The Interpretation of Dreams: Rand and Torok

The orthodox narrative of the history of psychoanalysis and Freud’s theorizing place a radical schism between the Project and The Interpretation of Dreams. Though The Interpretation of Dreams is different in that it deals with the theme of infantile sexuality, it also sets up a metapsychology that has many resemblances to the Project’s apparatus. Because infantile sexuality requires fantasies to be privileged over memories, the metapsychology of The Interpretation of Dreams would be about a machine of the psyche which would be primarily of fantasy, in contrast to the supposedly mnemic one of the Project. I will return to the themes of fantasy and memory below, but here I want to focus on what seems similar between the Project and The Interpretation of Dreams–indeed, what suggests that there was a great deal of continuity across the supposed schism. As I read the Project above, I read The Interpretation of Dreams as having a strong version of the tension between an ethos of mobile versus immobile texts at the origin. Because The Interpretation of Dreams describes self-present qualities independent of the differences between forces, as with the w system or ego in the Project, it does not necessarily qualify as a candidate for Derrida’s preferred "scene of writing." Though a différance-type "scene of writing" is missing from The Interpretation of Dreams, there are aspects of its metapsychology that create space for such a machine: uneasy elements with respect to logocentric repression.

The first part of Rand and Torok’s Questions for Freud: The Secret History of Psychoanalysis, "Fundamental Contradictions in Freudian Thought," is divided into two chapters. In the first chapter, "Dream Interpretation: Free Association and Universal Symbolism," Rand and Torok try to illustrate what they believe is an aporia within The Interpretation of Dreams by giving evidence of Freud stressing two "orientations" of dream interpretation, free association and symbolism, which they argue are fundamentally "incompatible," constituted by "contrary principles" (22), and "mutually exclusive" according to what they see as "the necessary logical conclusion" (23). They conclude that Freud’s approach to dream interpretation is conflicted and The Interpretation of Dreams is an "ambivalent book" (22). I agree that The Interpretation of Dreams is an ambivalent book, but not because of Freud’s inability to decide on a privileged method of interpretation between two supposedly mutually exclusive methods. Indeed, I do not see these two supposed methods as necessarily conflictual, and the context that allows for them not to conflict was a privileged one of Freud’s thought: the context of the immobile text at the origin.

Laplanche and Pontalis define free association as follows: "Method according to which voice must be given to all thoughts without exception which enter the mind [of the analysand]" (Lap67 169). Free association is not so much a mode of interpretation as a methodological tenet to be followed by the analysand to assist the analyst’s interpretation. Freud’s use of "free" here does not mean that he sees these associations as being outside of any determinative order. How could they be when he sees the psychical order as a deterministic one? "Free" here means that the association is allowed to be, at least somewhat, outside the order by which conscious selection works. It is, however, very much an effect of what the censors of that order might have missed (have not distorted). Ideally the analysand’s associations would be more free of the distortions of consciousness so that the relationship can be revealed between his or her supposedly unique order of consciousness (which is connected to the chance of "external reality") and what Freud saw as the more universal and very deterministic order of the unconscious (not connected to chance at all for Freud). In other words, Freud believed that it was via free association that the analyst could discover the relationship between the analysand’s conscious and unconscious orders by getting past the distortions and censorship of consciousness and its secondary elaboration of the unconscious material.

Symbolism is pretty straightforward: there is a transcendental, one-to-one relation between signifier and signified. For Freud, symbolism was "a kind of cryptography in which each sign can be translated into another sign having a known meaning, in accordance with a fixed key" (V 97-8). With symbolism, translation would then be the methodology, and an original text would be required, albeit a latent one. Again, Freud also believed in the transcendence of this key: "There is, in the first place, the universality of symbolism in language … Moreover, symbolism disregards differences of language; investigation would probably show that it is ubiquitous–the same for all peoples" (XXIII 98-9). What Freud describes here is a Symbolic with a capital "S," as Lacan would write it later. Lacan would base his psychoanalytic Weltanschauung on a symbolism of his "castration-truth," phallocentric Symbolic. If we combine Freud’s belief in an unconscious order and free association as a means of getting past the idiosyncratic relationship of the analysand to that order, then we can see how symbolism could be used with the free associations of the analysand in order to discover that analysand’s idiosyncratic relationship to the supposedly universal order of the unconscious–its original immobile text. The ambivalence of The Interpretation of Dreams, in fact, has to do with the nature of this unconscious order and whether it is an order, as he posited repeatedly, or something else altogether, for which his theories here sometimes left room. In relation to what Freud usually posited as the oedipal transcendental order of the unconscious, free association and symbolism do not necessarily constitute ambivalence in The Interpretation of Dreams or anywhere else.

Where Rand and Torok’s argument is most convincing is with respect to Freud’s conception of the dreamer’s role in interpretation, though this point too stems from a misunderstanding of free association as mutually exclusive from symbolism. They quote passages from The Interpretation of Dreams that seem diametrically opposed with respect to the dreamer’s role, such as this one from a footnote:

And a little further on: "Symbols allow us in certain circumstances to interpret a dream without questioning the dreamer, who indeed would in any case have nothing to tell us about the symbol" (XVI 151). Rand and Torok’s argument makes the same (false) assumption Freud makes in the footnote passage above: that this so-called "free association method" creates a situation in which the dreamer is more involved with the interpretation than with symbolism where the dreamer is supposedly not involved. Again, free-association is one mode of providing signifiers. A symbolist approach is one way of combining a signified to a signifier to create a sign that would then be a part of an interpretation, a complex of signs supposedly connected according to some logical or narrative structure. Rand and Torok seem to confuse free-association with a mode of interpretation and seem to assume that it would be one more "free" of universalist methods and more individualistic. The last assumption Freud makes above–symbolism does not require the dreamer’s input–is simply wrong: even with symbolism the dreamer must at least provide the signifiers to be referenced with the dream book, either by some mode of "free" association or some mode more conscious or more determined by the patient’s typical way of relating to his or her unconscious.

We could even say that the transcendental order determined by a dreambook is not necessarily as specific as Freud’s transcendental order, and the interpretation process with the dream book does not necessarily lead to a single source, a singular caput Nili. For example, the dreamer could come up with three signifiers, which would make for three signs when put through the dreambook processor. Even assuming there is a one-to-one relationship between signifiers and signified in dream books, which is not usually the case, these three signs could still be put together in myriad ways. Ironically, the footnote passage above suggests that the free associations of the dreamer necessarily leads the dreamer to an interpretation that seems unavoidable, as if there were a transcendental logical or narrative structure for the signs to be stuck into. With regard to the tension between transcendental structures of meaning and more individualistic ones that Rand and Torok mistakenly associate with free association, Rand and Torok present the ambivalence of The Interpretation of Dreams as follows: "Here are two simultaneous and incompatible Freudian positions: dream interpretation requires the dreamer’s participation; the interpretation of dreams has no need for the dreamer’s contribution" (15). They are interested in preserving "each person’s distinctive signification" and see Freud’s use of symbolism as a threat to this interest. What they fail to see is that Freud’s conception of free association does not necessarily give the task of interpretation to the dreamer. It does not necessarily give the dreamer a larger role in the interpretation process either. And neither does it necessarily respect any individuality of the dreamer, as Freud’s usually reductive interpretations illustrate. If the analyst is committed to a specific "key," as Freud always was–though the key would change according to the point being made and to where he was in his theorizing–the analysand’s free associations can be interpreted according to that key regardless of how contrary or different it may seem.
Rand and Torok ask the following questions: