Page 164 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes The Letter in the Unconscious
In the complete words of Freud, one out of every three pages is devoted to philological references,
one out of every two pages to logical inferences, everywhere a dialectical apprehension of
experience, the proportion of analysis of language increasing to the extent that the unconscious is
directly concerned.
Thus in "The Interpretation of Dreams" every page deals with what I call the letter of the discourse,
in its texture, its usage, its immanence in the matter in question. For it is with this work that the
work of Freud begins to open the royal road to the unconscious. And Freud gave us notice of this;
his confidence at the time of launching this book in the early days of this century only confirms
what he continued to proclaim to the end: that he had staked the whole of his discovery on this
essential expression of his message.
The first sentence of the opening chapter announces what for the sake of exposition could not be
postponed: that the dream is a rebus. And Freud goes on to stipulate what I have said from the
start, that it must be understood quite literally. This derives from the agency in the dream of that
same literal (or phonematic) structure in which the signifier is articulated and analyzed in discourse.
So the unnatural image of the boat on the roof, or the man with a comma for a head, which are
specifically mentioned by Freud, are examples of dream-images that are to be taken only for their
value as signifiers, that is to say, in so far as they allow us to spell out the "proverb" presented by
the rebus of the dream. The linguistic structure that enables us to read dreams is the very principle
of the "significance of the dream," the Traumdeutung.
Freud shows us in every possible way that the value of the image as signifier has nothing whatever
to do with its signification, giving us as an example Egyptian hieroglyphics in which it would be
sheer buffoonery to pretend that in a given text the frequency of a vulture, which is an aleph, or
of a chick, which is a vau, indicating a form of the verb "to be" or a plural, prove that the text has
anything to do at all with these ornithological specimines. Freud finds in this writing certain uses
of the signifier that are lost in ours, such as the use of determinatives, where a categorical figure
is added to the literal figuration of a verbal term; but this is only to show us that even in this
writing, the so-called "ideogram" is a letter.
But it does not require the current confusion on this last term for there to prevail in the minds of
psychoanalysts lacking linguistic training the prejudice in favor of a symbolism deriving from
natural analogy, or even of the image as appropriate to the instinct. And to such an extent that,
outside the French school, which has been alerted, a distinction must be drawn between reading
coffee grounds and reading hieroglyphics, by recalling to its own principles a technique that could
not be justified were it not directed towards the unconscious.
It must be said that this is admitted only with difficulty and that the mental vice denounced above
enjoys such favor that today's psychoanalyst can be expected to say that he decodes before he will
come around to taking the necessary tour with Freud (turn as the statue of Champollion, says the
guide) that will make him understand that what he does is decipher; the distinction is that a
cryptogram takes on its full dimension only when it is in a lost language.
Taking the tour is simply continuing in the Traumdeutung.
Entstellung, translated as "distortion" or "transposition," is what Freud shows to be the general
precondition for the functioning of the dream, and it is what I designated above, following Saussure,
as the sliding of the signified under the signifier, which is always active in discourse (its action, let
us note, is unconscious).
But what we call the two "sides" of the effect of the signifier on the signified are also found here.
Verdichtung, or "condensation," is the structure of the superimposition of the signified which
metaphor takes as its field, and whose name, condensing in itself the word Dichtung, shows how
the mechanism is connatural with poetry to the point that it envelops the traditional function
proper to poetry.
In the case of Verschiebung, "displacement," the German term is closer to the idea of that veering
off of signification that we see in metonymy and which from its first appearance in Freud is
represented as the most appropriate means used by the unconscious to foil censorship.

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