ABSTRACT
As my opening quotation implies, Freud was troubled by the discrepancy between the novelistic quality of psychoanalytic discourse as it emerged in his writings, and his wish to establish psychoanalysis as a science. But for him there was no fundamental difficulty in reconciling these two facets of his project. He viewed the unconscious rather in the way that today’s neuroimaging experts see the brain-an organ that is inaccessible and in many ways mysterious but which, given the right technology, can be clearly illuminated and if necessary manipulated. For him, that technology was the psychoanalytic method: free association, dream interpretation, the analysis of transference. His basic model remained that of dream interpretation, which he devised at the outset of psychoanalysis. The patient brings to treatment an incomplete and incomprehensible story-whether of a dream or a symptom. By reconstructing the underlying unconscious story, psychoanalysis fills in the missing gaps and so rearranges the confusion until it forms a coherent narrative. As in a good detective novel, the culprit-usually unconscious infantile wishes-is finally identified and brought to book.
