Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

Freudian psychoanalysis 95
Latent elements also appear in the manifest content via a chain of association or allusion
Freud calls displacement. This process works in two ways:
In the first, a latent element is replaced not by a component part of itself but by
something more remote – that is, by an allusion; and in the second, the psychical
accent is shifted from an important element on to another which is unimportant,
so that the dream appears differently centred and strange (248).
This first aspect of displacement operates along chains of association in which
what is in the manifest content alludes to something in the latent dream thoughts.
If, for example, I know someone who works as a schoolteacher, she may appear in
my dreams as a satchel. In this way, affect (the emotional intensity attached to the
figure) is shifted from its source (she who works in a school), to something associated
with her working in a school. Or if I know someone called Clarke, she may
appear in my dreams as someone working in an office. Again, affect has been moved
along a chain of association from the name of someone I know to an activity associated
with her name. I may have a dream situated in an office, in which I observe
someone working at a desk (it may not even be a woman), but the ‘essence’ of my
dream is a woman I know called Clarke. These examples work metonymically in terms
of similarity based on contraction: a part standing in for a whole. The second mechanism
of displacement changes the focus of the dream. What appears in the manifest
content is ‘differently centred from the dream-thoughts – its content has different
elements as its central point’ (1976: 414). ‘With the help of displacement the dreamcensorship
creates substitutive structures which . . . are allusions which are not easily
recognizable as such, from which the path back to the genuine thing is not easily
traced, and which are connected with the genuine thing by the strangest, most unusual,
external associations’ (1973a: 272). He illustrates this second aspect of displacement
with a joke.
There was a blacksmith in a village, who had committed a capital offence. The
Court decided that the crime must be punished; but as the blacksmith was the only
one in the village and was indispensable, and as on the other hand there were three
tailors living there, one of them was hanged instead (2009: 249).
In this example, the chain of association and affect has shifted dramatically. To get
back to the blacksmith from the fate of one of the tailors would require a great deal of
analysis, but the central idea seems to be: ‘Punishment must be exacted even if it does
not fall upon the guilty’ (1984: 386). Moreover, as he explains, ‘No other part of the
dream-work is so much responsible for making the dream strange and incomprehensible
to the dreamer. Displacement is the principal means used in the dream-distortion
to which the [latent] dream-thoughts must submit under the influence of the censorship’
(1973b: 50).
The third aspect of the dream-work, operative in the first two, is symbolization,
the ‘translation of dream-thoughts into a primitive mode of expression similar to