What Freud Said

What Freud Said and Why He Said It
Or: Why Derrida Is Wrong
December 23, 2007
Revised From: March 9, 2007

Someone like Derrida might take a look at the impact Freud had on modern thinking and claim: “One consequence of Freud’s thinking on dreams and the unconscious is that we can never be sure of where our ideas and words come from.” Freud’s On Dreams, however, does not necessarily deny our capacity to be certain about origin of the entirety of ideas and words. Freud offers a more nuanced view. A dream is not completely unknowable. Dreams are drawn from a variety of factors, some of which might not be directly represented. Although Freud argued that his dreams were indicative of the unconscious thinking which provides “the dream-work with the material for condensation, displacement, and dramatization” this dream-work nevertheless does not undermine the entirety of thought as a whole—Freud specifically leaves his discussion to that of the unconscious. Although the unconscious plays a large role in the life of an individual, it does not dominate or undermine conscious thought. Intention and the capacity to express that intention is not undermined by the existence and the aloofness of the unconscious. Freud’s analysis demands that we include in our definition of “intention” that, what we conceive of as “meaning” often will require understanding the symbols underlying it. The symbols that Freud identifies as underlying the dream always come from the individual’s experience in the world. The only challenge is in identifying which facet of the individual’s experience is the cause of which representation in the dream.

Freud, instead of denying the capacity to know where ideas and words come from, offers several possibilities of where they can originate from. Freud asserts that “only a small minority of educated people doubt that dreams are a product of the dreamer’s own mind.” Freud makes a distinction—he believes that the mythological interpretation of dreams, that dreams are of demonic or divine origin, has been rejected, and instead reasserts the argument that dreams originate from the dreamer’s own mind. Freud does know where dreams come from—they come from the mind. Although this seems obvious now, it nevertheless is a starting point, and a starting point that rejects several millennia of dream interpretation. This origin of dreams is not questioned. What is left unknown are the “conditions of their origin, their relation to waking mental life… but what stands in the foreground of our interest is the question of the significance of dreams.” The significance of dreams is what Freud leaves as the center of his object of debate, rather than the capacity to know dreams at all. After all, if Freud regarded dreams as completely unknowable, then there would be no point of psychoanalysis.

Freud conceptualizes of dreams as representative of the impulses and manifestations of mental forces which have been obscured during conscious life. The first is the overvaluation of the dream, as akin to the ancient mythologies which took the dream as the will of some supernatural agent. The prototype Freud provides for this line of thought is that of Schubert, that “dreams are a liberation of the spirit from the power of external nature.” Freud rejects this overvaluation, but nevertheless he probably would associate his conceptualization of dreams more with this extreme than he would with the other, that one held by “the majority of medical writers” to whom “dreams scarcely reach the level of being psychical phenomena at all.” Freud’s own conceptualization of dreams certainly is not that held by the “majority of medical writers” nor would it be that of Schubert. Instead, his conceptualization would be closest to that of Scherner and Volket, who insisted that dreams arise from mental impulses, and represent manifestations of mental forces “which have been prevented from expanding freely during the daytime.” Freud certainly would not argue that every element in every dream is an expression of a repressed desire, but nevertheless he certainly would be willing to accept that this was the case some of the time. Freud adds to this the idea that dreams frequently condense, dramatize, or displace events and thoughts which occur during waking life, and focuses on the multiplicity of associations that can be inferred from the events of a dream. For instance, Freud likens the activity of a dream to a painting that represents “all the poets in a single group in a picture of Parnassus.” Many of the poets in such a painting would not have ever been together at the same place at the same time, but because the mind associates the poets together the mental representation of them places them close together in proximity. Returning to the views of Scherner and Volket, Freud likens his interpretation of dreams to theirs in the case of wish fulfillment in dreams. Freud argues that there are three types of wish fulfillment: infantile, dreams with repressed wishes, and dreams with wishes that are not repressed, but usually are accompanied by anxiety. It certainly is true some of the time that dreams include repressed wishes—nevertheless, the content of dreams include much more than this.

The sentiment, like Derrida’s, that Freud’s arguments negate the capacity to understand the origin of thoughts stem largely from his conclusion, where he makes the caveat, “one can never tell whether any particular element in the content of a dream is to be interpreted symbolically or in its proper sense.” This caveat is far from the sentiment that it often evokes. Freud’s argument makes it clear that we must accept the possibility that sometimes we will not be able to understand where the constituents of our dream come from. However, to say that one can never be sure of where our ideas and words come from is to deny the magnificence of the associative links that underlie many of our dreams, and the many cases where in all likelihood the interpretation of the dream is centered. There is very little doubt in the painting of the poets in a picture of Parnassus where the images that the painting is based on came from. Although Freud expands his arguments to be indicative of the unconscious he nevertheless does not negate the capacities of conscious activity to understand the origin of its words and ideas. The dream that Freud speaks of is not necessarily the same dream that Martin Luther King Jr. speaks of in his speech, “I Have a Dream.” Freud is specifically discussing dreams that occur during unconsciousness. The conscious mind is one that is capable of producing dreams as well, but the conscious mind creates ones that express clear and well-stated desires that do not have to produce anxiety, but can produce hope instead.

Freud, like many of his predecessors, identifies his center: it is the ego, the self, as the shaping force behind all dreams. Just as Aristotle begins the Poetics by arguing that most forms of art are imitation or representation, and Victor Shklovsky identifies the maxim, “Art is thinking in images”, Freud has his center. It is through the center that one can exert intention. It is through the center that one can be reminded that some of the time, one can understand where what is said and thought comes from. Just the same, one can infer from reading Aristotle that art is the expression of the intention—it is the expression of the intention to reproduce or imitate something else. Or, for Shklovsky, art is the intention to think in images. However, the sentiment that one cannot know the origin of thoughts or words, as the prompt posits, echoed by Derrida in Structure, Sign, and Play when he links Freud with Heidegger and Nietzche in precipitating what he calls “this decentering, this thinking the structurality of structure”. Derrida remarks on “the Freudian critique of self-presence, that is, the critique of consciousness, of the subject, of self-identity and of self-proximity or self-possession.” Derrida, in typical form, provides no work, let alone page number, of Freud’s to refer to that would allow the reader to substantiate this claim. Instead, Derrida refers to “the Freudian critique,” a term so ambiguous it could be a critique which need not even necessarily originate from Freud, but from all that deem themselves “Freudian.” Yet, although it is true Freud critiques consciousness, and indeed further critiques the modern medical establishment for essentially ignoring the unconsciousness, Freud never renounces consciousness. We might sometimes not be able to comprehend our dreams consciously, and this might be a criticism of consciousness. But a criticism of consciousness is not a renunciation of consciousness—and Derrida’s inclusion of Freud as one of his central forces of “decentering” is flawed.

Perhaps instead of asking whether it is ever possible to write or say what one means, one might ask whether it is ever possible to not write or say what one means. Dreams always come from one’s self, and our own personal associations, and our own personal experiences. If this is the case, then there is no situation in which we cannot express what we mean, as all expression is the result of some will, either conscious or unconscious. Wimsatt’s and Beardsley’s The Intentional Fallacy offers an example that follows these lines; that of Elliot’s note to The Waste Land where Elliot explains that “The Hanged Man… fits my purpose in two ways: because he is associated in my mind with the Hanged God of Frazer, and because I associate him with the hooded figure in the passage of the disciples of Emmaus…” As Wimsatt and Beardsley argue, Elliot explains his poem in terms of his own intentions, and his intention in terms of his associations. This style nevertheless creates a problem for the earlier assertion that we cannot express what we do not mean, since, as Saussure argues in The object of study, there may be a distinction between what is expressed and what is intended to be expressed, as there is the capacity for miscommunication. But this only requires revision to the earlier proposition: all of our expressions are causally related to our intentions, even if our expressions do not always express our intentions. This, although rephrased, is essentially the same paradigm that can be inferred from Freud’s interpretation of dreams. Everything in our dreams is comes from our mind, even if the recollection and expression of our dream does not allow us to comprehend the intentions that are the causal basis for the dream’s occurrence.

Derrida’s criticism and the sentiment that it is impossible to comprehend the origins of thought provides an incomplete picture of Freud’s arguments. Freud’s arguments include a center, and that center is the ego. Through this center, one can, at least some of the time, express thought and language, and know the origin of it. This origin often will take the form of some desire, whether repressed or infantile, but also sometimes will be the result of condensation or dramatization. Although sometimes we will not be able to comprehend the nuance of the origin of our dreams, the origin remains constant. A better question from a Freudian perspective might be, “Can we ever express what we consciously want to express?” But that question too would be flawed, for it would seek to divide conscious activity from unconscious activity. The conscious mind and the unconscious mind inhabit the same brain; each is linked, and each takes in information from the other. Perhaps the ultimate objective is to ask, “Can we ever have such a perfect filter that none of our unconscious desires would seep into our conscious thought and speech?” Freud would probably offer that that is the true center, and the ultimate objective, of psychoanalysis.