The Interpretation of Dreams: Weber

In a footnote added to The Interpretation of Dreams in 1914, Freud makes it clear that he thinks that the essence of dreams should be looked for in the dream-work, the resistance of the dreamer, and not in the latent dream-thoughts (V 579n1). At this time in his work (1914), Freud was not as interested in discovering the destination-origin of the "royal road" in the form of dream-thoughts and dream-wishes because, as I will argue below, he felt he had already discovered the components of what was primal in the unconscious. Focusing on the dream-work suggested that what is important is the individual’s personal relation to the truth of the dream-thoughts. Because this truth included the themes of incest and infantile sexuality, themes Freud considered to be transcendentally noxious to any conscious order that might be produced within a civilization, the dream-work would then constitute the analysand’s unique way of not presenting, "de-presenting" "Ent-stellung" (Web82), a dream-wish based on that truth, or Truth.

At the time The Interpretation of Dreams was written, however, Freud was more ambivalent with respect to the nature of the unconscious, to the extent that he was even ambivalent about whether its bedrock constituted an order or not, though he leaned toward the side of order. Freud’s ambivalence with respect to this issue constitutes what I consider to be the actual ambivalence of The Interpretation of Dreams. The Freud of The Interpretation of Dreams certainly felt he had access to many universal aspects of desire, Oedipus being for the most part introduced there–but he also made speculations that subverted anyone having such access. In order to highlight those aspects of The Interpretation of Dreams that suggest something otherwise than having such access–that is, to suggest that Freud had not decided on what was primal regarding the unconscious, and whether this issue was decidable–I turn away from Rand and Torok’s chapter in Questions to a chapter in Weber’s The Legend of Freud called "The Meaning of the Thallus," where we find his reading of The Interpretation of Dreams. Weber begins:

In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud would at rare times disrupt his own goal of establishing the ubiquity of meaning, the order of the unconscious. What is at stake in Weber’s reading of The Interpretation of Dreams is Freud’s position with respect to the ubiquity of meaning and, therefore, the possibility and certainty of interpretation–or, as Derrida writes, whether psychoanalytic reason constitutes hermeneutic reason. Weber’s argument, like Derrida’s in Resistances of Psychoanalysis, centers on the short passage I quoted above, and which Weber believes is possibly the "most celebrated passage" in The Interpretation of Dreams. I quote it again here, but this time translated by Weber:

Weber argues that this passage is not simply Freud "perched on the threshold of metapsychology, on the border that ostensibly divides the transparent realm of dream-interpretation from the obscurities of speculation … only to discover, or describe, a shadowy place in the midst of the light" (ibid.). There is also the self-assured Freud who knows what this absence is about, where it is located, "because of its obscurity": "It is as if its shadowy contours are all the more readily identifiable, localizable, by virtue of the clarity against which they are silhouetted" (76). In The Post Card, Derrida shows Lacan making the same move with his letter and conception of truth, the absence of castration locating the letter’s destination within its silhouette:

Lacan’s destinational linguistics maps out Freud’s "royal road" as a "circular path" with a destination-origin and a version of a Nietzschean eternal return. Freud’s navel is also a knot that constitutes a trace, an absence as mark, signifying the mother’s absence. Whence Freud’s security as he gazes into the "navel of the dream"; he sees a navel, the absence of the mother, castration (the absence of the mother), and not an abyss. Weber argues,

And what could be more reassuring than if this navel represented the destination-origin of a circular path? Lacan even goes beyond Freud by assuming the centrality of the navel and therefore the structure of the unconscious, since every center has a structure. Weber suggests another connection between Freud and Lacan when he focuses on Freud’s confidence that, despite the supposed obscurity of the navel, the dream-thoughts have, according to Freud, "made no further contributions to the dream content." Weber wonders how Freud could know this given that the navel represents the unknown. How could there be certainty that the navel represents some kind of end point? Both Freud and Lacan seem to know the pathway and destination in question, even though the Thing (das Ding) itself eludes interpretation–or because the Thing eludes interpretation. As Derrida shows with his reading of Lacan, centering the navel is not so much the unknowable being seen as the unknown, as it is transforming the unknowable into a specific absence of the presence that centers knowledge, of reducing the Other to more of the phallic Same: the primary trope of psychoanalysis. All that is Other is transformed into the "absence of the mother" at the center, a specific absence where she (her desire for the phallus, her lack) figures its transcendental presence. "Castration-truth" is the magical trope that secures logocentrism at the same time that it secures the One of hom(m)osexuality. Phallocentrism, via "castration-truth," becomes a dominant mode of logocentrism. Are there other modes? Other magical, material-ideal tropes that can perform the same tricks? Is "castration-truth" the actual "Freudian breakthrough"? I will return to this more general question in the concluding chapter.

As will be the case throughout my project, the more specific question for me here becomes: should we read Freud as Derrida has read Lacan, in terms of "castration-truth"? Contrary to Lacan’s reading of the "navel of the dream" passage–a reading Weber calls Lacan’s "Baedeker" (79)–Freud’s passage above, according to Weber, resists such simple "mappings" (ibid.), and even resists the confidence and suggested decidability Freud asserts within the same passage. "If Freud’s description of this navel differs from Lacan’s," according to Weber, "it is precisely because it brings into movement just what Lacan seeks to arrest: the very notion and place of a center" (80). Weber’s evidence for this claim first focuses on Freud’s phrase "dem Unerkannten aufsitzt," which Strachey translates as "straddles the unknown." Zooming in on "aufsitzt" or "straddles," Weber refers to the O.E.D. and its many definitions that suggest the action of spreading and moving apart, and also notes a synonym from botany, divaricate: "To stretch or spread apart; to branch off or diverge" (qt. in Weber 80). The "navel of the dream" is read through "dem Unerkannten aufsitzt" by Weber as "an untenable alternative" which Freud "straddles" (81): what I call, following Derrida, undecidability. The reference to botany leads Weber to focus on the last line of the passage–"Out of one of the denser places in this meshwork, the dream-wish rises [erhebt sich] like a mushroom out of its mycelium"–and his next piece of evidence that Freud–unlike Lacan and his "castration-truth" Baedeker of the Symbolic–is interested in the dream as dis-location, "ent-stellt" (81). Referring again to the O.E.D., Weber finds the following for "mycelium": "Mycelium. (f. Gr. mykes mushroom, after epithelium) Bot. The vegetative part of the thallus of fungi, consisting of white filamentous tubes (hyphae); the spawn of mushrooms" (qtd. in Weber, 81). And for "thallus": "(Gr. thallos, green shoot, f. thállein to bloom) Bot. A vegetable structure without vascular tissue, in which there is no differentiation into stem and leaves, and from which true roots are absent" (ibid.). Weber contrasts Freud’s undecidable metaphor of the thallus with Lacan’s phallocentric reading of the navel’s absence:

Weber sees Freud’s thallus metaphor as constituted of negations and therefore analogous to "that form of language that the unconscious employs to render itself accessible to consciousness while avoiding repression" (82). Weber shows that Freud’s metaphor subverts Freud’s own confidence regarding the ubiquity of meaning and Freud’s own knowledge of what lies beyond the horizon of interpretation. Interpretation’s straddling of the dream-navel, and the thallus (non-roots) at the root or origin of the dream (the dream-wish), both suggest the undecidability of an unknowable rather than an unknown. This movement and undecidability, for Weber, suggest the unknowable, a différance and not a specific absence of meaning: a non-original mobile textuality rather than an original immobile text. Though I find Weber’s reading to be powerful and convincing, "straddle" (aufsitzen) also connotes a mode of controlling, as when one straddles a horse in order to ride it; and a thallus, though not a proper root, could be said to be a pseudo-root for those things that grow in very dark places. It is still cylindrical and tubular, and can be read as a metaphor of the origin–a phallic origin.

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