ABSTRACT
Each is epiphenomenally vivid and yet immediately dismantled by the arrival of emerging ideas, dispersing the hegemony of any event by the work of the unconscious that keeps moving the self. ‘The laws that govern the passage of events in the unconscious’, writes Freud in ‘An outline of psychoanalysis’, ‘are remarkable enough. Above all there is a striking tendency to condensation, an inclination to form fresh unities out of elements which in our waking thought we should certainly have kept separate’ (1940: 167). And though we may dwell on newly formed unities, Freud’s theory of the dream work attends to the movement of thought itself, working to break up former unities as it recombines them in new complexes.
