Chapter Fifteen: Orders of the imaginary—Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams and the literature of classical modernity

The European Enlightenment all but imposed a ban on interpretation by declaring the dream to be the epitome of the absence of meaning. It fell to Sigmund Freud’s theory of dreams to release the dream from the stranglehold prompted by this designation. Psychoanalysis constitutes the first scientific system since the oneirocritic of classical antiquity purporting to construe the dream according to the idea of a strict inherent structure. The productive literary impact of Freud’s interpretation of dreams reveals itself where one extends its model of a language-like approach to the preconscious to the narrative structures themselves. Freud opened up several new fields in the theory of dreams capable of developing productive forces in the practice of interpretation. When considering the epistemological architecture of Freud’s theory, each of the single fields may, in turn, be attributed four central concepts: thought, space, language, and time.