Abstract
Sigmund Freud
The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud. Vols 4,5
London: Hogarth and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1955–1964
Title page to Freud's original German publication of The Interpretation of Dreams.
Some time ago a man in his thirties came to see me because he was depressed and terribly unhappy. He had always been unhappy, he told me; but now it was worse: he could not cope with life, and he feared that he was going to lose his job, as he could not cope with it either. He could not face people, he had never had a girlfriend, he had revolting sexual thoughts, and he felt he was a complete failure, unlike the rest of his family, who had done reasonably well in life. Judging from the account he gave me of his symptoms, I considered that he had been a severe neurotic as a child. He had already seen three psychoanalysts in the previous 3 years, none for very long, and other professionals of mental health in the past, without any positive results.
For a while I did not know exactly why this man still wanted to see a fourth psychoanalyst, but he did, despite his completely pessimistic state and scepticism about life in general and psychoanalysis in particular. After the first session he rang me to say ‘thank you very much’, he had had it, he did not think there was a cure for him, he did not want to waste my time. A few days later, however, he rang again to ask me whether I would consider taking him in analysis. He became one of the best analysands with whom I have had the fortune of working.
The patient told me after a few sessions that he had never read a book, which in his view confirmed his idea that he was worthless, a bizarre exception in a family of intelligent people with intellectual interests. A few minutes later, however, thanks to an opportune intervention of the unconscious, he said that he had read in a book that a boy is doomed to fall in love with his mother and wish to kill his father.
‘And what is this book that you never read?’, I asked.
‘The Interpretation of Dreams, by Sigmund Freud’, he replied. ‘You know, Freud, Sigmund Freud, the chap who wrote on sex and stuff. I read all the volumes of the Penguin collection that I found at home.’
‘And you don't count that as a book?’, I asked.
‘Well, you know, it's not like a novel or something’, he replied.
Freud's most precious work
Indeed, The Interpretation of Dreams is not a novel, even if, like the rest of Freud's writings, it is a work of literary merit. It was Freud's most precious book, although not, according to himself, his best piece of writing: an appraisal he reserved for Totem and Taboo.
Is it the book of the century? Although the first edition is dated 1900, it appeared in 1899. The publisher probably wanted it to introduce the twentieth century, and he counted the year 1900 as part of it. Oxford University Press has recently published a new English-language translation of the original edition of the book, without the additions that Freud introduced into subsequent editions [1]. If one judges a book by its capacity to change the lives of people (and this is literally what some great works have done) then The Interpretation of Dreams must be high in the table of revolutionary texts. Its influence is commensurable to that of psychoanalysis itself, which, as Jacques Lacan put it [2]: … however misunderstood it has been, and however confused its consequences have been, to anyone capable of perceiving the changes we have lived through in our own lives, is seen to have founded an intangible but radical revolution. There is no point in collecting witnesses to the fact: everything involving not just the human sciences, but the destiny of man, politics, metaphysics, literature, the arts, advertising, propaganda, and through these even economics, everything has been affected.
Yet in the first 6 years after publication only 351 copies of The Interpretation of Dreams were sold, although Freud knew very well, as he wrote later, that ‘insight such as this falls to one's lot but once in a lifetime’, and that recognition would eventually come. But despite this recognition by part of the world, ever since the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams, there has been, every fortnight or so, a proclamation announcing the death of Freud and the demise of psychoanalysis. One is reminded of Don Quixote's remark to Sancho Panza: ‘They are barking at us, Sancho: that means we are riding along’.
Analysis of the dreamer
What makes The Interpretation of Dreams the most important work in the history of psychoanalysis?
In the first place, it reveals the secret of dreams; but it demonstrates that such revelation can only be done through and within the analysis of the dreamer. No deciphering of the dream is possible without the dreamer's active work of analysis. Thus, the dreamer becomes an analysand, that is to say, the subject, rather than the object, of analytic interpretation; and as a subject, the dreamer is subjected to the unconscious.
In the second place, it postulates that the dream is not the unconscious. It is a privileged path of access to the unconscious, ‘the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind’ [3], p.608], but not the unconscious itself. I leave aside any consideration regarding the English translation of Freud's text, which has been examined critically by a number of authors. Perhaps the best known discussion of Strachey's translation is that of Bruno Bettelheim [4]; but there are also others (cf. Schur [5], Anzieu [6]). In order to demonstrate that the dream is not the unconscious but one of its formations, Freud had to work out the structural mechanisms of both: on the one hand the unconscious, and on the other the series constituted by the formations of the unconscious – dreams, neurotic symptoms, parapraxes and jokes.
In the third place, the key to the deciphering of the dream is the discovery of the rules and means of the dream-work. Through a methodical suspension of the fascinating and deceptive attraction exerted by the apparently pictorial presentation of the dream, evocative of the effort required of Champollion for the deciphering of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, Freud could establish that the manifest content of the dream is a form of writing, a rebus or picture-puzzle (these are his own words), and that his ‘predecessors in the field of dream-interpretation [had] made the mistake of treating the rebus as a pictorial composition’ [3], p.278]. He could identify the laws that govern the organization of the latent content of the dream (the mechanisms of the primary process, condensation and displacement) and the rules of transposition of the verbal, preconscious latent content into the hieroglyphic writing of the manifest content. That dreams are meaningful is not a Freudian discovery, since the art of dream-interpretation (which presupposes that the dream has meaning) has existed for centuries. Nor is it a Freudian discovery that there is an association between dreaming and wishing, something that, again, has been present in the popular mind and linguistic usage since well before Freud. However, Freud needed to turn the concept of desire upside down in order to postulate the universal presence of desire in the construction of the dream, and this is part of the epistemological and ontological revolution that the Freudian conception of the unconscious effected. The interpretation of the dream demonstrates that the desire that divides the subject, the unconscious desire, is forever un fulfilled and does not cease operating once the subject has woken up. In fact, the subject, awake and alert, continues to dream, the only difference being that, when awake, he calls his dream reality and thinks of his nocturnal dream as pure fiction. He needs a true encounter with the real, something that never fails to occur, in order to really wake up. The psychoanalytic experience that Freud created is one such encounter; and although this experience is subjected to the principle of safety and the treatment (not the promotion) of trauma, it nevertheless shakes the subject, as this subject, having told a truth, wakes up to it. ‘Pour faire une omelette il faut casser des oeufs’, Freud wrote later when warning apprentices of psychoanalysis about what was in wait for them. [7], p.135]
Finally, for the first time in the history of human scientific endeavour, a scientist lent himself to be the subject-matter of investigation down to the most intimate aspects of his life. Freud, analyst, creator of psychoanalysis, wrote The Interpretation of Dreams; he is also the main character in his book: the dreamer, the analysand, the subject of the unconscious. He wrote in the Preface to the second edition that the book had a special subjective significance for him, ‘a significance which I only grasped after I had completed it. It was, I found, a portion of my own self-analysis, my reaction to my father's death – that is to say, to the most important event, the most poignant loss, of a man's life.’ [3], p.xxvi] That is why The Interpretation of Dreams reads like an autobiography.
The desire to know
If Freud did not hesitate to defy scientism and methodological canons and used himself as the phenomenon under scrutiny it was because both his work on dreams and his dream-work were animated by the same desire to know. He was one of the rare incarnations of the desire to know, in the service of which he put his own person and the formations of his unconscious that he was able to decipher. This desire to know of Freud's, in what concerns his own subjective position, cannot be confined to his self-analysis: a problematic notion that Freud himself was the first to question. His desire to know, like all desire, was desire of the Other. It was for the Other, from the Other and through the Other that he came to know: and it is his merit to have discovered the dialectical relation between subject and Other in the generation of knowledge, that is to say, to have uncovered the function of the transference.
Freud and Fliess
We do not know what Wilhelm Fliess understood of what Freud told him during the 15 years (1887–1902) that their friendship lasted; a friendship largely maintained by correspondence, thanks to which (and to Princess Marie Bonaparte, who rescued Freud's letters to Fliess for the benefit of future readers) we know what we know of their relationship [8,9]. We do not know how much Fliess knew, or how much (from Freud's perspective) he was supposed to know. We know even less what Fliess told Freud: what he interpreted of what Freud said. Whatever Fliess told Freud, it could not have been that bad, judging from the results. It seems that he occupied for Freud the position of something like an analyst, a semblance of an analyst, and therefore a semblance of what Jacques Lacan called the object a, the object cause of desire (the desire to speak and eventually learn something from speaking [2,10]). It was an extraordinary state of affairs: Freud, the analysand, trained his analyst. He trained his analyst in analytic theory and practice… as he was developing it, since it was the analysand, Freud, who created the praxis of psychoanalysis. Whatever Fliess told Freud, it certainly promoted Freud's work, and Freud's dreams, and his work on dreams, and the discovery of the structure and function of the dream-work.
Freud's transference
Freud himself called Fliess his Other [9], p.73,313], and sometimes his daimon [9], p.134], which amounts to the same, as the daimon, the demon, was for the Greeks the spirit that animates and propels the subject; not a god, but the activity of the gods; in other words, the Other as locus of the unconscious (which has replaced the old gods as the site of the subject's fate). In those years of almost complete scientific and professional isolation, with Josef Breuer's support increasingly declining, alone in that city of Vienna which treated him so badly, Freud could only rely on the patient listening and reading of his friend in Berlin. He communicated to Fliess his clinical findings, his theoretical elaborations and his personal and familial intimacies. When in 1896 Freud decided to formally and systematically undergo a self-analysis, Fliess was still the only one he trusted to tell his findings. And those years of self-analysis (1896–1899) were precisely when he wrote The Interpretation of Dreams. Fliess, an ear, nose and throat surgeon with some reputation as a clinician and teacher, was simultaneously engaged in theoretical constructions, concerning nasal eroticism, bisexuality and highly speculative ideas about biological rhythms and periodicity (the periods of 23 and 28 days that Freud mentions occasionally), most, if not all, of which have not survived the test of time and scientific evaluation. He also communicated his elaborations to Freud, who at best expressed ignorance on the matters that Fliess exposed and eventually disagreed with the quasi-delusional conceptions of the surgeon. There is by now a considerable mass of biographical data and interpretations on Freud's life. (Cf. the works of Gay [11], Jones [12], Schur [5], Anzieu [6], Appignanesi and Forrester [13]).
Their relation was not symmetrical. Perhaps Fliess was more patient with Freud than Freud with Fliess, as far as the exchange of theories and narrated experiences was concerned. But it is clear that Freud assumed the position of Fliess’ patient, and he explicitly wrote so [9], p.125]. He literally became Fliess’ clinical and surgical patient. Fliess operated on his nose probably twice (apparently Freud suffered from chronic nasal infections, and so did Fliess [6], p.110]). It appears that Freud consulted Fliess on medical matters through correspondence and on the occasion of their ‘congresses’, as they called their periodical encounters, when they discussed personal and scientific matters. As it usually happens with doctors, Freud was probably not the best of medical patients. During the years of creation of psychoanalysis he consulted three different doctors, and probably did not pay serious attention to any of them. The three were his friends, and they appear in Freud's dream of Irma's injection, two of them in person, and the third by allusion: Josef Breuer, his teacher and mentor, and co-author of the Studies on Hysteria; his friend Oskar Rie, a paediatrician who was also the family doctor, and Wilhelm Fliess.
The specimen dream
By the time Freud produced the dream of Irma's injection, the specimen dream of psychoanalysis, the most significant dream in Freud's own account, on the night of 23–24 July 1895, Freud's transference with Fliess was firmly established. Freud had not commenced his selfanalysis formally, which he did a year later, with the same discipline and rigour with which he always approached his work. But he had already embarked in the systematic analysis of his own dreams, prompted by the questions arising from his neurotics and their dreams. Psychoanalysis was being created; it did not have a name yet, it had to wait for another year, when Freud chose one: la psychanalyse first saw the world in French, in a short piece published in 1896 [14]. I have referred in another paper [15] to that date (the 24 July 1895) as the date of birth of psychoanalysis, and this on the basis of Freud's own interpretation of the historical magnitude of the enlightenment he gained from the analysis of the dream of Irma's injection.
One can now turn to chapter 2 of The Interpretation of Dreams and read Freud's interpretation of his ‘specimen’ dream. It is also worthwhile reading Erik Erikson's remarks on the English translation, as well as the rest of his article on Freud's inaugural dream [16]. Here I reproduce only the manifest content of the dream [3], p.107]:
A large hall – numerous guests, whom we were receiving. – Among them was Irma. I at once took her on one side, as though to answer her letter and to reproach her for not having accepted my ‘solution’ yet. I said to her: ‘If you still get pains, it's really only your fault.’ She replied: ‘If you only knew what pains I've got now in my throat and stomach and abdomen – it's choking me’ – I was alarmed and looked at her. She looked pale and puffy. I thought to myself that after all I must be missing some organic trouble. I took her to the window and looked down her throat, and she showed signs of recalcitrance, like women with artificial dentures. I thought to myself that there was really no need for her to do that. – She then opened her mouth properly and on the right I found a big white patch; at another place I saw extensive whitish grey scabs upon some remarkable curly structures which were evidently modelled on the turbinal bones of the nose. – I at once called in Dr M., and he repeated the examination and confirmed it…. Dr M. looked quite different from usual; he was very pale, he walked with a limp and his chin was cleanshaven. … My friend Otto was now standing beside her as well, and my friend Leopold was percussing her through her bodice and saying: ‘She has a dull area low down on the left.’ He also indicated that a portion of the skin on the left shoulder was infiltrated. (I noticed this, just as he did, in spite of her dress)… M. said: ‘There's no doubt it's an infection, but no matter; dysentery will supervene and the toxin will be eliminated.’… We were directly aware, too, of the origin of the infection. Not long before, when she was feeling unwell, my friend Otto had given her an injection of a preparation of propyl, propyls… propionic acid… trimethylamin (and I saw before me the formula for this printed in heavy type). … Injections of that sort ought not to be made so thoughtlessly…. And probably the syringe had not been clean.
At the time Freud was experiencing serious difficulties in both his personal and his professional life. A year earlier he had had a cardiac episode, which Max Schur, his doctor of the last 12 years of his life retrospectively diagnosed as a coronary thrombosis (Fliess had been in favour of a diagnosis of hypersensitivity to nicotine, to which Freud was addicted [5]). Whatever the case, Freud had suffered from severe cardiac symptoms, and he thought he was going to die. His wife, Martha Bernays, was pregnant with their sixth child, Anna (‘the twin of psychoanalysis’, as she called herself, was born in December 1895). Freud's financial position was precarious: he had to support a wife, five children, his own parents and five sisters. He was heavily in debt with the friends who lent him money to meet his expenses, and he did not have too many patients. Some time later he complained that it was a pity he could not earn his living as a dream interpreter and had to rely on unreliable neurotics instead. Yet it was clear that his desire for psychoanalysis was absolutely resolute and committed; that he had reached a point of no return and that he was not going to stop until the end, 44 years later.
Freud interpreted
The dream of Irma and her injection made Freud wake up to the consequences of his creation. As Erik Erikson and Jacques Lacan have suggested, Freud's plea for exculpation in that dream concerns a fault which is more fundamental than the one that, in Freud's own analysis, the latent content of the dream reveals; and more fundamental than the exculpation of Fliess, who according to the interpretation of his biographers (Schur [5] and Anzieu [6]) was the real culprit behind the dream of Irma's injection (and this because of the disastrous intervention on Fliess’ part in the case of Emma Eckstein, the patient who Freud referred to Fliess for a nasal operation; Emma is one of the women who constituted the composite person, ‘Irma’).
Erikson suggests that the guilt involved in the dream concerns ‘the wish to be the one-and-only who would overcome the derisive fathers and unveil the mystery. It helped him in the necessity to abandon well-established methods of sober investigation (invented to find out a few things exactly and safely to overlook the rest) for a method of self-revelation apt to open the flood gates of the unconscious.’ [16], p.51]
Lacan reinterpreted Freud's dream-wish in these terms [17], pp.170–171]:
I am he who wants to be forgiven for having dared to begin to cure these patients, who until now no one wanted to understand and whose cure was forbidden. I am he who wants not to be guilty of it, for to transgress any limit imposed up to now on human activity is always to be guilty. I want to not be [born] that. Instead of me, there are all the others. Here I am only the representative of this vast, vague movement, the quest for truth, in which I efface myself. I am no longer anything. My ambition was greater than I. No doubt the syringe was dirty. And precisely to the extent that I desired it too much, that I partook in this action, that I wanted to be, myself, the creator, I am not the creator. The creator is someone greater than I. It is my unconscious, it is this voice that speaks in me, beyond me.
May I add that this voice of the unconscious was also asking Freud a question, the question that remained enigmatic for him and continues to pester us. Freud's dream attempts to find a formula for it: the formula of trimethylamin, which he sees printed in heavy type (but does not reproduce in his text); probably:
(CH3)3N
or
or
Freud writes that ‘the formula was printed in heavy type, as though there had been a desire to lay emphasis on some part of the context as being of quite special importance.’ [3], p.116] Freud says that it was Fliess who had introduced him to this substance, which he, Fliess, believed was a product of sexual metabolism. Freud adds that his associations led him to sexuality and all the questions it had elicited in him, and to how the theme of sexuality had become for him tied up with his friend Fliess; that is to say (in our interpretation), with the object of his transference. The earlier section of the dream, with its reference to the curly structures in Irma's throat, also had for Freud associations with questions arising from feminine sexuality. But the dream did not provide him with answers, only with questions and the confirmation that he must act in accordance with his desire. If the dream fulfilled Freud's desire, it did so only by virtue of sustaining it.
From its birth psychoanalysis is dialectical both as experience and theoretical work-in-progress. Fliess contented himself with the self-validation of his theories. Freud addressed himself to the Other; for him, even the most intimate and solipsistic formations of the unconscious (the symptom, the dream) can be invited to ‘join in the conversation’ [18], p.296], thus exposing themselves to the response of the Other.
The Interpretation of Dreams today
In the ‘Preface to the Second Edition’ (1908), Freud wrote [3], p. xxvi]:
Anyone who is acquainted with my other writings… will know that I have never put forward inconclusive opinions as though they were facts, and that I have always sought to modify my statements so that they may keep in step with my advancing knowledge. In the sphere of dreamlife I have been able to leave my original assertions unchanged. During the long years in which I have been working at the problems of the neuroses I have often been in doubt and sometimes shaken in my convictions. At such times it has always been the Interpretation of Dreams that has given me back my certainty. It is thus a sure instinct which has led my many scientific opponents to refuse to follow me more especially in my researches upon dreams.
With Dreams Freud passed from analysand to analyst. He surpassed Fliess; he painfully went beyond his own father, beyond Breuer and well beyond the medical establishment and the scientific knowledge of his time; he had to break with his own prejudices and with his own neurosis and leave them behind. Today's analyst has the advantage of learning from Freud's writings, his experience and his mistakes – and from all of those who have followed Freud's path. But to occupy the position of analyst is not enough. Today's analysts, the dreaminterpreters of our times, have to act as Freud did: they need the same courage to listen to the unconscious – their unconscious – and learn about their desire. Then, and only then, will they be able to let the analysand's desire be.