Disturbing Origins: The Interpretation of Dreams

In the previous section I have tried to show that in the Project Freud did not unproblematically get away from reestablishing a metaphysics of presence and a simple origin of an immobile text, even while simultaneously creating the possibility for, as Derrida makes clear, a very mobile textuality within the mnemic apparatus he describes, the simple f -y system, by theorizing it as a potential "scene of writing" of différance. This potential is lessened, if not negated, by Freud’s subsequent theorizing in the Project, primarily the introduction of the w neurons and the biologically determined origin of "wishful ideas." This same tension would be played out in psychoanalysis proper, though, as with the Project, whatever possibility arises for a non-origin of mobile textuality is either marginalized or negated. What follows is my attempt to trace this tension in Freud’s descriptions of the unconscious, dreams, dream interpretation, the "navel" of the dream, and the primary process in The Interpretation of Dreams. In the next chapter, I trace this tension in his positing of primal phantasies in the case of the Wolf Man. To do this I first look at the Freudian concepts of "overdetermination" and "overinterpretation" to show that it is not, as some Derrideans claim, necessarily synonymous with chance. I then look at the initial arguments made by Maria Torok and Nicholas Rand in Questions for Freud: the Secret History of Psychoanalysis. In contrast to the two oppositional binaries they use–free association versus symbolism as the basis of a methodology, and what they misname, as Freud does, "reality" versus fantasy as the basis of an etiology–I will try to show how their initial arguments are at the same time problematized and better served by focusing on the (non)binarism of the mobility or immobility of (non)origins. I will show that, even more so than in the Project, Freud counteracts whatever "otherwise" breakthroughs he makes in The Interpretation of Dreams by turning (troping) toward a psychoanalysis of an immobile text and translation.

In this chapter and the next, this tracing (of the repression of the erasable trace) spans from the paradigm shift in Freud’s thinking that followed his cessation of work on the Project to the Wolf Man, which Strachey called "the most important of Freud’s case histories" (XVII 3). What we find is a theory of repression, for example, that transforms from one that suggests a very mobile textuality at an indeterminable origin–suggested by the paradox at the base of Freud’s theory of the primary processes and the undecidability of the dream "navel," both as described in The Interpretation of Dreams–to one that posits an original and very immobile text of "phylogenetic heritage" (XVII 97) in the Wolf Man. As Samuel Weber makes clear in The Legend of Freud, Freud’s theory of repression in 1916 radically problematizes his theory of the primary processes of 1899, and translation becomes that which explains repression and the preferred mode of interpretation in the form of a symbolism. I conclude by expanding on a theme I touched on above: Freud’s turning toward an immobile text also includes an expansion of his stereotomy as the fantasy of castration. What Freud initially calls an "infantile theory of sexuality" becomes a supposedly true part of "reality"–that is, a Truth that transcends and therefore subverts the binarism of inside/outside. As the external world of chance becomes more determined by the internal world of destiny with respect to Freud’s inside/outside (determinism/chance), chance is wiped out and Freud becomes master of a stereotomy turned cosmology. Freud’s phantasmal world of the "inside" eclipses "reality" and those aspects of the psyche that are commonly thought to originate there, on the "outside": trauma and memory. In other words, whereas the Freud of The Interpretation of Dreams made space for something otherwise and indeterminate, the Freud of the Wolf Man subverts the binarism of inside/outside in order to establish, if not a phantasmatic totality, a stereotomy of determinism that would greatly decrease the effects of chance on the object of his theory. Lacan would do something similar with his reading of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, which grounds Lacan’s adestinational theory of language in a theory of the unconscious "structured like a language," as both Weber and Derrida argue. In chapter five, I will argue that the lure of extending or projecting psychical determinism into "external reality" is evidenced by the lure superstition held out for Freud, and that, insofar as Freud theorizes this extension or projection, this theorization constitutes a reactionary subversion of the inside/outside dichotomy.

next —>