birthday. He is forty-three when the Dream Book is published. At
that point he is just a lecturer in neuropathology, a freelance therapist, the father of
six children—even if he has already seen quite a lot, that is to say he has had almost
twenty years of different kinds of experience in the fields of neurology and psychiatry.
Albrecht Hirschmüller has given the most accurate account of Freud’s first years
after his time as a medical student.3 Freud the neurologist stuck with physiology:
“[H]is goal was to become a scientist, not a doctor. At this time he worked on the ner-
vous system of river crabs.”4 His work in Brücke’s institute of physiology, then in sur-
gery, and subsequently in internal medecine, suffers from the fact that every single
assistant professorship is occupied, and for a long time to come. No free place left for
young Mr. Freud.5 So in  he goes to work as a psychiatrist at the Second Psychi-
atric Clinic of Vienna, directed by Theodor Meynert. This was Freud’s first paid posi-
tion. Forty-five reports on patients from Freud’s hand survive in the archives. They are
hardly distinguished, as Hirschmüller shows, from the reports of other physicians:
“The anamneses first take into account the details of the cases given by the admitting
physician; they are only secondarily based on the patients’ own accounts.”6
Along with his clinical work, Freud continues his experiments in Meynert’s
neuroanatomical laboratory. The abstract of the report on his minor inventions hav-
ing to do with the process of dyeing histological specimens with Gold chloride (to give
better contrast to the specimens) is translated into English.7 But Freud did not expect
in the least for his breakthrough to fame to come from this work in the laboratories
and psychiatric clinics of Vienna.
There was a new medicine around, however, an alkaloid not yet studied, but which
was yielding amazing results: cocaine. Freud took it himself, and quickly became
euphoric in more than one way. Soon he tried the drug out on patients, prescribing
this miraculous powder for all kinds of psychic weaknesses: hysteria, hypochondria,
 Young Mr. Freud f 

neurasthenia, asthma, melancholic disposition, inability to work, digestive trouble, and

even psychically induced impotence. “[In] three cases, female melancholics,” Freud
writes, were able to “speak [once] again” by virtue of cocaine injections. And, together
with Dr. Koller, a friend and specialist of eye diseases, Freud discovered cocaine’s
anaesthetic qualities for eye surgery. Freud’s  monograph on the coca plant
caused a fury in Vienna. The Physiological Club congratulated the young researcher
on this work, and Dr. Heuss, director of the eye clinic, believed that Freud’s medical
use of cocaine “had brought about a revolution.”8
These adventures in research took place during Freud’s four-year-long engage-
ment to Martha Bernays, who was then living in Hamburg. She regularly received
reports by letter. About his hopes for his work with cocaine Freud writes in a letter
from April , : “We don’t need more than one lucky strike in the cocaine arena.
It would guarantee us our household equipment, and we would be able to think about
settling down.”9 Until then Martha’s mother had not agreed to the marriage because
of young Dr. Freud’s lack of money, hence his inability to feed a family. If only one of
those cocaine trials had worked. . . .
But Freud’s further attempts at treating neuralgia and morphine addiction with
cocaine failed, as did his similar experiments with diabetics. As Ernest Jones suggests,
success with these patients would have meant “wealth and glory,” marble and mar-
riage. The lowest point occurred when Freud’s close friend (and partial role model)
Ernst Fleischl von Marxow, whom Freud had tried to heal of his morphine addiction
by means of cocaine, died of a self-administered overdose. Freud’s path to the monu-
ment via the means of cocaine ended in disaster, at least as far as prescribed medicine
was concerned. Still, many authors read Freud’s cocaine euphoria as a precondition for
his later capacity for self-analysis and his ability to get into his own dreams so deeply—
precisely in the sense of Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced? For such capacities pre-
suppose a splitting of the self as a vehicle for self-exploration—something that may be
enhanced through experimentation with drugs.
Here, albeit unintentionally, Freud had already dismissed the traditional doctor-
patient relationship. He did not simply prescribe cocaine, but partook of it himself—
and heavily. Nor did he discontinue this kind of work after the public disaster. The self-
experiment would remain his distinct method of experience. The boundaries between
doctor and patient would be remoted even further, to the point at which the doctor
himself became the patient.10
At the time Freud’s readings were in Darwin, Flaubert, Cervantes, and Dickens.
In music—never Freud’s special field—it was Bizet’s Carmen. It is also at this time that
he became interested in his own dreams, and, according to Jones and Hirschmüller,
that he first started a dream journal, which he did on July , .
These are also the years during which Freud also stayed for a while in Paris,
studying at Charcot’s Salpêtrière, with the help of a travel grant for which he was
recommended by his superior, Meynert. Freud brought back to Vienna what would
 F Klaus Theweleit

soon become his new obsession, his next big kick. He strongly positioned himself
as Charcot’s front man for using hypnosis treatment in Vienna. He wrote to Karl
Koller: “Paris was a new beginning for me. I have found a new mentor, Charcot, just
as I always imagined him; I have learned to observe clinical cases (as much as I have
been able); and generally I have brought back a great amount of new and positive
knowledge. The only bad thing is that I was stupid enough only to have money for
five months.”11
In his lectures, Charcot demonstrated that typical hysterical symptoms could
be produced and removed by hypnotism, thus excluding primarily organic causes for
this illness. Freud’s translations of Charcot, as well as his lectures on the hypnotic
method and “On Male Hysteria,” which began in Vienna on October , , caused
a major falling out between Freud and the Viennese medical authorities. Hirschmüller
writes: “All authors on Freud are united in their opinion that Freud’s enthusiasm for
Charcot’s work reached missionary zeal, and that the Viennese professors were not
only unimpressed, but considered it all quite inappropriate.”12 A lecture on aphasia
followed, in which Freud argued against the localization of aphasia in distinguishable
or discrete parts of the brain, thus exacerbating the confrontation with Meynert:
“Within the course of less than a year, Freud thus came into conflict with three central
tenets of Meynert’s teachings. The points of dispute were caused by Freud’s enthusi-
asm for hypnosis, his statements on male hysteria, and his anti-localization theory [of
aphasia].”13 Freud wrote to his fiancée on May , : “So the battle with Vienna is
in full swing!”14 Little Napoleon, still in contact with his invisible marble ghosts. With
the insulting decision to remove hysteria from the field of diseases reserved for cer-
tain members of European femininity, Freud made a further step in the direction of
“becoming his own patient.” Ten years later, he will discover himself as a special case
of male hysteria.
The year : At the time of this battle with Vienna’s psychiatric authorities, an
article by Freud appeared in Buchheim’s Ärtzliche Versicherungs-Diagnostik. “In this
astounding text, Freud discusses how to examine patients’ nervous systems with re-
spect to whether or not a life insurance company should accept or decline an applica-
tion”—exactly the thing such companies try to work so hard at today with the help of
the genetic code of potential clients. Hirschmüller comments thus on this neurologi-
cally rather sophisticated article: “Freud had completed his clinical education; finished
his stay in Paris; and opened his own practice. It is obvious that he now possessed a
clearly defined neurological diagnostic kit he could use whenever called for. In the ear-
lier psychiatric anamneses of the Meynert period, nothing like this was visible.”15
If we look at the time span during which Freud’s development from a beginner
in institutional psychiatry to an experienced neurological diagnostician takes place,
namely from  to , we are surprised to find that these are also the years of
Freud’s cocaine experiments. As is so often the case with his biography, one gets the
feeling of dealing with the lives of (at least) two different people. Only in his letters to
 Young Mr. Freud f 

his fiancée do all of these different strands come together. Many authors have come
to recognize the diary-like function of these letters. Freud, with his fiancée off in the
distance, brings his different lives together in the eyes of his bride to be, thus invent-
ing the psychoanalytic technique in the letters to Martha Bernays. Fifteen years later,
what will be called Freud’s “self-analysis” in fact begins here as an experience between
a loving couple, and as a procedure of self-splitting—a self-splitting that is not only an
intra-psychic experience, but also a crucial fact of Freud’s outer life or lives. Freud really
lives in splits—in this technique between two and in this procedure of self-division—
in order to arrive at a device for self-exploration, and one with durable results.16
After four years of this letter-life and nearly fifteen hundred letters to his fian-
cée—that makes about one letter every day, most of them still unpublished—the
couple marries in . Freud opens his practice the same year. And he is worried that
it will not earn him a living in hostile Vienna. Furthermore, his stream of letters has
lost its addressee, because Martha now lives with him. Now where will he send his
letters, his stream of diary entries?
In , in a lecture hall in Vienna, Freud and the otolaryngologist from Berlin,
Dr. Wilhelm Fliess, meet for the first time and vehemently embrace each other. These
two young Jewish doctors, both in their early thirties and convinced of their own
extraordinary intellectual qualities, had no idea that the book that, twelve years later,
would become the offspring of their life and of their correspondence as an intellectual
couple, would eventually change twentieth-century thinking like no other. The two
develop a productive friendship—love at first sight, so to speak. Their meeting makes
a deep impression on Freud and engenders a letter with a “confession.” To his new
friend, Freud feels compelled to remark “in what sort of rank among men I put you”—
the highest, of course.17
How does one prove to oneself and to a courted friend in a first letter that both
are worthy of being included among the gods? In that one shows oneself to be incisive
and well informed about the world—women, for example—in an especially interesting
case: Freud hands over to Fliess a conclusion about Dr. A., a female physician whom
both men know. This is the case the two men had spoken about: “her weak disposi-
tion,” her “neurasthenic dizziness while moving,” her so-called “vertige”—Freud uses
the French word—a dizziness not, as Freud suggests here in this first letter, caused by
neurosis. Rather she appeared to him as an actual “sufferer of simple vertigo,” from a
somewhat corporeal “post-diphtherial paralysis of the legs”; and perhaps one should
also consider the possibility of “an infection of the spinal chord.”
The passionate friendship and working relationship of Freud and Fliess in fact
develops through a dialogue concerning Dr. A.’s vertige, her Schwindel, which, in Ger-
man, means at once giddiness and swindle. This is the same constellation to be found
seventy years later in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Scottie Ferguson and Gavin Elstir, the hid-
den male couple of the plot, click in to form the investigation machine that will kill
Madeleine/Judy/Kim Novak.18
 F Klaus Theweleit

Freud and Fliess, the most important couple in the exploration of the psychical
apparatus—theologically speaking, “the soul”—put their sniffers together over the case
of a woman’s vertigo. It is a marvelous ghost that guided Freud’s hand in this very first
letter to Wilhelm Fliess. Nowhere is the founding of psychoanalysis more accurately
or revealingly documented than in this fifteen-year stream of letters. For us today, it is
easily one of the books of another Hitchcockian concept, “the twentieth century.”19
Freud and Fliess are going strong in following this train, especially during the first
ten years of their correspondence. More than ever do they expect their dreams of
fame and fortune to be fulfilled through their discoveries regarding the bodies and the
psyches of women. Marble: “the feminine stone.”
But the temptations of the organic (or somatic) still continue, and they con-
stantly resurface in Freud’s attempts. The nasal operation performed by Fliess on one
of Freud’s patients, Emma Eckstein—and at Freud’s request—is one of the last of these
resurfacings. (Its horrible details can be read in Freud’s letters to Fliess of March .)
For us, though, what is of interest is the reference to marble. On the basis of his alleged
discovery of a connection between the vagina and the nose, Fliess was convinced that
the irregular menstruation of hysterical patients could be brought under control by
manipulations of the nasal region. On the grounds of his own discovery of the existence
of a psychological mechanism of “symbolic substitution of the ‘below’ of the body for
the ‘above’ of the body,” Freud was convinced that Fliess’s removal of swelling in the
nose would have noticeable effects on Eckstein’s menstruation. This would have been
another path to the monument. But Fliess, just like Freud, failed to cure the patient. In
fact, both of them avoided public scandal only through the benevolent silence of a pro-
fessor friend, whose last-minute surgery saved Emma E.’s life. This attempt at marble
did not come to a halt at the edge of the abyss; it already had one foot deeply in it.
The long recovery of Emma Eckstein corresponds with the publication of the
Studies on Hysteria in May . Again one notes with astonishment how, even in
spite of this “Urbuch of psychoanalysis,” Freud is still trying to find organic causes
for hysteria. He experiments in both directions as part of two different male couples.
While the book on hysteria (in collaboration with Josef Breuer) moved in the direction
of “psychoanalysis,” his work with Fliess remained firmly rooted within their sensa-
tional discoveries of “life rhythms,” mathematical methods for the prevention of con-
ception, and surgical procedures.
It is indeed remarkable that this splitting of Freud’s research paths didn’t lead
him—or guide him—to something like more cautious formulations. In the Studies on
Hysteria Freud claims that he has finally succeeded in finding the cause of female hys-
teria, namely that all hysterical patients suffered severe forms of sexual molestation as
children, usually at the hands of a family member such as a father, uncle, or brother. In
this work he presents these findings as the caput nili, the finally discovered source of
the Nile, and himself as both the Stanley and Livingstone of neuropathology. Because
of their friendship, Fliess was enthusiastic about Freud’s publication; the public,
 Young Mr. Freud f 

however, remained distant. Even Breuer, Freud’s coauthor, was not too happy with the
caput nili business. He was not sure about the hundred-percent evidence Freud
claimed in the matter. Modern authors, who think that the real truth of psychoanaly-
sis lies buried here, like to blame Breuer as a coward—as is so often done with Freud
himself. The social danger of Freud’s theory is easily to be seen: if all cases of female
hysteria were brought on by familial molestation, then bourgeois Vienna had far to
go to clean itself up. Without a doubt Freud, by virtue of his theory, would have been
able to fill his practice amply; but a reputation as a specialist in the healing of the
abused daughters of the city’s honorable men wouldn’t get him a marble monument—
more likely only a gravestone in the Jewish cemetery. So he did not trumpet his find-
ing to the world, and later he would give it a status among other sources of the Nile. He
had other reasons for this than just fear. We shall come to them shortly.
During the same year, another path to the heights of fame appeared. By virtue
of experiments conceived to explain the emergence and function of human memory,
the natural sciences were developing the thesis that there exist conductors in the
brain, along which particles with varying electrical charges, called neurons (or, as it
is written in the English Freud translations, neurones) move back and forth. These
neurological paths resist sense data, or transfer them in varying degrees of intensity.
Like a fanatic, Freud immersed himself in all the available literature, and plugged in
the problem of the resistance of patients in the preanalytical cure. Within months, he
attempted a complete electrophysiology of the brain. It was a radical theory in which
he attempted to connect every psychic reaction with a measurable electrical or chem-
ical process in the nervous system. And at the same time, he attempted the first for-
mulation of a metapsychology in terms of a combination of natural science and his
own findings in psychology.
Freud sent his text, the most ambitious he had yet written, to Fliess in Berlin in
October —this only five months after the Studies, with their famous technique of
chimney sweeping. If Freud’s letters had not fallen into the hands of Marie Bonaparte
after Fliess’s death, and if she had burned them, as Freud had demanded, we would not
know anything about Freud’s Entwurf einer Psychologie, the Project for a Scientific Psy-
chology. But because the Princess, refusing Freud’s demand, did not burn any of the
letters, we can take note today, with astonishment and admiration, of Freud’s attempt
to define all psychic activity and its disturbances by means of neurophysiological
processes. The invention of psychoanalysis, as we have come to know it, would have
been superfluous if this approach had worked. One can only render justice to Freud if
one realizes that contemporary neuropsychology is not really much more advanced
today than it is in Freud’s text, with the exception of an agglomeration of many details.
The cure of psychological disturbances by means of measuring the energy of endopsy-
chic systems and of prescribing medication is still a utopian project.
This was Freud’s last attempt to achieve the status of a giant on the basis of
work in human physiology. He broke off this work because he realized that it was so
 F Klaus Theweleit

far ahead of its time. He might well have gained recognition as a genius in some-
thing like speculative neurophysiology—something a university professor could well
afford, but which Freud could not.20 What he had to do was to fill his practice and
feed nine mouths.
If one begins to realize that all of these tracks are laid down in this same year of
, one gets a sense of just how many different and condensed conglomerations
were cooking, moving around in Freud’s head at the same time, each one more radical
than the last. The Studies in Hysteria may indeed be the first significantly psychoana-
lytical book, but the psychoanalyst himself is still not yet born. Freud has his fingers in
many pies [or dances at many weddings—“auf vielen Hochzeiten,” as the German say-
ing goes—Ed.], but the specific psychoanalytic space is not yet opened. Freud is on the
way. The Dream of Irma’s Injection, which he will present as the model dream in chap-
ter  of the T-Deutung, is dreamt on July , , right between the Studies on Hyste-
ria and the Project for a Scientific Psychology. In her description of the cooperation
between Breuer and Freud, Ilse Grubrich-Simitis stresses the ambiguity of this moment:
That the desertion of the privileged position of the doctor aggrieves both researchers
is quite obvious from their book. In Freud’s case studies we can follow the gradual
consolidation of the new method chronologically. For example, in the earliest phase
of the treatment of Emmy von N., the whole body of the patient is still included in the
therapy, for example by means of medicated painting of the anaesthetized leg, or
through a total massage of the body and a regimen of food and drink. In his hypnotic
suggestions, Freud does not even shy away from lies and tricks. Only in the conversa-
tions between the awakened patient and the doctor does there seem to be some free
space secured for the reflection, appearance, and opposition of the patient.21

The really decisive change in all this occurs more than two years later, in September
. For years Freud had concerned himself with finding out what role events in real-
ity had played in the instigation of psychic diseases, and thus with what had been
repressed by the patient and hence might be remembered in therapy. Summing up
his efforts, he comes to the cool conclusion: “I have not yet achieved the theoretical
understanding of repression and of its role in therapy.” And then he unfolds the full
shape of these thoughts of taking stock in a letter of September , : “The con-
tinual disappointment in my efforts to bring a single analysis to a real conclusion;
the running away of people with whom for a period of time I had been most taken; the
absence of the complete success on which I had counted. . . .” Thus he revises his caput
nili: “And now I want to confide to you immediately the great secret that has been
slowly dawning over me these last few months. I no longer believe in my neurotica.”
By which he means: in sexual abuse as the regular etiological mechanism of hysteria.
Still in the same letter, Freud moves on to the core of the problem: “[T]he certain
insight that there are no indications of reality in the unconscious, so that one cannot
distinguish between truth and [a] fiction that has been cathected with affect.” This is
the official American translation of Freud’s letters to Fliess, and I’m not quite happy
 Young Mr. Freud f 

with it. Freud writes: “daß es im Unbewußten ein Realitätszeichen nicht gibt.” Here
there is a new word, a new term; there is no reality mark in the unconscious.22 The
result—for the real history of the patient, for the moment of his or her actual trauma-
tization—is thus: “that the unconscious never overcomes the resistance of the con-
scious. . . that even in the deepest stages of psychosis the unconscious memory does
not break through, so that the secret of childhood experiences is not disclosed even
in the most confused delirium.”23 As a fact of the unconscious, Freud admits that one
never gets absolutely close to real history, that there is no sure way to find out what
really happened to someone in the not-yet-conscious stages of early life, or even in
later situations of traumatic experience. So there’s no use and no necessity in trying to
search for the bare bones of the real facts.
Freud’s real stature shows up here in the force with which he throws out nearly
all the central certainties he had relied on up to this point: after fifteen years of prac-
tice as a psycho-doctor, he concedes, he hadn’t healed a single patient. After some ten
grand attempts to achieve his monument, he is now isolated in Vienna, connected only
with a single correspondent who shares his fantasies. He confesses to his co-fantasist:
All of this is nothing yet, I don’t have it yet. And yet he isn’t depressed at all—quite the
contrary: “I have more a feeling of victory than of defeat (which surely is not right).”
(This is still the letter of September , .) In other words, if this wasn’t right, it
wouldn’t have made him happy in any future. It’s a very clear-minded stance that Freud
takes here; there is nothing of the usual complaints about his common headaches and
heartaches of which these letters to Fliess speak on other days.
During these months of the second half of  we see the rapid growth of what
is later called Freud’s self-analysis: I’m sick and I must use my own methods on myself,
and first of all the method of T-Deutung. Freud finds out what his dreams tell him,
something about the early stages of his life that he had repressed all the while: not the
simple truth about his life, but rather things he had preferred to not-know. Something
emerges out of his own unconscious in states of vertige, his own Vertigo. He commu-
nicates this to Fliess with some lines from Goethe:

And certain lovely shadows reappear,

Like an old half-forgotten myth,
First love and friendship come therewith.24

And he continues:

And also first fright and discord. Many a sad secret of life is here followed back to its
roots; many a pride and a privilege are made aware of their humble origins. I find here
once again all that I experienced with my patients as a third-person observer—there
are days when I drag myself around, dejected because I have understood nothing of
the dream, the phantasy, the mood of the day; and then again there are days when a
flash of lightning illuminates the interrelations and lets me understand the past as a
preparation for the present. (October , )
 F Klaus Theweleit

Here the real moments of the birth of psychoanalysis are to be found: For the moment,
the vision of the monument trades places with visions of “humble origins,” first of all
the fright and discord of his own life. Freud dives in and makes discoveries—but none
medical. Much like his patients, he becomes a site for a restaging of his own lost sto-
ries and history. Earlier I referred to this as Freud’s self-splitting or duplication—an
impossible term to be sure, but I don’t have a better one.
What happens here is the entrance of something like art, of the theatre stage,
or even the film set, into the structure of what will become psychoanalysis. One must
play and stage oneself: Thus, to find one’s own “true story” is partly an act of per-
forming. With the Deutung of dreams, literature makes a major entrance onto the
scene of Freud’s writings, as is already to be seen in the letters to Fliess: C. F. Meyer,
Goethe, Shakespeare, Virgil, and finally, Sophocles. Not accidentally is all literature
(become) a sort of daydream, a daydream realm dreamt on a bed of facts. With the
opening of the psychoanalytic space in the Dream Book, medical experience, in the
end, is replaced by the whole complex of literature, of sounding out words. The doc-
tor’s office turns into a stage for displaying one’s self: as if at an audition, the patient is
allowed to say whatever he or she wants because of being on this proscenium, on this
experimental playground. This is Freud’s final secret: he tried everything with the
sciences of medicine, electrophysiology, chemistry, neurology—but to no avail. Too
many fields remained uncharted and the results were not applicable. He tried to cure
with drugs, but they were too dangerous, too uncontrollable, and, in the end, they
killed. He attempted to cure patients by confronting them with their real (hi)stories
(always molestation or rape), but in the long term this did not work, either: there was
no lasting healing. And sometimes the realities came out as having been phantasied.
You couldn’t tell the phantasies from the real attacks, and—even more difficult—the
imagined violations could be worse and harder to enter into than the real ones. He had
tried to cure patients with the accuracy of numbers—cycles of the psyche, or men-
struation cycles—and also with surgery based on such theories. So what? Hypnosis:
attempting to cure through the control of the magnetism of a person’s body. So what?
Attempted more than once, and more than once the result was someone’s arms
around his neck. The problem of love in analysis will remain a problem, and there
will be the technical writings. But that is for later.
What is important for now is that the setting has changed. As a result of these
years, the patient and the doctor no longer sit across from each other, eye to eye;
the doctor moves to a position behind the patient. Eye contact is avoided. Both parties
sit oriented toward the same direction, facing the stage, the silver screen of the imag-
inary, upon which history, the present, and the future all run together—if anything
runs at all. The secret: the absolutely deliberate intention to have replaced all medical
procedures by the setting of playing games. The purported precision of medicine was
not precise enough to bring about the hoped-for results to which it laid claim. But
analysis as an art form can bring about something like a healing.
 Young Mr. Freud f 

At the end of this process, Freud writes to Fliess: “As far as hysteria is concerned,
I am at present completely disoriented” (March , ). Psychoanalysis is not born
out of the chimney sweeping of hysterical women as this is described in the Studies;
rather, it takes off from the vertigo Freud experienced within himself. Seventeen years
later, this shift finds a wonderful formulation in the essay “Recollection, Repetition,
and Working Through”:

The transference thus forms a kind of intermediary realm between illness and real
life, through which the journey from the one to the other must be made. The new
state of mind has absorbed all the features of the illness; it represents, however, an
artificial illness which is at every point accessible to our interventions.25

An “artificial form of illness” is produced and treated in the intermediary realm of

the transference. The entrance into this realm “between illness and life” is provided—
and this is what Freud adds with the Traumdeutung—only by the dream, and by work-
ing on the dream with the technique of free association. Which means: by a body of
narration that is not determined by something outside the analytic room, but which is
produced in the session as something art-ificial.26
It is not before the T-Deutung that Freud first develops this awareness of the
artistic space in analysis, that he perceives a new reality zone created just there. “Von
den intellektuellen Schönheit der Arbeit kann ich Dir eine Vorstellung nicht verschaf-
fen,” writes Freud to Fliess concerning the Deuting of his own dreams during self-
analysis (March , ): “I cannot give you any idea of the intellectual beauty of the
work.” From then on, the envy felt by mainstream medicine focuses on this situation
of the doctor as artist and on his or her co-production with the patient. The produc-
tion begins the moment the patient encounters the artificial bed, the couch, immerses
him- or herself in transference, and begins to play the part of him- or herself in this
still-alien drama. Where else but in a dream does one appear to oneself in all kinds
of possible or impossible configurations? The dream is the attempt at a permanent
reinvention of the self. If this new self uncovers or appears to uncover something from
childhood, or even from life inside the womb, this is a side effect. Or rather, it is Freud’s
way of turning the content of dreams into something writable and readable, the nec-
essary attempt at transforming the dream’s textuality into something like a novel.
What follows, if it is not the task of finding the real story behind traumata, and
if it is not the goal of tracking down the original culprits—if it is not a matter of all of
this? Entirely different abysses open up. The patient is as an adventurer in a virtual-
reality chamber. Freud’s first great step was the deemphasizing of organic causes. With
this the medical scientist began his exit from the stage. With the ensuing removal of
“what actually happened” from the space of the cure, the detective-like search lost
its dominance. 27 After the exit of the medicine man, the policeman and the judge,
too, left the analyst’s office: They had still a home there as long as the analyst himself
was on the trail of the real perpetrator. Freud was quit with this type of analysis on
 F Klaus Theweleit

September , . On that day, at the end of a really stupendous letter to Fliess, he
writes: “In this collapse of everything valuable, the psychological alone has remained
untouched. The dream secures its place.” And he adds: “It is a pity that one cannot
make a living, for instance, by deuting dreams.” And where the illusions fall away, there
remains the wise guy, the eiron, cracking jokes. Unburdened of his fifteen-year strug-
gle to reach the top, he contented himself with a balloon, a game—and laughed. Then
the balloon took him even higher.
Two years later, the Dream Book is there. Freud is both the rooster and the hen
of this egg—a fact that is itself part of the very invention he has just made. His lifelong
self-duplications will become more and more fruitful in this new setting, precisely
insofar as each part of Freud will study the other. And this results in figures such as
that of the Nebenmensch, of which Gérard Pommier writes, as well as in such figures
as Doppelgänger and revenants. Since the structural similarity of dream images to
images in art and literature had for such a long time been glinting in Freud’s eye—until
then a glint the Deuter himself did not yet know how to use in order to see—Freud
takes precisely this mere glint of an eyebeam and converts it into a supporting pillar
for the purpose of constructing the main hall of the analytic edifice. Certainly this
had consequences for his way of representing his own dreams in his book. As we now
have many more data concerning Freud’s life than he himself ever assumed we might,
it is easy for us to see where he wrote as a novelist, and not just as an accurate reporter
of his dreams. He changed his dreams while writing them down; he combined dreams
from different nights; he left out things about which he didn’t want to speak—this is
especially the case with the Mustertraum, the model “Dream of Irma’s Injection.” And
yet, nothing would be more stupid than to blame Freud for this. For precisely this is
the very nature of the game. I could well imagine that there is possibly not a single
dream in the entire book that was dreamed exactly in the way in which it was writ-
ten—even if such accuracy is conceivable in the first place. Freud himself made a very
blunt remark about this to Fliess when the latter, reading the manuscript of the book,
gave utterance to his fear that he might be recognized by readers in certain constella-
tions of Freud’s dreams, and begged his friend to take some other dream—please!—for
the purpose of demonstrating or exemplifying a certain dream type. Freud answered
him: “OK, dear Wilhelm, please tell me what you don’t like, and I shall alter it. You
know that I have the ability to make dreams to order for the next night” (September ,
). This is the artist speaking.
Another revealing little utterance from the letters allows us a glimpse into
Freud’s own use of drugs in connection with his different phases of production. Dur-
ing these years, Freud confesses to Fliess that he has started to love wine, especially
red wine, a liquor that had meant nothing to him before. This goes along with the fact
that Freud had stopped treating his permanent nasal infections with a tincture of
cocaine, a medication he had used for nearly a decade, along with friend Fliess: both
were addicts, but without really knowing it. And now, at work on the Dream Book,
 Young Mr. Freud f 

Freud the cocaine addict slowly turns to a milder use of red wine—you can even feel
this while reading!
So, in the end, we count several Urbooks of psychoanalysis: first the Studies on
Hysteria, then the Traumdeutung—but no less than these are his letters to Martha
Bernays or to Fliess. What a quartet indeed!
For me it is rather impossible to really understand Freud’s achievement with the
Traumdeutung if one does not see the paths of his evolution from the preparation
knife in the neuroanatomy lab to words as instruments for cutting up dreams. That is,
certain symptoms cannot be cured by medicine, but rather what works is playing with
verbal drugs. Furthermore, certain symptoms are only cured when the now so-called
patient uses his or her own words in the healing process, thus turning this process into
a working agreement, a therapeutic alliance, or Arbeitsbündnis, as German analysts
like to call it. Finally, cure is not the right word; rather we should use metamorphosis.
The patient changes into something of a different nature, untouched by the phantasia
of eugenics of distressed philosophers, who burn with panic when driven to thinking
about DNA and the threats of genetic personality construction.28
Since Freud, physicians—with rage and systematically—have denied or mis-
judged the character of psychoanalysis as an art form that lets the other use her or
his own language to find his or her own special truths. Thus medical doctors think
that they, too, can accomplish this little bit of chatting about problems—“good ad-
vice from your doctor”—and love having this on the list of things they can put on
the bill. What they most likely overlook is that Freud postulated some rules for the
patient’s apparently unstructured chatter: he requested, first of all, that one remove
from one’s speech “every kind of order, syntax, logic, discipline, etiquette, or stylistic
considerations as irrelevant, or even as disturbing.”29 That’s precisely what physicians
love: when their patients start with their discourse of pain in the context of a medical
consultation.
D. W. Winnicott describes beautifully this newly and ever-to-be recreated artifi-
cial space in analysis. During a session, one of his patients (he was an engineer) had
the feeling of rolling like a ball from the couch into the room, and without falling
down. The room became something like a medium enveloping him; much as oil sur-
rounds the ball in a ball bearing.30 Winnicott found this medium of “grease” compara-
ble to the mother’s function in respect to holding the baby. What psychoanalysis
means by transference and countertransference is something like the meeting of the
bodies of the analyst and the analysand in a lubricated space, in which the parts of
their bodies they “send” into this space can meet without touching. And thus there
is an opportunity for growing into a new body, different from the one each of them
carried around prior to this encounter: a third body, the real product of their common
labor in “mutual transference.”
Jürgen von Scheidt dedicates his study on Freud and cocaine to “the many young
people who did not handle their own drug experimentation as well as Sigmund Freud
 F Klaus Theweleit

handled his own cocaine euphoria.” The tenor of this compassionate dedication may
be applied to other fields of life experimentation. Generally one can assert that Freud
handled his lifelong self-experimentations better than any other similarly interested
explorer, and better than many similarly interested young people. This is one of his
most significant trademarks. He masters drugs just as he masters the female patients
who threaten to transform themselves into lovers. He also handles the dangerous self-
experimentation with male friendships, and converts this experience into a ground of
his productivity—thus he handles his own narcissistic transference. He handles his
experimentation with marriage and with six children, as well as with two women in
the household: Martha’s sister Minna joins the family when her own fiancé dies young.
He also handles the dangerous founding of an international movement. He copes with
a new definition of woman—female analysts—by turning them into a community of
daughters (under male leadership) in the psychoanalytic state, as Derrida loves to call
it. And he handles the dynamite of his surroundings in the shapes of his various crown
princes, from Jung to Ferenczi. Last but not least, his self-experimentation includes
the progress of three different forms of writing: the philosophical, the narrative, and
the technical-analytic. With his Traumbuch, surely he deserves the fame of having
written the first book in the genre of the theory-novel.
In order not to get lost in the dangers of such self-experimentation, one needs
the temperament of a conquistador, as Freud said on occasion.31 In a similar vein, Arno
Schmidt considered “the constitution of an ox” to be a necessary part of a being a good
prose writer. Conquistadors have a particular kind of immortality. In reference to
the burning of Freud’s books on the order of Goebbels in , A. R. Bodenheimer has
a vision: “Freud’s texts radiate bright and extremely hot flames. And then, when one
looks at the smoke surrounding the ashes, one discovers the phoenix hovering high
above, against all laws of nature, and against all prophecies of his demise.”32
The ashes of the latest Freud burnings are still hot: anybody seen this bird start-
ing up, somewhere? As an old man, Freud spoke of the great injury he had inflicted
upon an enlightened humanity: that it wasn’t the rational consciousness of mankind
that was in control, the ego, with its reason, which was the head of the household, but
rather this position of chief fell to the puzzling energy of the unconscious or to the
sexual drives.
If I see things right, mankind has forgiven Freud for diagnosing this injurious
nature, and has accepted his suggestions. No reasonable human being denies psychi-
cal processes such as the repression of basic perceptions and facts; no one doubts
the dependence of one’s actions on unconscious wishes. There is likewise no one who
wouldn’t speak of denial, projection, and of psychic resistances. The most ardent ene-
mies of Freud use his concepts. No politician, scientist, or journalist could get along
without them, and often without knowing that they are Freudian in the first place.
Many of Freud’s thoughts have become everyday, just as many parts of Marx’s eco-
nomic thinking have. Forgiveness through unrecognizability and integration: this is
 Young Mr. Freud f 

a somewhat bearable death. Probably only the physicians have not forgiven Freud’s
injury to their practice, in the form of the possibility of the dissolution of the dif-
ference between the patient and doctor, and the substitution, in place of “the right
medicine” (a strong hierarchical device), of the right way of working together in an act
of healing by artistic or creative play.
For me, the central thing in all of this is what I have referred to as the “third body.”
You can experience it in several arenas, especially in music, electric music, as well as
in love—in all processes where a certain intermingling of bodies happens.
Amplified music: you meet the music and the music meets you, in a heavy en-
counter. Your body is in transference with the power of the waves beating up against
your ear. Again, it’s a sort of violent process. The bass works hard to tear the borders
of your body down; but then you start to float and to mix in with the body of the music
filling the room all over—and you’re bathing in it, just like that engineer’s metal balls
in the oil of the bearings. Freud says that in analysis you learn Probehandeln, acting
by trying out a part or a role, trying out new little steps in a newly achieved body in
the shelter of the analyst’s chamber. This body is built precisely out of the energy both
analyst and patient put into that room. It belongs to both of them, and so I call it their
third body. If everything goes well, the patient will connect it with his or her own body,
and one day will take it away, out the door, as her or his own. You can do the same with
the music you love most, or which you feel to have the strongest metamorphic power
upon you. How this wonder works with two bodies in love I need not explain.
There is a strange thing about technical recordings, about records as items. They
are sort-of ready-mades in Duchamp’s sense, works of art that are themselves capable
of being destroyed, but, at the same time, actually indestructible, untouchable, perfect,
with the quality of being capable of being reborn. You always get them back again, they
come back to you in another form: you use them, you leave them alone. You listen to
them again after years and years and you make a strange discovery: they give some-
thing back to you that had not been there when you first heard them. They recorded
your own emotions while they were playing. And now you hear and feel the emotions
you had twenty years ago, and in a way more precisely than from any written record
or from any way in which your so-called memory stored them in your mind. The
recorded disk, with the music you loved on it, has stored them, saved them.
No kidding: this is not an exercise in mysticism, but rather something quite
materialist. The presence of thoughts and emotions long gone, brought back by the
disc, is a result of the body you built up between the music and yourself; and now the
disc is the memory of this body, an outer memory, ghostly, but existing to an eminent
degree. Here we touch on a whole range of phenomena that appear regularly in the
interminglings of our bodies with different technical media.
Freud himself was on the way toward realizing things like this when he used the
term “psychical apparatus” for the human soul, and when he gathered together his
theoretical papers under the rubric of “technische Schriften,” “techn(olog)ical writings.”33
 F Klaus Theweleit

Notes
[All references to the correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Fliess are to Sigmund
Freud. Briefe an Wilhelm Fließ –, complete edition, ed. Jeffrey Masson and Michael
Schröter (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, ), and are given according to the date of the letter. For
the English we have consulted Sigmund Freud, The Origins of Psychoanalysis: Letters to Wilhelm
Fliess, ed. Eric Mosbacher and trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, ), which
translation has been occasionally modified for reasons of technical accuracy or incompleteness.
Jason Peck produced a draft of a translation of an earlier version of this text for oral deliv-
ery. The reworking of that translation, as well as its expansion and editing into its current form,
was done by Thomas Pepper in collaboration with the author. I wish to thank Klaus Theweleit
and Monika Theweleit-Kubale for their indefatigable patience, good humor, and generosity in
the preparation of this text.—Ed.]
1. Judith Le Soldat, “Der Strich des Apelles. Zwei homosexuelle Leidenschaften,” Psyche.
Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse und ihre Anwendungen , no.  (August ), .
2. Ilse Grubrich-Simitis, “Urbuch der Psychoanalyse: Die ‘Studien zur Hysterie,’” Psyche
 (): –.
3. Albrecht Hirschmüller, Freuds Begegnung mit der Psychiatrie. Von der Hirnmytholo-
gie zur Neurosenlehre (Tübingen: Edition Diskord, ).
4. See Sigmund Freud, “Über den Bau der Nervenfasern und Nervenzellen beim Fluß-
krebs,” Sitzungsbericht der Akademie der Wissenschaft Wien (Math.-Naturwiss. Kl.),  Abtei-
lung, Band  (): –.
5. Hirschmüller, Freuds Begegnung, .
6. Ibid., , .
7. Freud, “A New Histological Method for the Study of Nerve-Tracts in the Brain and
Spinal Chord,” Brain  (): –.
8. Jürgen von Scheidt, Freud und das Kokain. Die Selbstversuche Freuds als Anstoß zur
“Traumdeutung” (Munich: Kindler, ), -.
9. Freud, Brautbriefe. Briefe an Martha Bernays aus den Jahren –, ed. Ernst L.
Freud (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, ).
10. Only Freudian officialdom has had a problem with this notion, as Jürgen von Scheidt
observes: “Isn’t it strange that the idea that cocaine might have helped Freud to find the entrance
to his own unconscious, and might even have played a crucial role in his self-analysis, occurred
neither to Jones nor to the other Freud biographers?” (Scheidt, Freud und das Kokain, ).
11. Hirschmüller, Freuds Begegnung, .
12. Ibid., .
13. Ibid., ff.
14. Freud, Brautbriefe, . Still to follow was the major public discussion concerning
hypnosis in Vienna in , in conjunction with the Paris Congress on Hypnosis (August –,
). Freud stood in opposition to Meynert and to his school, which accepted only organic
reasons or major problems in nutrition as the causes of neurological and psychical diseases. As
Meynert was publicly considered to be the absolute authority in Vienna in this field, Freud thus
broke not only with his former teacher and boss, but with the head of a medical racket.
15. Ibid., ff.
16. The course of medical publications had never stopped; besides the book on aphasia,
there was also an essay on poliomyelitis, as well as various articles written for dictionaries.
17. See Freud’s letter to Fliess of November , .
 Young Mr. Freud f 

18. The first edition of Freud’s letters to Fliess was published in , right in the
middle of Hitchcock’s most ardent psychoanalytic phase. I am quite sure the filmmaker knew
of the vertige in Freud’s opening letter and made it into the title of Vertigo in –. [And
what, indeed, are we to say about the Madeleine? In the context of the co-occurrence of the
names Madeleine and Elstir there is only one possible reference: Proust.—Ed.]
19. [This is, of course, the name of the train from New York to Chicago on which Cary
Grant meets Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest.—Ed.]
20. For a just evaluation of this text, see Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau, “Geburt der Meta-
psychologie: Der ‘Entwurf einer Psychologie,’” Psyche  (): –. Schmidt-Hellerau
finds the Project to be a “theoretical document of astounding modernity and contemporane-
ity,” and to be “Freud’s ambitious attempt to overcome the schism of body and soul, the split
between neurophysiology and psychology” ().
21. Grubrich-Simitis, “Urbuch,” .
22. [Of many alternatives—reality sign, reality criterion, etc.—we prefer reality mark as a
parallel to the notion of an irony mark in Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages.—Ed.]
23. Sigmund Freud, Briefe an Wilhelm Fliess –, ed. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson,
German edition by Michael Schröter (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, d ed. ), –. We
have slightly modifed the translation to be found in The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to
Wilhelm Fliess –, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, ed. and trans (Cambridge: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, ), –.
24. “Und manche liebe Schatten steigen auf;/Gleich einer alten, halbverklungenen
Sage,/Kommt erste Lieb’ und Freundschaft mit herauf.” These are lines – of the “Dedica-
tion” to Faust. Thirty-three years later, in , Freud will cite the same lines in the Goethe
House in Frankfurt am Main as an expression of gratitude for the Goethe Prize awarded to him
there: “words we could repeat about any of our analyses,” he says.
25. “Erinnern, Wiederholen, Durcharbeiten,” in Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse  (),
now reprinted in GW X, .
26. [Playing on the German adjective künstlich, meaning artificial, from Kunst, art.—Ed.]
27. [“(W)ie es eigentlich geschehen ist”: Ranke’s formula for what the historian’s work
should depict.—Ed.]
28. With such phantasies from Schloss Elmau, Peter Sloterdijk reveals himself as part of
the company of those who can’t withstand the temptation of being God for fifteen minutes. See
his “Regeln für den Menschenpark,” in Die Zeit  (September , ).
29. Peter Gay sums up this point in his Freud. Eine Biographie für unsere Zeit
(Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, ), .
30. See D. W. Winnicott, “Withdrawal and Regression,” in Through Paediatrics to Psycho-
Analysis (New York: Brunner/Mazel,  []), –.
31. For example, see his letter to Fliess of January , . In his letter of July , , he
wonders whether any of the “undiscovered provinces of the soul” will ever be named after him.
32. See “Einen Freud suchen fürs dritte Jahrtausend,” in Freuds Gegenwärtigkeit. Zwölf
Essays, ed. A. R. Bodenheimer (Stuttgart: Reclam, ), .
33. The freewheeling, ninety-six-year-old Zurich analyst, Paul Parin, considers the ques-
tion as to “whether the techniques of psychoanalysis belong to art or to science” in what is
one of the most productive investigations for the future of the business. See his preface to
Johannes Reichmayr, Spurensuche in der Geschichte der Psychoanalyse (Frankfurt am Main:
Nexus, ), .
This page intentionally left blank
 R . Such Stuff As
Dreams Are Made Of
Freud, Life, and Literature
Mary Lydon R
A Disturbance of
Memory at the Podium
To Mary Lydon in Memoriam
John Mowitt

Thank you very much, John, and I have an impulse before I begin to remember a
late dear friend of ours who is always associated for me with the University of
Minnesota, who is George Bauer, who is professor of French here for a number of
years. [Pause, exhale.]
The title of my presentation is “Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made Of: Freud,
Life, and Literature.”

W
ith these words Professor Mary Lydon began her opening remarks,
remarks that marked the formal beginning of the conference from
which all but one of the chapters in this book were selected. It is
fitting to place them here, at the end of this volume, not merely
to remember their original function, but because the loss to which the author of these
remarks points—the death of a colleague—has now, alas, been visited on her. Mary
Lydon died on April , , just seven months after the words above were pro-
nounced and recorded.
In my introduction of her I made whimsical reference to the telephone conversa-
tion Mary and I had had during which I extended the invitation to speak at our confer-
ence. Specifically, I recalled that in broaching the matter of style or genre (the opening
plenary was to be somewhat less formal, less elaborate in its argument than the others),
I had told Mary that we (the organizers) were looking for something “serious, but not
deadly.” We giggled, recognizing in this lame spoonerism the very texture of our friend-
ship, a friendship forged in the language games enabled if not authorized by what she
was to refer to in her talk as “the French Freud.” Mary replied by invoking that friend-
ship: “John, you know me, you know the kind of thing I can do.” The deal was, as is said,
sealed. Now, of course, I wish that the thing I knew Mary could do included overcom-
ing the disease that had been and was haunting her. In this I am surely not alone.


 F Mary Lydon

Now again I am struck by the painful fact that I was the one to call up the un-
spoken and now tragic theme of our exchange: “serious, but not deadly.” As if antici-
pating what it could only fail to ward off, this phrase, this lame bit of wit, doubtless
put in motion the chain of allusions that culminated in the blunt acknowledgment of
Mary’s passing printed in the journal of the Modern Language Association. At least
so it seems to a survivor, especially one who mourns, as Freud might have predicted,
by attributing to himself, in the mode of guilt, the very power his mourning belies.
After learning of her death I understood immediately why there was no “final version”
of her paper, but also why my distress over her not having shared her suffering with
me during the conference was at once defensive and narcissistic. In responding to her
impulse to “dedicate” her praise of Freud, life, and literature to George Bauer, and to
do so as an expression of gratitude to her Minnesota sponsors, she, or her “impulse,”
was telling me more than I could hear. The “third ear,” like Hegel’s owl, picks things up
only after the fact.
Those familiar with our respective careers know that Mary joined the faculty at
Wisconsin several years after my departure. We did not study together. This did not
stop me, however, from clipping a wonderful color photograph of Mary from the Wis-
consin alumni magazine. It marked her assumption of the Pickard-Bascom Chair in
French Studies, and instead of tediously capturing her at the lectern or posed in front
of the bookcases in her office, it depicted her seated, tan skirt, white blouse, back
propped against one of the surviving Dutch elms dotting the hills around Van Hise
Hall, surrounded by students. If I mention this it is not primarily because I longed to
number among those touched directly by her teaching, or because, as I look down
again at the clipping now, I imagine my phantom in the field falling in the range of her
readings. I mention the clipping because it is a photograph, and because one of my
favorite essays of Mary’s, “Amplification: Barthes, Freud, and Paranoia” (), is one
in which she taught me to hear things in images, a lesson that quietly orients my own
teaching and research in unfathomable ways. Is it a coincidence that this essay also
renders coincidence a methodological principle of literary criticism in the wake of
psychoanalysis? Is it a coincidence that what “falls together” in this essay is the click of
a camera, the snap of a compact, and the withdrawal, the death, of the maternal image?
I suppose not. After all, what is the rhetorical function of the expression “mere coin-
cidence” if not, somewhere between English and French, to silhouette the enabling
necessity at work within coincidence itself. Mary, ever suspicious of the adage nomen
est omen, could not but resist the suggestion.
But what necessity is thus asserting itself in this image? To be sure it is not in
the photograph, it is in my grasp, the very one now wrinkling and thus hastening the
demise of the clipping. It is in the coincidence of my distracted attention, attention
that in “Amplification” is presented as the way to get one’s head around the navel
wherein psychoanalysis and the work of literary criticism knot. Mary’s opening
remarks went on to explore precisely this point by tracking the legible opacity of the
 Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made Of f 

dreams staged in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. More than a reiteration of Shoshana
Felman’s figure of “implication” as a way to dream-weave psychoanalysis and litera-
ture, Mary’s reading put what Felman had opened, what she had inaugurated, on a dif-
ferent footing. The old and still vibrant sectarianisms—those between clinicians and
critics, theorists and historians, etc.—all seemed to slacken faced with the faceless
chora where meanings are forged, given shape, and bent to task in the hands of read-
ers and analysts alike. Mary put, as it were, the opening in the open. This site of expo-
sure and encounter is one where the death invented by Freud, the glitch in the drive,
passes through every crowd. Now I understand the anxiousness with which I attended
Mary’s opening remarks. She brought us to the anxious opening into which psycho-
analysis and literature hurl themselves with seemingly endless abandon. This gift—
“the kind of thing I can do”—I thank her for. Regardless of what I say here, I did not
know how soon she would follow. I do know, however, that I will not be alone in miss-
ing her terribly.

I have an impulse before I begin to remember a late, dear friend of ours, who is always
associated for me with the University of Minnesota, who is George Bauer, who was a
professor of French for a great number of years.

“Telling One’s Dreams”

The topic of this conference, “The Dreams of Interpretation/The Interpretation of
Dreams,” is enough to set one dreaming—about dreams, one’s own and others, about
Freud’s theory of dreams and the dream of psychoanalytic theory, what Shoshana Fel-
man calls “the on-going psychoanalytic dream of understanding,” about the dream of
the conference, about what I dream of doing in this introductory talk, which as I
embark on it seems fraught with risk. For no less than dream interpretation, dreaming
and especially telling one’s dreams have consequences, a point Samuel Beckett empha-
sizes in Waiting for Godot. Three times in the course of the play, Estragon, who claims
to have been a poet once, manages temporarily to opt out of his intolerable situation
by falling asleep. Vladimir, his companion in misfortune, rouses him twice, unable to
bear the loneliness of remaining awake beside his friend’s sleeping body. On the third
occasion, Estragon is awakened by a nightmare. Each time on waking, Estragon tries,
starts to tell Vladimir his dream, and each time Vladimir stops him, twice violently.
The first of these scenes, which occurs early on in the play, goes like this:

estragon: Let’s stop talking for a minute. Do you mind?

vladimir: (feebly) All right. (Estragon sits down on the mound. Vladimir paces
agitatedly to and fro, halting from time to time to gaze into the distance off.
Estragon falls asleep. Vladimir halts finally before Estragon.) Gogo! . . . Gogo! . . .
GOGO!
Estragon wakes with a start.
 F Mary Lydon

estragon: (restored to the horror of his situation) I was asleep! (Despairingly.)

Why will you never let me sleep?
vladimir: I felt lonely.
estragon: I had a dream.
vladimir: Don’t tell me!
estragon: I dreamt that—
vladimir: DON’T TELL ME!
estragon: (gesture towards the universe) This one is enough for you? (Silence.) It’s
not nice of you, Didi. Who am I to tell my private nightmares to if I can’t tell
them to you?
vladimir: Let them remain private. You know I can’t bear that.
estragon: (coldly) There are times when I wonder if it wouldn’t be better for us to
part.1

Obviously Estragon’s hurt reaction is a precise counterpart of the romantic wish so

often expressed in popular song that the loved one share our dreams. Later, in Act II,
Vladimir, in an outburst of love that momentarily supersedes his fear of being alone,
touchingly encourages Estragon to sleep, even singing him a lullaby though he does so
amusingly (such is the conflict he feels) in a loud voice so that Estragon is obliged to
plead, “Not so loud!” “Estragon sleeps,” Beckett continues:

vladimir: [. . .]
(Vladimir gets up softly, takes off his coat, and lays it across Estragon’s shoul-
ders, then starts walking up and down, swinging his arms to keep himself
warm. Estragon wakes with a start, jumps up, casts about wildly. Vladimir runs
to him, puts his arms around him.) There . . . there . . . Didi is there . . . Don’t
be afraid.
estragon: Ah!
vladimir: There . . . there . . . it’s all over.
estragon: I was falling—
vladimir: It’s all over, it’s all over.
estragon: I was on top of a—
vladimir: Don’t tell me! Come, we’ll walk it off. (–)

Finally, as the play nears its end, Estragon falls asleep for the third time, leaving
Vladimir to see the now blind Pozzo and mute Lucky off the stage. Once they’re gone,
Vladimir goes toward Estragon, contemplates him a moment, then shakes him awake.

estragon: (wild gestures, incoherent words. Finally.) Why will you never let me
sleep?
vladimir: I felt lonely.
estragon: I was dreaming I was happy.
vladimir: That passed the time.
estragon: I was dreaming that—
vladimir: (violently) Don’t tell me! ()
 Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made Of f 

There would be a lot to say about the haunting progression from the simple statement
“I had a dream . . .” through the nightmarish “I was falling. . .” to the regretful “I was
dreaming I was happy.” But what is noteworthy in the present context is that the topic
that interests Beckett in these scenes interests him enough to make him want to repeat
them: the desire to sleep or to go on sleeping, the escape that sleep provides, the acute
loneliness of the individual, the impulse to tell one’s dreams on waking—these are all
topics that interested Freud as well. And this leads me to wonder what Freud would
have made of the repeated representations of sleeping, dreaming, and being awakened
in Beckett’s text; how Freud would have interpreted the dream that is Waiting for
Godot in which precisely the telling of dreams is proscribed. For not only is the con-
tent of Estragon’s dreams never revealed, but the blank left by its repression is most
tellingly repeated, creating a mise-en-abîme of the play itself, where, as Vivian Mercier
wittily and acutely observed, “Nothing happens, twice.” Registering the implications
of that quip and recalling the opening lines of the play, “rien à faire,” nothing to be
done, I wonder parenthetically how Beckett and Waiting for Godot could have escaped
Lacan’s attention. Perhaps for the same reason that Derrida has willfully avoided writ-
ing anything on Beckett to date, that is to say his awareness of the extent to which
Beckett’s work uncannily anticipates and hence usurps any possible theorizing about
it. But what can we make of Vladimir’s adamant, indeed violent, refusal to hear his
friend’s dreams? “Let them remain private,” he says harshly, “You know I can’t bear
that.” One might speculate that the repeated refusal could be a belated expression of
Beckett’s ambivalence vis-à-vis his analysis with W. R. Bion, in which presumably the
author, too, had been induced to tell his own dreams. But whether or not that is the
case, one thing at least is clear. We are here today because Freud could bear to hear
people’s dreams, which he actively encouraged people to put into words. It is clear
that for Freud and for the poet and dreamer Estragon, the universe of waking life
was precisely not enough. That it is not enough for any of us is perhaps one of Freud’s
most pregnant lessons—perhaps what Beckett wanted to convey, however negatively.
Estragon’s question is, after all, greeted by silence.

Freud as Dreamer
Not only could Freud bear to listen to other people’s dreams, he could bear to con-
front his own dreams of anxiety and failure about psychoanalysis, the practice he was
trying to theorize and establish at the turn of the last century via The Interpretation
of Dreams. This is particularly evident in his dream of July –, , the Dream
of Irma’s Injection, which has been so brilliantly analyzed by Shoshana Felman.2 It
seems appropriate, at the beginning of this conference, to spend a little time both on
this specimen dream (as Freud himself called it) and on Felman’s illuminating inter-
pretation of it. It is Felman, by the way, who proposes “practice” as the mediating term
 F Mary Lydon

between art and science, thus allowing a re-description of psychoanalysis. After pur-
suing a detailed and highly nuanced reading of the dream from the perspective of a
second-stage feminism, which would view Freud neither as an unmitigated villain, as
first stage American feminists tended to do, nor as an unadulterated hero, as Juliet
Mitchell, in reaction to this position, did in her Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Felman
opts instead for acknowledging Freud as simply what she calls a male genius, with
all the insight and blindness that this term implies.3 Emphasizing that the Irma dream
is the dream from which psychoanalysis proceeds, Felman skillfully traces the threads
in Freud’s text, relating the central theoretical notion of the navel of the dream, which
emerges fully fledged only toward the end of The Interpretation of Dreams, to the
knot of female figures there: Irma, her more intelligent, ostensibly more compliant
friend (Freud’s wife)—in this specimen dream where the navel first surfaces—most
interestingly in a footnote. Might not Freud’s footnotes be the place where his uncon-
scious is most overtly active? Then, by linking the Irma dream to Freud’s controver-
sial lecture on femininity, Felman is able to lead her reader gradually and skillfully to
the conclusion:

The question of the woman and the woman as a question, the question precisely that
femininity raises is bound to remain unsolved and unresolved in psychoanalytic theory
to the extent precisely that it is the very navel of psychoanalysis, a nodal point of sig-
nificant resistance. Irma had been resistant as you recall, to Freud’s “male” solution.4

The question of woman, then, is a nodal point in the text of the ongoing psycho-
analytic dream of understanding. It would be impossible in the time I dispose of here
to do justice to Felman’s subtle structural reading of Freud’s text, in which, rather than
attempting reductively to outsmart Freud in his own psychoanalysis, to psychoanalyze
the Irma dream and use it against Freud in a demystifying manner (these are Felman’s
terms) as it has become fashionable to do, she proposes rather “to learn more from
Freud himself by turning to him not as a theoretician, but as a dreamer and as an inter-
preter of his own dream” ().
To learn more from Freud himself, neither as hero or villain, but rather as male
genius and as a dreamer, I cannot think of a better rubric under which to pursue the
ongoing psychoanalytic dream of understanding, which is what I take to be the object,
the wish, the dream of this conference. And to the degree that this is the case, if we
follow Felman, the question of the woman and woman as question: this nodal point
of significant resistance in the pursuit of that dream must concern us, too. But how
do we learn from Freud, or for that matter from anyone else? If we are to believe
Adam Phillips, we do it by a process that is similar to the dream work as Freud
described it, that is, by the operations of condensation, displacement, secondary revi-
sion, and considerations of representability. Significantly, however, as Jean-François
Lyotard has demonstrated, the dream-work does not think, it transforms. Thus, when
Phillips likens learning to the dream-work, he means that the student consciously and
 Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made Of f 

unconsciously makes something of her own out of what is being taught and finds the
bits she can use, the bits that make personal sense.
This is why the question I posed earlier was: “What would Freud make of Beck-
ett’s play, Waiting for Godot?” This transformation, this making something of our own
out of material presented to us, is what generates and sustains interest, Phillips claims;
and interest is what interests Phillips a great deal and is what keeps us alive. Beginning
with the sexual theories of children, which fascinated Freud, this kind of transfor-
mation produces theory and produces art. This is the insight derived from Freud that
Phillips explores so interestingly in his book The Beast in the Nursery, which speaks
subtly sotto voce throughout this paper. 5
How does one make something of one’s own out of Freud, out of psychoanalytic
theory? It sounds like an ambitious, even grandiose project. But this is precisely what
happened, I believe thirty or so years ago, with the startling emergence of what Jeffrey
Mehlman, in a famous number of Yale French Studies, called “French Freud,” an in-
vention that has all the vividness and mischievousness of childish language. What
currency does French Freud have today? I wonder whether it still has either the ex-
pression or the transformation it represented in the academic study of literature in
the United States in the s. Perhaps this is one of the things we will find out. But I
suspect the loss of interest—not only in French Freud, but in psychoanalysis—which
makes this conference so welcome and so unexpected has to do with the backlash of
hostility against the spectacle of adults (and academics at that!) having so much fun
with what suddenly became known as theory, an activity that, in retrospect, seems to
be related to the sexual theories of children in ways that have yet to be explained.
Freud wrote of what he called the sexual theories of children that they have one curi-
ous characteristic: although they go astray in a grotesque fashion, each one of them
contains a fragment of real truth. And in this they are analogous to the attempts of
adults, which are looked at as strokes of genius at solving the problems of the universe,
which are too hard for human comprehension.
The phrase “French Freud” seemed to suggest a going-astray in a grotesque
fashion. This indeed was part of the excitement and the incitement it offered, though
it also gave rise to a certain amount of nonsense. While the elaborate coherence of
any theory can produce, or degenerate into, nonsense at any time, it holds a fragment
of real truth: to wit, that knowledge, whether for the adult or the child, is sexually
inspired, just like the dream-work. This might not have been evident in Jeffrey
Mehlman’s introductory statement in Yale French Studies , where, emphasizing the
importance of translation in the rereading of Freud that was embarked upon there,
Mehlman writes:
Our effort at translation is an attempt at working through in the analytic sense, a
textual reality, which the American reader will no doubt be reluctant to assimilate. If
we dedicate this issue to that task, it is partly out of a sense that the recent French
reading of Freud has strategic value, for any future articulation of American thought,
 F Mary Lydon

a permissible simplification with that far-ranging ill-defined speculative enterprise

which has flourished in France in the last twenty years and come to be associated with
the word structuralism. The texts presented thus wage their interpretative battle on
grounds in which America has an elaborate investment.6

This is elegant, sober, academic language. But the interest obliquely suggested by the
final word, “investment,” points to French Freud, to the bad joke that evokes the un-
conscious and the vivid mischievous language games of children. The French Freud
experience, I would suggest today, and as I am encouraged in doing by my reading of
Phillips, is equally related to what Winnicott calls the second stage of learning, where,
instead of the compliance, the identification that marks the first stage, each student
makes something of his or her own out of it all, finds something in the bits that he can
use in that personal sense. Phillips writes:

The student finds herself being unwittingly drawn to specific bits of the subject
being taught—whatever the emphasis of the teacher happens to be—which she will
then, more or less secretly (even to herself ), transform into something strange. If she
did this while she was asleep, we would call it a dream. If she does it while she was
awake, it will be called a misunderstanding, a delusion, or an original contribution
to the subject.7

To those who espoused it, whom it interested, French Freud allowed theory to be
felt as “real”—that is a phrase of Winnicott’s—rather than as “irritating and madden-
ing” (that is also Winnicott’s phrase: he is talking about psychology)— as it appeared
to those unable or unwilling to pass from the compliance and identification of the first
stage of learning (competence as a kind of imitation), to the second stage of trans-
formation; that is, from a person who knows things to being the child who continues
to ask questions. No wonder French Freud and all it stands for, dream-work and plea-
sure, couldn’t be allowed to go on. All too soon after it had become axiomatic, those
of us who were its practitioners or its apprentices, whom it vitally interested, for whom
“we are such stuff as dreams are made of ”—we were obliged to acknowledge that
“our revels now are ended,” as Prospero also said in the same speech. “Don’t tell me!”
became the response to our desire to tell our dreams.
I will leave you, then, with two questions: First, can those of us who study litera-
ture regenerate, refind our pleasure in that activity at this conference? And second, can
this conference rekindle our interest in dreams and in psychoanalysis, so that we can
again put it to work in our reading and declare? The days to come will tell.

Notes
1. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, in Beckett, I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On: A Samuel
Beckett Reader (New York: Grove Press, ), –.
 Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made Of f 

2. A discussion of the Irma dream first appears in Shoshana Felman’s “Postal Survival, or
the Question of the Navel,” The Lesson of Paul de Man, special issue of Yale French Studies :
–. Felman’s work on the Irma dream is amplified in What Does a Woman Want? (Balti-
more: The Johns Hopkins University Press, ).
3. Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (New York: Pantheon Books, ).
4. Felman, What Does a Woman Want? .
5. Adam Phillips, The Beast in the Nursery (London: Faber, ).
6. Jeffrey Mehlman, “French Freud,” Yale French Studies  (): .
7. Phillips, Beast in the Nursery, .
This page intentionally left blank
 R
Contributors
R
Willy Apollon is a practicing psychoanalyst. Since the early s, he has worked to
introduce Lacanian theory in Québec; he has written frequently on issues fundamen-
tal to the practice and theory of psychoanalysis, from questions of psychoanalytic
training, the ethics of analytic action, and the logic of psychoanalytic treatment, to the
psychoanalytic treatment of the feminine, the pervert, and psychoses. He is a found-
ing member and a past president of Gifric, as well as director of its center for research
and training, and he is the consulting psychoanalyst and director of training of the
staff at the Center for Psychoanalytic Treatment of Young Psychotic Adults. He has a
doctorate in philosophy from the Sorbonne in Paris, and he is on the editorial board
of the journal Savoir.

Karyn Ball is associate professor of English and film studies at the University of
Alberta, Edmonton. She is the editor of Traumatizing Theory: The Cultural Politics of
Affect in and beyond Psychoanalysis, as well as a special issue of Cultural Critique
(“Trauma and Its Cultural Aftereffects”) and an issue of Parallax (“Visceral Reason”).
Her essays on critical theory, cultural studies, and the Holocaust have been published
in Cultural Critique, Research in Political Economy, Women in German Yearbook,
and differences. Her current project reflects on figurations of melancholy in recent
cultural theory.

Raymond Bellour is director of research at the Centre National de la Recherche

Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris. His publications include Jean-Luc Godard: Sound-Image,
–, The Analysis of Film, and other books on literature and cinema. With
Serge Daney, he launched Trafic, a journal of cinema.

Judith Feher-Gurewich practices psychoanalysis in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She

is the publisher of Other Press and has written numerous articles on psychoanalysis
and the social sciences.


 F Contributors

Patricia Gherovici is an analyst in private practice in Philadelphia. She is director of

the Philadelphia Lacan Study Group and Seminar and a supervising analyst at Après-
Coup, New York. She is author of The Puerto Rican Syndrome, which was awarded the
 Gradiva Prize of the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis
and the  Boyer Prize of the Society for Psychological Anthropology of the Amer-
ican Anthropological Association.

Jonathan Kahana teaches in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York Univer-
sity. His writing has been published in Social Text, Afterimage, Film Quarterly, and
Camera Obscura. He is writing a book on the public spheres of American documen-
tary cinema.

A. Kiarina Kordela is associate professor in the Department of German at Macalester

College. She is the author of $urplus (Spinoza; Lacan) and of several essays that have
been published in Cultural Critique, Parallax, Rethinking Marxism, and MLS.

Pablo Kovalovsky, a physician and psychoanalyst, was born in Buenos Aires. He

was president of the first Lacanian association in Latin America, the Escuela Freudi-
ana de Buenos Aires, and he has published extensively in psychoanalytic journals in
Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and the United States. He is editor and director of the psy-
choanalytic journal Clínica de Borde.

Jean Laplanche is a theorist and psychoanalyst. He is best known for his work on psy-
chosexual development and Freud’s seduction theory, and he has written many books
on psychoanalytic theory. For many years he owned and operated the Château de
Pommard winery in Burgundy, France.

Catherine Liu is author of Copying Machines: Taking Notes for the Automaton (Min-
nesota, ) and of the novel Oriental Girls Desire Romance. She is associate pro-
fessor of film and media studies, and visual studies and comparative literature, at the
University of California, Irvine. She held a Fulbright teaching fellowship at Tainan
National University of the Arts in Taiwan and is completing a book on mimesis, criti-
cal thinking, and cultural studies.

Mary Lydon was Pickard-Bascom Professor of French at the University of Wisconsin,

Madison. Her studies of twentieth-century French literature focused on psychoana-
lytic, feminist, and poststructuralist theory, and she is author of Skirting the Issue:
Essays in Literary Theory and Perpetuum Mobile: A Study of the Novels and Aesthetics
of Michel Butor. She was a member of the Samuel Beckett Society and editor of The
Beckett Circle. She died in .
 Contributors f 

Laura Marcus is professor of English at the University of Sussex. Her publications

include Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice, Virginia Woolf,
and, as editor, Sigmund Freud’s “The Interpretation of Dreams”: New Interdisciplinary
Essays and (with Peter Nicholls) The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English
Literature. She is completing a book on cinema, literature, and modernity.

Andrew McNamara teaches art history and theory at Queensland University of Tech-
nology, Brisbane, Australia. He coedited Medium Cool (with Peter Krapp) and Mod-
ernism and Australia: Documents on Art, Design, and Architecture – (with
Ann Stephen and Philip Goad).

John Mowitt is professor of English, cultural studies, and comparative literature at the
University of Minnesota. He has written numerous books on culture, theory, and pol-
itics, most recently Re-Takes: Postcoloniality and Foreign Film Languages (Minnesota,
). He is coeditor of the journal Cultural Critique.

Claire Nahon works as a psychoanalyst in Paris. Her Ph.D. thesis from the University
Paris VII—Denis Diderot is on the subject of trans-sexuality. She is the author of
several articles and the editor of an issue of the French journal Cliniques méditer-
ranéennes, “La trans-sexualité: défiguration, déformation, déchirement.”

Yün Peng is a Ph.D. candidate in comparative literature at the University of Min-

nesota. Her dissertation concerns the culture and literature of the s in China.

Thomas Pepper is a thinking language worker in the Department of Cultural Studies

and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota.

Gérard Pommier is a psychoanalyst in Paris and a professor at Nantes University. He

is author of How New Sciences Are Proving Psychoanalysis and Erotic Anger: A User’s
Manual (Minnesota, ).

Jean-Michel Rabaté is the Vartan Gregorian Professor in the Humanities at the Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania. He has authored or edited thirty books on modernist authors,
psychoanalysis, and literary theory, including James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism,
The Future of Theory, and The Cambridge Companion to Lacan.

Laurence A. Rickels is author of The Vampire Lectures, The Case of California,

and the three-volume Nazi Psychoanalysis, as well as editor of Acting Out in Groups,
all published by the University of Minnesota Press. He teaches at the University of
California, Santa Barbara, Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, and at the Euro-
pean Graduate School in Saas Fee, Switzerland.
 F Contributors

Avital Ronell has chaired the German department at New York University, where
she taught an annual course with Jacques Derrida and directs Trauma and Violence
Transdisciplinary Studies with Shireen Patell and Judith Alpert. She was also the
Humanities Council Distinguished Visitor at Princeton University. Her most recent
book is The Test Drive, and she appears in several videos and films, including Derrida.

Elke Siegel is assistant professor of German at New York University. She is author of
a book on Robert Walser’s micrograms and of Entfernte Freunde, a study on friendship
in Nietzsche, Freud, and Kafka. Her next project examines the diary as a literary inter-
face between experience, writing, and everyday life, with an emphasis on contempo-
rary diary projects.

Jakki Spicer received her Ph.D. in cultural studies and comparative literature at the
University of Minnesota. Her writing has been published in Criticism: A Quarterly for
Literature and the Arts.

Rei Terada is professor of comparative literature at the University of California,

Irvine. She is author of Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the “Death of the Subject.” Her
essays on critical theory have appeared recently in Common Knowledge, ELH, and
Studies in Romanticism.

Klaus Theweleit, a long-time associate of the Department of Sociology at the Uni-

versity of Freiburg-im-Breisgau, is professor of theory at the Academy of Arts in
Karlsruhe, Germany. His publications include the two volumes of Male Fantasies
(Minnesota,  and ), Object Choice: All You Need Is Love, the three volumes of
Das Buch der Könige (The Book of Kings), and Der Pocahontas-Komplex (The Poca-
hontas Complex), as well as numerous works on music, politics, literature, and the
visual arts. With other musicians, he recorded the CD BST.

Paul Verhaeghe is senior full professor and chair of the Department of Psychoanaly-
sis at the University of Ghent, Belgium. He is author of Does the Woman Exist? From
Freud’s Hysteric to Lacan’s Feminine, Love in a Time of Loneliness: Three Essays on
Drive and Desire, Beyond Gender: From Subject to Drive, and On Being Normal and
Other Disorders.

Silke-Maria Weineck, associate professor of German studies at the University of

Michigan, is writing a book on fatherhood that explores paternity as the ambivalent
master metaphor of legitimate power, drawing on literary, political, theoretical, legal,
and biological discourses at historical crisis points. She is author of The Abyss Above:
Philosophy and Poetic Madness in Plato, Hölderlin, and Nietzsche, and she has pub-
lished on Plato, Hölderlin, Shelley, Kleist, Nietzsche, Freud, and Celan.
 R
Index
R

Algerian war, – autoeroticism, , , , –; and the
Althusser, Louis: and film theory, ; and Other, 
ideology, ; interpretation of Marx’s
Capital, ; and overdetermination, – Barthes, Roland: and the relationship between
“Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy” the sign and capitalism, –; on the role
(Freud),  of listening in psychoanalysis, 
“Analysis Terminable and Interminable” Battle of Manila (May , ), –. See also
(Freud),  Spanish-American War
Antigone (Sophocles), –, ,  Bazin, André, –
Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze & Guattari),  Beckett, Samuel, xxiv; Waiting for Godot,
anxiety, , , , –,  –
“Are Dreams Experiences?” (Dennett), Benjamin, Walter, , , ; and film
– spectatorship, ; on modernity and
Aristotle, xix; Eudemian Ethics, ; altered forms of perception, ; and
Nicomachean Ethics, ; and the photography, 
relationship between father and son,  Bergson, Henri, –, 
art: as “collective day-dream,” ; the function Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud), xxiv, ,
of, ; and the neurotic’s dream,  , , –, , , , , , , ,
art history: and the amateur, –, , ; 
and Bois’ “critical formalism,” –; and Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon), , 
connoisseurship, –, , n; Bois, Yves-Alain, xxiii, –; Painting as
critical vs. archaeological, –; and Model, 
dream interpretation, –; and borderline personality disorder (BPD), xx,
psychoanalysis, – –; and the ego, ; frequency of, in
Austria, – contemporary psyche, ; and narcissism,


 F Index

xx; and the Oedipal fantasy, ; and the Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud), ,
Other, ; and the symptom, –; and , 
transference,  Clandestine (Ellroy), –
Breakfast Ship dream. See Freud, Sigmund, cocaine, –, , , ; Freud’s own
dreams of use of, , , , , ; Freud’s
Breuer, Josef, , , ; Studies on prescription of, for his patients and others,
Hysteria, , , , , , , , n, –
 colonialism: of Algeria, –; and America,
–, ; and the repressed, ; and the
capital: circulation of, – unconscious, 
capitalism, xvii, –; and deconstruction, “Comments on the Theory and Practice of the
; and Lacan, ; and Ayn Rand, ; and Interpretation of the Dream” (Freud), 
semiotics, – Crary, Jonathan, –
Carrier, David, – “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming” (Freud),
Case of Wagner, The (Nietzsche),  , 
castration: and addiction, ; of the analyst, Crowley, Aleister, xix, ; Confessions, 
; and anxiety, ; and the cinema, ;
and fatherhood, ; and the fetish, ; death, ; and evolution, ; and sexual
and jouissance, ; and Lacan, ; and reproduction, 
punishment, ; and transference,  death drive. See drive (Trieb), the
cathexis, , ; and decathexis, ; and deconstruction, , , –, 
Hartmann, ; and hypochondria, ; and deferred action (Nächtraglichkeit), , ,
Isakower, ; and the mirror stage, ; 
and sexuality, ; and the vivacity of the Deleuze, Gilles, xxi, –; Anti-Oedipus,
dream,  ; and cinema, –; and the crystal
censorship. See Interpretation of Dreams, The image, xxi, , ; on Hitchcock, ;
“Character and Anal Eroticism” (Freud),  and intensities, ; and masochism, ;
Charcot, Jean-Martin, , , –, ,  and modulation, ; and the plane of
“Child Is Being Beaten, A” (Freud),  immanence, ; and stupidity, ; A
cinema: and apparatus theory, , ; and Thousand Plateaus, 
Bergson, –; and castration, ; and demonic possession, –, , , 
Deleuze, –; and dreams, –, , Dennet, Daniel: “Are Dreams Experiences?”
–; and fetishism, ; and German –
Expressionism, ; and H.D. (Hilda Derrida, Jacques, , , 
Doolittle), –; and the illusion of desire, –; and the dream, , ; and
movement, ; and the interval, –; jouissance, , ; and neuroses, ; and
and the interview, –; and modernity, Oedipus, ; and representability, ; and
; and the primal scene, –; and the signifier, 
psychoanalysis, xxi, xxiii, –, –, de Stijl, –
; and realism, , , ; and the devil, the. See Satan
relationship of the gaze of the camera to that Didi-Huberman, Georges, ; Invention de
of the spectator, ; as spectacle, –, l’hystérie, 
; the uncanniness of, ; and the use of Ding, das (Thing, the), xvii, , , , , ; and
color, –; and voyeurism, ; and wish- Heidegger, –; and memory, 
fulfillment,  disavowal, , , 
 Index f 

displacement. See Interpretation of Dreams, genesis of, ; Geschlectstriebe, ; and
The instinct, ; and orality, ; and the
Doane, Mary Anne, , ,  Q-factor, ; and self-preservation, ;
Dora. See Freud, Sigmund, patients of: Dora sexual and nonsexual, 
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, xviii, xviii, –; The
Brothers Karamazov, –; The Idiot, – ego, xix, ; as bodily projection, ; and
Double, The (Rank), – borderline personality disorder, ; and
Dream Analysis (Sharpe),  dreams, –, , ; and “father-
dreams: and awakenings, ; as “capitalist” to identification,” ; Hartmann’s conception
the unconscious, , ; and the Cartesian of, vs. that of Freud, –; imaginary
cogito, ; of children, , , ; and structure of, ; and Lacan, ; and
cinema, –, , –; the cipher language, ; and the mirror stage, , ,
method of interpretation, –; clarity of, ; and repression of the drives, ;
–; clarity vs. distinctness, –; and subservience to unconscious, 
the constitution of knowledge, ; of the “Ego and the Id, The” (Freud), 
death of a loved one, ; and desire, , ; Ellis, Havelock, 
differences in intensity of, –; and the Ellroy, James: Clandestine, –
dissolution of inner and outer world, ; epilepsy, –
and the ego, –, , ; and ethics, – erotomania, 
, –, –; and forgetting of, , ethics, xv, xvii, , , –, –; and clinical
; functions of, , , ; future practice, , , ; contrasted to morals, ;
orientation of, ; and historical context, and dreams, –,–, –; and Lacan,
; intelligibility of, –; interpretation xvii, ; and masochism, ; and
of, , , –; and intersubjectivity, overdetermination, –, –, ; and
xvii, ; and language, , , –; politics, ; and repression, ; and
and memory, , , , –; narration transference, , , –, ; and the
of, , , –, , –; the narrative unconscious, xvii, –, 
of, , , , ; of the neurotic, ; of Eudemian Ethics (Aristotle), 
newborns, ; nightmares, , , ; and expiation, –
the occult, –; political elements of,
, ; and reality, –; and relation to Fanon, Frantz, –; attitude toward
mental illness, ; and relation to waking homosexuality, ; Black Skin, White
life, ; and repression, , ; and Satan, Masks, , ; and colonialism, ;
; and the signifier, ; the space and death of, –; difference between the
time of, ; and the symbolic method of gaze and ordinary vision, ; on the
interpretation, , ; and telepathy, ; Oedipus complex and the black male, ;
transitional states between sleep and theory of the “look,” , 
dreams, , –; and trimethylamin, father, the, xvi, , , , ; and addiction, ;
, –; vivacity of, –; the Vorbild and ambivalence, , ; analyst as counter-
of, , –; and the unconscious, xvi, father, n; and Christianity, ; death of,
, , , , –, , , , –. ; and God, –; idealization of, xiv;
See also Freud, Sigmund, dreams of identification with, –; and immortality,
drive (Trieb), the, xx, , –, , –; –, , ; and Lacan, ; pre-
and death, ; the death drive, , , –, Oedipal, , ; and Satan, , –; and
, , , , , , , –, ; the sexual difference, ; and the Wolf Man, 
 F Index

Faust (Goethe), xix, , – Freud, Sigmund, patients of: Dora, n,
Felman, Shoshana, , , – , –; Little Hans, , , , , ,
Ferenczi, Sandor, , , ,  ; President Schreber, , , ; Rat
filicide. See Laius, King Man, , , ; Wolf Man, , , , ,
Flaubert, Gustave, – , –, 
Fliess, Wilhelm, xxiv, ; and Freud, , , friendship, –, –
, , , –, –, , , Future of an Illusion, The (Freud), 
–, ; and the Non vixit dream, ,
–, , – gaze, the, –, –, ; of the camera
FLN (Front de Libération nationale), , , vs. the spectator in cinema, ; and
 colonialism, ; and feminist film theory,
Flusser, Vilém: Geschichte des Teufels, Die ; and hysteria, ; as opposed to
(History of the Devil), – ordinary vision, ; of the Other, ; and
“Forgetting and Dreams” (Freud),  sexual difference, 
Forrester, John, – Geschichte des Teufels, Die (History of the
Foster, Hal, , ,  Devil), –, , 
Foucault, Michel, , , , – God, –, ; and the father, –
Fountainhead, The (Rand),  Goethe: and the epitaph for The Interpretation
Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask (Julien), of Dreams, –; and psychoanalysis,
xxiii, , –; and castration, ; 
handling of Fanon’s death, –; and the Gogol, Nicolai Vasilyevich, –
mirror-stage,  Graf, Max, –, 
Freud, Sigmund: alcohol use, –; and his Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
children, , ; and the cinema, , , (Freud), , , , 
; and the death of his daughter Sophie, Guattari, Félix, ; Anti-Oedipus, ; A
; and the death of his father, ; desire Thousand Plateaus, 
for fame, –; early career of, –; guilt, , 
falling out with Viennese medical
community, ; and William Fliess, xxiv, , Hall, Stuart, , , 
, –, , –, , –, – hallucination: dream as, , –; and the
; interest in the work of Giovanni Morelli, sensorium, ; and the unconscious, ;
, , ; and Judaism, ; and Jung, and wish-fulfillment, 
, , ; methodology of, ; and his Hamlet (Shakepeare): and Freud, –,
nephew John, , –; recording of his n
own dreams, ; self-analysis of, , ; Hartmann, Heinz, –
and telepathy, ; and travel phobia, ; and Heath, Stephen, , 
the United States, xviii, ,  Hegel, G. W. F.: and art history, –; and
Freud, Sigmund, dreams of, , , ; connoisseurship, n; and the
Breakfast Ship, xviii, – (see also Spanish master-slave dialectic, , –; and
American War); Castle by the Sea, , , , the Other, 
, ; Defecating Father, –; Irma’s Heidegger, Martin, , , , , n;
Injection, xvii, xxii, , , , , , , , and das Ding, –
, , , n, , , , – Herzog, Werner, –; Little Dieter Needs to
n, , , –; Non vixit, xix, xxii, Fly, –
, , , –, n,  Hitchcock, Alfred, –
 Index f 

Hofmannsthal, Hugo von: Chandos Letter, (Uberdeterminierung), xv, xviii, –, –,
– , , , , , , , , , ,
Holocaust, – , , ; principle of noncontradiction,
humor: and the super-ego,  ; revenant, xix, , , , , ,
hypnosis: and the Freudian crowd , , –, , , –, ;
(Massenpsychologie), –; as predecessor secondary revision, , , , , ;
to psychoanalysis, , ; and sleep, Tartini’s dream, ; transference, xvi, –,
– , , n, , , , , , ,
hypochondria, ,  , , –, , ; wish-fulfillment,
hysteria, ; and bisexuality, ; and the xiv, xv, xix, , , , , , , ,
dream, ; and epilepsy, ; and the gaze, , , , , , , , , ,
; and the libido, ; and molestation, , , , –
; and sexual difference, ; and sexuality, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
 (Freud), 
Invention de l’hystérie (Didi-Huberman), 
Idiot, The (Dostoevsky), – Irma’s Injection. See Freud, Sigmund, dreams
Imaginary Signifier, The (Metz),  of
infantile sexuality, , , ; and repression, Isakower, Otto, –

Informe, ,  Jakobson, Roman, , 
insomnia: and melancholia, , ; and the Jones, Ernest, –, –n, ; On the
super-ego, ; treatment of,  Nightmare, ; Sigmund Freud: Life and
Interpersonal World of the Infant, The (Stern), Works, 
 jouissance, –, –, , , –,
Interpretation of Dreams, The, xiii, xiv, xv; the –, –, , ; and castration,
burning child, xv, n, –; ; and desire, , , ; and dreams,
censorship of, xvii, , , , , , , , ; and the feminine, , ;
, ; condensation, xx, , , , , and narcissism, ; and the Other, ,
, , , , , –, , , –, –; and postmodernism,
; countertransference, n, , , –; and the real, ; and the signifier,
; day’s residues, , , , ; defense ; and surplus, ; and the unconscious,
mechanisms, , , ; displacement, –, 
, , , , , , , –, , Julien, Isaac, , –
, ; dream-images (Traumbilder), , Julius Caesar (Shakespeare), , , ; and
, , ; dream of Emile Maury, the Non vixit dream, 
–; dream-thoughts (search), , ; Jung, Carl, , –, 
dream-work, xviii, xix, xx, , , , –,
, , , , , , , , , Kant, Immanuel, xxiv, , , –; and the
–, , –, , , , , categorical imperative, 
, ; epigraph to, –, ; free Kernberg, Otto, –, , 
association, , , , , , , , King, Martin Luther, Jr., 
, ; initial reception of, ; “the navel Kohut, Heinz, –, 
of the dream,” –, , , , , , , , Kracaeur, Siegfried: and cinematic realism, ;
; the nearest person (Nebenmensch), , , and distraction, ; and dreaming, –;
, , –, ; overdetermination dreaming and the cinema, 
 F Index

Lacan, Jacques, , ; and anxiety, ; and Marx, Karl: Capital, 
the burning child dream, –, ; and Marxism, –; exchange-value, xxiii, ,
capitalism, ; and castration anxiety, ; , ; synthesis with psychoanalysis, xxiii;
and countertransference, ; and the use-value, xxiii, , , 
crowd, ; and das Ding (the thing), xviii, masochism, –; and Deleuze, ; and
–, ; and dream interpretation, ; Dostoevsky, , ; and ethics, 
the ego and its relationship to the drives, ; memory, , –, , ; and das Ding,
and ethics, xvii, ; and the father, ; and ; of the dream, , , , –; and
film theory, –; and the gaze, ; and Emmy, –; and forgetting, , , ;
identification, ; and the imaginary, , and the Other, ; and the psychic apparatus,
; interpretation of Irma’s Injection dream, ; screen memory, ; and the trace, ,
, n; and the “knot,” xviii, ; mirror –; and the unconscious, 
stage, –, , , , ; narcissism metaphor, , –; and Lacan, 
and dreams, , and “not-all,” xx, , , , “Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory
–, , –, , ; and the of Dreams” (Freud), , , , , 
object a, , , , , , , , metonymy, –; and Lacan, ; and
; and the Other, , ; and the Sharpe, 
polycepahlic and acephalic subject, –, Metz, Christian, , , ; and the “aural
; reading of Antigone, ; and the real, object,” , ; and the cinema’s “tactility,”
n, ; and the relationship of the ; conception of listening, ; and
unconscious to the signifier, xx; and the dreams and the cinema, ; The Imaginary
sinthome, ; and stupidity, –; and Signifier, 
the symbolic, ,  Morelli, Giovanni, –
Lagache, Daniel, – Moses and Monotheism (Freud), 
Laius, King, – “Moses of Michelangelo, The” (Freud), 
language: and the constitution of the subject, Mulvey, Laura, , ; “Visual Pleasure and
; and dreams, , , –; and the Narrative Cinema,” 
ego, ; and jouissance, ; and the Other, music, –
; and Satan, ; and speech, –
Laplanche, Jean, , –; Life and Death Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon), 
in Psychoanalysis, ,  Nadja (Breton), –
Lewin, Bertram, , , , ,  narcissism, , ; of the analysand, ; and
libido, , , , , – borderline personalities, xx; and dreams,
Life and Death in Psychoanalysis (Laplanche), –; dominance of in contemporary
,  psyche, –, –; and identity, ;
Little Dieter Needs to Fly (Herzog), – and imaginary, ; and the Other, ; as
Little Hans. See Freud, Sigmund, patients of the result of the encounter with “das Ding,”
Lumiére brothers, , , ; The Workers ; and transference, 
Leaving the Factory,  navel of the dream, the. See Interpretation of
Lyotard, François, , , ; Discours/ Dreams, The
Figure,  neuroscience, xviii, , . See also
psychoanalysis: and science
Madame Bovary (Flaubert), – neuroses, –; and dreams, –; and
Margueritat, Danielle, ,  fixation, ; and Little Hans, ; and the
Marnie (Hitchcock), xxii–xxiii, – “not-all,” ; and one’s relationship to the
 Index f 

future, –; and the real, ; and the Painting as Model (Bois), 
symptom, ; and transference, , , , paranoia, , , 
; and trauma,  patients. See Freud, Sigmund, patients of
Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle),  patricide, , , 
Nietzsche, Friedrich, ; and “amor fati,” ; penis envy, 
The Case of Wagner, ; ethics, , ; phobias, , ; and Little Hans, 
influence on The Interpretation of Dreams, pleasure principle, the, , , , , –,
; and Satan, ; and stupidity, ; and the , 
transvaluation of all values,  Podro, Michael, , 
Non vixit. See Freud, Sigmund, dreams of popular fiction: and fantasy, –
“Notes on Obsessional Neuroses” (Freud), postmodernism, , –, 
 primal scene, the, , , , ; and cinema
–; and trauma, ; and the Wolf
Oedipus, xix; in the black male, ; and Man, 
borderline personality disorder, ; and Project for a Scientific Psychology (Freud), , ,
Clandestine, ; and current understanding , , , , , –
of, , ; and desire, ; in Freud’s psychoanalysis: and the cinema, xxi, xxiii, –
dreams, ; and guilt, ; interpretations , –, , ; and clinical practice,
of, , ; and King Laius, ; and the xviii, , –, , , ; contemporary
“not-all,” xx; pre-Oedipal father, –; and relevance of, ; current state of, xiv, xv, ,
the point of view of the father, –; , , , –; development of, ;
and repression, ; the revision of, xx; and differences in French and American schools,
Satan, ; and the super-ego, –; and xx, –; and the ethics of interpretation,
symbolic order, , ; and transference, xv; and film theory, –; as a form of
– knowledge, ; and the function of art, ;
Oedipus (Sophocles), , – influence on twentieth century thought,
“On Male Hysteria” (Freud),  ; and its relationship to the future,
“On Narcissism: An Introduction” (Freud), , –; relevance to contemporary life,
 xiv, –; the representability of, ;
On the Nightmare (Jones),  responsiveness to changing historical
oral zone, ; and the drives,  contexts, ; and science, –, –, ;
Other, the, xiv, xvi, xvii, , ; and auto- and sexuality, –; and theology, –
eroticism, ; and borderline personality “Psycho-analytic Notes on an Autobiographical
disorder, ; and the creative ego in Ayn Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia
Rand, ; and desire, –; and friendship, Paranoides)” (Freud), 
; and the function of the dream, , , ; “Psychopathic Characters on the Stage”
and identification, ; and jouissance, ; (Freud), , 
and language, ; and memory, ; and Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Freud), 
narcissism, ; role in the dream-work, xx, psychosis, xix, , , ; and transference,
, , , , , , ; and self- ; and the unconscious, 
consciousness, ; and speech, ; and Puerto Rico: America’s annexation of, –
transference, , , –; and the
unconscious,  Rand, Ayn, , , ; and capitalism, ;
overdetermination. See Interpretation of objectivism and the ego, –
Dreams, The Rat Man. See Freud, Sigmund, patients of
 F Index

real, the, , ; and the death drive, ; and the pre-Oedipal father, ; and President
deconstruction’s resistance to, ; and the Schreber, 
dream, , , , ; and neuroses, ; shame, , 
postmodernism’s resistance to, ; and Sharpe, Ella Freeman: Dream Analysis, 
representation, ; the signifier’s Shoah (Lanzmann), –
inadequacy in the face of, , ; as surplus Sigmund Freud: Life and Works (Jones), 
of signification, , ; and the symptom, signifier, the: and capitalism, –, –;
 and condensation, –; and death,
“Recollection, Repeating, Working Through” –; and displacement, –; and
(Freud),  jouissance, ; and the master-slave
repetition: and the cinema, ; compulsion dialectic –, –; “split reference” of,
toward, , –, ; and the demonic, ; ; and surplus, , , , , –
and dreams, –; and fatherhood, , sleep: and hypnosis, –; and “primitive
; and the goals of analysis,  narcissism,” ; and temporal relationship
repression, xxiii, ; analysis’s undoing of, to the dream, 
; and colonialism, ; and contemporary Sleepwalkers, The (Broch), –
psyche, xix, xx, –; and dreams, , ; “Some General Remarks on Hysterical Attacks”
of the drives, –, –n; and the (Freud), 
epigraph to The Interpretation of Dreams, son, the: as unheimlich, ; and writing, 
; and ethics, ; and God, ; and infant Sophocles. See Antigone; Oedipus
sexuality, ; and the interview in Spanish-American War: and the Breakfast
documentary cinema, ; and neuroses, Ship dream, –; and the fear of an attack
, ; and Oedipus, ; the primal on New York City, ; and Freud’s political
repressed, ; and relation to the drives, ; allegiances, ; role of Admiral Dewey in,
the return of the repressed, , , ; –, 
translational model of, ; and the Spellbound (Hitchcock), xxii, , , , 
unconscious, – Spinoza, Benedictus de: and ethics, , 
Ricoeur, Paul, ,  Stern, Daniel: The Interpersonal World of the
Rietveld, Gerrit, – Infant, 
stimulus shield, –
Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von,  Student of Prague, The (Student von Prag, Der)
Sachs, Hanns, –, ,  (Rye and Wegener), , 
sadism, , – Studies on Hysteria (Freud), , , , ,
Sartre, Jean-Paul,  , , , 
Satan, xix, –; and the death drive, , ; super-ego, the: development of, –; and
and dreams, ; exorcism of, ; and epilepsy, –; and father-identification,
language, ; and neurosis, ; and –; and humor, ; and hypnotism,
possession, ; and the seven deadly sins, ; and insomnia, ; and the Oedipus
–; and Wagner, , , , ,  complex, , ; and sadism, ; and the
Secrets of a Soul (Pabst), , , ,  unconscious, 
self-preservation, , , ,  symptom, the, ; and analysis, , ; and
sexual difference: as the basis of hysteria and borderline personality disorder, –; in
epilepsy, ; and Sarah Bernhardt, –; Dostoevsky, , ; and jouissance, ;
and the devil father, ; and gender, ; and and the real, ; and repression, ; and
hysteria, ; and infantile sexuality, –; subjectivity, 
 Index f 

telepathy, , ,  and memory, ; the non-repressed

Theodora (Sardou),  unconscious, ; and the Other, ; and
Thing, the. See Ding, das psychosis, ; and reality, , –;
Thousand Plateaus, A (Deleuze & Guattari),  and relationship to history, ; and
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (Freud), relationship to the signifier in Lacan, xx;
, ,  sexual dimension of, ; subservience of
Totem and Taboo (Freud), ,  ego to, ; and the super-ego,; and time,
To the Lighthouse (Woolf ),  , –; and transference, , ; and
transference. See Interpretation of Dreams, The truth, ; various types of, , –
trans-sexuality: and the dream-work, ; and “Unconscious, The” (Freud), 
the embodiment of the unconscious, xx; and
mirroring anxiety,  Wagner, Richard, –
trauma, – Wagner Problems (Graf ), 
Truffaut, François, , , ,  Waiting for Godot (Beckett), xxiv, –
Turing, Alan,  Winnicot, D. W., , , , 
wish-fulfillment. See Interpretation of Dreams,
uncanny, the: and cinema, ; and The
trans-sexuality,  Wolf Man. See Freud, Sigmund, patients of
“Uncanny, The” (Freud), , , ,  Woolf, Virginia, 
unconscious, the, , ; and colonialism, ; Workers Leaving the Factory, The (Lumiére
current American interpretation of, –; Brothers), 
and dreams, xvi, , , , , –, , World War I, , , 
, , ; and ethics, xvii, –, ;
Freud’s interpretation of, vs. that of Lacan, Žižek, Slavoj, xxiii; on The Fountainhead, ;
, ; and the gap between dream and and Hitchcock, ; and the importance of
reality, ; genesis of, ; and the the Oedipus myth to psychoanalysis, ; on
interview in documentary cinema, ; neurotic experience, –