ABSTRACT
The theoretical labour of ‘The interpretation of dreams’ is not the interpretation of dreams, but the postulation of the unconscious for which the dream is offered as evidence. If interpreting dreams was all that it had accomplished, then Freud’s study of dreams would not have the theoretical interest it does. But it is as an argument for the unconscious that the work’s impact can be seen, and the dream is its extended case-study. The unconscious is presented as an entity, in a diagrammatic way; as a place of images. But in the dream rhetoric—and inherent in the logic of the ‘primary process’— the unconscious is also presented as an operation. In fact, the book is remarkable for its confluence of three metaphorics. There is that of textual exegesis, in which Freud suggests the notion of reading in referring to the dream interpretation of the ancients (which is also an arcane art, proximate to sorcery). There are the metaphors of catharsis and healing—in the medical setting of the work, but further, in the attention given to the disturbances of spirit, the passions, to pain and in the excursion into the deepest confidences kept in the dream. And there are the metaphors of hydraulics: industrial metaphors of process, production, mechanism and apparatus—all the romances of nineteenth-century science.
