ABSTRACT
The unconscious of the structuralist may be compared with a “thinking machine”; the unconscious of psychoanalysis can be likened to a battlefield of warring forces, hidden deep in the psyche, sometimes betraying itself by inducing somatic changes and emitting coded messages. The attempt by the anthropologist Kuper and the psychiatrist Stone to restudy Freud’s specimen dream (“the dream of Irma’s injection”) reveals how irreconcilable psychoanalysis and structuralism are. Structuralists also recognize a distinction between surface and underlying phenomena. They, like psychoanalysts, insist that outward appearances are often misleading. This insight of Freud seems more acceptable than the authors’ assumption that the dream represents an argument that reaches its culmination in the last sentences, when it is discovered that the illness is “organic sexual-hysterical.” A combination of elements from the manifest dream and from Freud’s associations can be linked to Emma’s case history.
