ABSTRACT
Freud’s patients presented themselves to him with their symptoms, their conversion reactions, their obsessions, their phobias, and so forth. And, through the act of listening to these patients, Freud discovered, he created the notion of the unconscious, the Other Scene, and he, in the most classical phase of his work, worked through an act of reading these symptoms and dreams and Witz and lapsus differently. Psychoanalytic interpretation seemed to lose its efficacy at this moment, and people might understand that from within the very context of this notion of “reading otherwise:” reading unconscious formations through the lens of the Oedipus complex no longer worked at the very moment analysands were themselves reading it in those terms. The act of the analyst in interpretation is the act of punctuation. An exclamation point might highlight a word or phrase. A question mark introduces equivocation. An ellipsis erases a long stretch of blah to bring two important words of the analysand together.
