3 - To slip, perchance to dream: Freud on the unconscious

Summary

Remembering Signorelli

If dreams are “the royal road to the unconscious”, Freud did not stumble upon this road straight away. His discovery of the unconscious came via another route: the unlooked-for byway of the talking cure. As Freud puts it in “The Question of Lay Analysis”, psychoanalysis seemed to stumble upon a modern confirmation of ancient beliefs in the magic power of words to effect changes in the real world (QLA: 187). To understand this chance discovery, Freud turned to the mechanistic biology pre-eminent in the culture of his time (Chapter 1) and his theory of the drives (Chapter 2). Yet the primary evidences upon which Freud based his theoretical conclusions remained linguistic: the spoken clinical testimony of analysands. When Freud asked his analysands to free-associate, phenomena emerged that seemed to point him away from the solely natural-scientific approach he desired. Instead, they recommended a primarily interpretive theory of the psyche (see Chapter 8). Analysands would recount their dreams, as if these were somehow connected to their malaises. Moreover, Freud's analyses of neurotics' symptoms pointed towards the specific importance of language in shaping neurotics' symptoms, as well as their cure. We glimpsed this in Chapter 1, when we considered the strange symptom of the psychotic who felt her deceptive boyfriend had “twisted her eyes”, or the metaphorical “blood on Lady Macbeth's hands”. The point can be illustrated further by returning to the Ratman case, and considering what might be in this name Freud bestowed upon him.