ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud realised he had stumbled on a powerful explanatory tool and began to apply it to other psychological phenomena. Jokes, parapraxes, slips of the tongue, and neurotic symptoms were, in turn, illuminated by its heuristic searchlight, and before long he had used it to unravel the mystery of dreams. Psychoanalysis has always been vulnerable to criticism from the scientific community, and if Freud felt that his scientific reputation was at stake, the need to present his ideas in a "scientific" language would have been intense. The scientific requirement of "objectivity" is at variance with "story-like" origins, and it might be for this reason that Freud recast his clinical ideas in such an experience-distant form. With some poetic licence, it could be said that word presentation, thing presentation, the censorship and the not quite explicit translator, emerge as the principal dramatis personae in Freud's latent topography of the mind.
