ABSTRACT
The hallucinatory function of dreams is, in fact, foregrounded by Anna Freud with the analysis of the dream of the burning child—a dream that realizes its goal without any disguise through the manifest figuration of the still living child. Freud undoubtedly found himself hindered by the direction impelled by his first discovery, which tied symptoms to memory and memory to an exogenous trauma. The fact that Freud must strive to form a “plastic representation” of what, in fact, pertains to the plastic arts of presentation—of which Galton’s “family portraits” are one of the metaphors—signals the extent to which the dream-work diverts language from its function. If Freud’s project is Kantian in any way, it is specifically insofar as its aim is anti-metaphysical. Freud’s project is therefore an anti-metaphysical project par excellence insofar as the point is to bear “ignorance” rather than sustain the illusion fuelled by the wish to overstep the limits of knowledge.
