DIASPORIC LITERATURE - diasporic.org - eBooks4Greeks.gr

The Notion of the Dream-Work: What is the ‘dream work’?What ‘work’ does it do?Sophocles Kitharidismany dreams on the other. 44 However, Freud provides a defence against the accusationthat all dreams require a sexual interpretation. This assertion is alien to the fundamentalthesis of the Interpretation of Dreams. 45With ‘secondary vision’, the last of the four elements that Freud contends shaped thecontent of dreams, one can come to a phenomenon noted by many others besides Freud:‘the fact that we cannot directly know a dream, but can only recollect it.’ 46 Into thedream as remembered, therefore, ideas close to waking consciousness may be insertedas one wakes, possibly in an attempt to make sense of the dream story or to account forsensations at the moment of waking. Freud claimed that it was possible to recognise such‘alien’ elements in a dream report since they were qualitatively different from the rest ofthe dream. 47 It is clear that such elements lie relatively closer to what one calls daydreamsor waking fantasies than to the deeper thoughts of the dream proper. They appear asprepacked images, more logical, more direct and less disguised, as if the mind had alreadyconceived them and now attached them to some suitable point in the dream. 48 This is aninteresting idea that Freud more or less additionally placed into his argument, but onethat may prove to have more validity than some other conceptions to which he attachedgreater importance. Freud provides readers with the example of discussing Maury’s famousdream of being tried and guillotined during the French Revolution. Arguably, Freud soughtto find an explanation for the apparent speed of this long dream, how it was that it couldall be composed between the head rail of the bed hitting Maury’s neck and his almostimmediate awakening. One suggestion could be that Maury was having such a dreamand the rail provided a final lucky stimulus. But it is more suitable to pursue Freud’s ideathat Maury’s dream “represents a fantasy which had been stored up in his memory formany years and which was roused...at the moment he became aware of the stimuluswhich woke him.” 49 The story was clearly one that any Frenchman of Maury’s age couldhave imagined (or heard of a tale in childhood) not once, but many times, and have, asit were, held “available” for discharge under a suitable stimulus.Concluding, such a hypothesis fits into the universal notion of dreaming as a ‘fantasy’,with its purpose being for modern psychology and physiology directing renewed attentionand research. It is, in fact, a conception that, though Freud employs it only as a possibleexplanation of some arousal dreams, may be capable of explaining many dream phenomenathat he deals with entirely differently. 50 Significantly, the four elements of the dream-workprovide psychoanalysts with the ability to interpret the representation of dreams with theassistance of symbolism, condensation, displacement and of course secondary revision.44Ibid.45Ibid.46MacKenzie, loc. cit.47Ibid.48Ibid.49Ibid., p. 171.50Ibid.92 Diasporic Literature/Διασπορική Λογοτεχνία/Literatura de Diasporic - http://diasporic.orgIssue 1 Vol. 1, Μarch 2011