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Dreaming plague and plaguing dreams: the teachings of psychoanalysis

2008; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 22; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09502360802271454

1470-1308

Jennifer Cooke,

Psychotherapy Techniques and Applications

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes This comment has been passed on, from Freud to Jung to Lacan, who uses it in his paper ‘The Freudian Thing’. See: Jacques Lacan, ‘The Freudian Thing’, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 128. Despite extensive searching through the published letters and diaries of Jung and Freud around this time period, I can find no other reference to this comment other than Lacan's claim in ‘The Freudian Thing’ that he had it ‘from Jung's own mouth’, p. 128. Jacques Lacan, ‘The Freudian Thing’, p. 128. The infectiousness of the Oedipus complex, its reception and its relation to the plague of Oedipus the King is discussed in considerable depth in my doctoral thesis, entitled But I Ain't Dead: Legacies of Plague from Defoe to Romero. Sigmund Freud, ‘On Dreams’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. V: 1900–1901, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1963), p. 642. In German: Sigmund Freud, Gesammelte Werke II/III Die Traumdeutung, Über den Traum (London: Imago Publishing, 1942), p. 655. This text is used for references to Die Traumdeutung [The Interpretation of Dreams] as well. Where clear, all page numbers will be given in parenthesis within the text. Where the German or French is provided, the page reference follows its English counterpart, separated by a forward slash. In their turn, these typical dreams lead back to plague: the section of The Interpretation entitled ‘Dreams of the Death of Persons of Whom the Dreamer is Fond’ is also where Freud first describes (but does not yet name) the Oedipus complex. As part of this, he gives an account of Sophocles' play and makes mention of the Theban plague. See: Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, PFL 4, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 363. Antonin Artaud, ‘The Theatre and the Plague’, Theatre and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), p.18. Where the French is given: Antonin Artaud, Oeuvres Complètes IV (Paris: Gallimard, 1978). There is a question of telepathy here; a telepathic communication between plague and man. Freud was interested in the possibilities of telepathy and its potential role in dreams. In a very short comment upon occult dreams, Freud proposes to discuss prophetic dreams, which he repudiates strongly, and telepathic dreams. However, he does not discuss telepathic dreams but instead an incident upon which a fortune teller predicted a future for a woman which didn't come true. Freud is interested because the numbers and details of the prophecy were not without significance in the woman's life even though the prophecy was incorrect. He suggests that ‘a strong wish on the part of the questioner – the strongest unconscious wish, in fact, of her whole emotional life and the motive force of her impending neurosis – had made itself manifest to the fortune-teller by being directly transferred to him while his attention was being distracted by the performances he was going through’. Interesting, in the light of the discussion to come, Freud calls this ‘thought-transference’. Freud's attempt to banish prophetic dreams brings him back to the (future orientated) wish and a scene of prophecy and infectious transference. See: Sigmund Freud, ‘Some Additional Notes on Dream Interpretation as a Whole’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIV: 1923–1925, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute for Psycho-Analysis, 1961), p. 138. Discussing Freud on dreams and telepathy, Jacques Derrida comments, ‘in its purity, the concept of telepathic dream appeals to the perception of something external with regard to which psychic life would behave in a “receptive and passive” manner’. This brings us back to Artaud's suggestion. See: Jacques Derrida, ‘“Telepathy”’, Deconstruction: A Reader, ed. Martin McQuillan (New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 518. Jean-Noël Biraben, Les hommes et la peste en France et dans les pays européens et méditerranéens, Tome I (Paris: Mouton, 1975), pp. 233–5. Hélène Cixous seems to recognize the possibility of psychic infection in dreams when she writes ‘dreams have brought me news of a few virosignifiers’ in ‘The Unforseeable’, The Oxford Literary Review, 26 (2004), p. 178. This is again what is asserted in the short paper, ‘Some Additional Notes on Dream Interpretation as a Whole’ and implied in the even shorter ‘A Premonitory Dream Fulfilled’, which attempts, in a rather convoluted way, to show how what a patient deemed to be a prophetic dream was in fact the resurfacing of a wish from her past; nothing, Freud is sure, but a wish fulfillment which had disguised itself and been retrospectively identified as prophetic. See: Sigmund Freud, ‘A Premonitory Dream Fulfilled’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. V: 1900–1901, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1958), pp. 623–5. I thank Susanne Sklepek for assisting with my German translation throughout this chapter. David Wills, Prosthesis (Stamford CA: Stamford University Press, 1995), p. 116. Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, in their authoritative guide to the terminology of psychoanalysis, note that Freud uses Wunsch more frequently than the terms Begierde or Lust, which evoke ‘the notion of desire’, p. 482.The whole problem of transference from one language to another is raised by this little grouping. In English there is an obvious difference in nuance and usage between desire and lust but they both share a sexual connotation, whereas wish usually does not. In French, Laplanche and Pontalis's language, there is only désir, since wish does not have a cognate. Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Karnac Books, 1988), pp. 481–3. Maud Ellmann makes a similar point in her introduction to the collection of essays entitled Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism: ‘Yet Freud came to realize that a gut resistance to psychoanalysis often signified a deeper recognition of its dangers than a prompt assimilation of its principles. A little indigestion was a healthy sign’. Maud Ellmann, ed., Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism (London and New York: Longman, 1994), p. 1. She goes on to observe that Freud extended this to his whole oeuvre: ‘Freud tended to regard all criticism of his theories as a symptom of resistance to unwelcome truths’, p. 2. The dictionary was begun by the Grimm brothers in 1838 but not fully completed until 1960. Freud, ‘On Dreams’, p. 650. Strachey's translation renders this clause: ‘in complete contrast to the desires which were now plaguing me in my dreams’. The slight difference in tense, coupled with the insertion ‘now’, lose the sense of a repeated and continual activity which the original German carries. Ernest Jones, The Life and Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume I: The Young Freud, 1856–1900 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1954). A more literal translation renders this: ‘One should never let anything escape from oneself, take what one can get even if a small wrong is done alongside; one should miss no opportunity: life is so short and death is inevitable’ [Man soll sich nichts entgehen lassen, nehmen, was man haben kann, auch wenn ein kleines Unrecht dabei mitläuft; man soll keine Gelegenheit versäumen, das Leben ist so kurz, der Tod unvermeidlich], p. 213. See: Sigmund Freud, ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’, Art and Literature, PFL 14, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin Books, 1990), p. 134, where Freud links playing to phantasy and then to dreaming, stating of the underlying wishes: ‘These motivating wishes vary according to the sex, character and circumstances of the person who is having the phantasy; but they fall naturally into two groups. They are either ambitious wishes, which serve to elevate the subject's personality; or they are erotic ones’. Translations of these lines vary. David Luke translates them as ‘Suck on at Wisdom's breasts, you'll find / She daily grows more sweet and kind’ in Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, Faust Part One, trans. David Luke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 57. An earlier translation renders them very poorly as: ‘So you will suck the breasts of learning / With rising appetite and yearning’ in Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, Faust Part One, trans. Walter Arndt (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1976), p. 45. A more literal rendition would be ‘So with every day that passes / you will lust more and more after the breasts of wisdom’. My thanks to Keston Sutherland for assistance with this couplet. Neil Hertz, The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 149. Jacques Derrida, ‘To Speculate – “On Freud”‘, The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 339. Sigmund Freud, ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XXIII, ed. And trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1964), p. 248. The other ‘impossible profession’ listed by Freud is politics. Christopher Bollas, Cracking Up: The Work of Unconscious Experience (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 11. Freud, of course, maintained that the dream work, which Bollas believes is the model for all unconscious activity, does not think: ‘It [the dream work] does not think, calculate or judge in any way at all; it restricts itself to giving things a new form’, Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation, p. 650. Nevertheless, Freud does allow that dreams themselves ‘are a particular form of thinking’, Freud, The Interpretation, p. 650. The basic problem with Bollas's theory here for strict Freudians is the looseness with which he appropriates and deploys psychoanalytic terms: ‘dream’ is something the analyst can do while awake and listening with concentration; ‘unconscious thinking’ appears to be accessible, and in quite coherent ways, to conscious thought.