ABSTRACT
The introduction is divided into two parts: a theoretical outline and a list of chapter summaries. The theoretical outline offers an overview of the central theses, as well as a summary of the psychoanalytic terms to be situated linguistically: displacement (metonymy), condensation (metaphor), overdetermination, secondary revision, inversion, repression, projection, and parapraxes (i.e., speech errors). These constitute the polyvalent mechanisms that structure dreams and unconscious thought processes, and that progress along the continuum of unconscious–preconscious–consciousness. These mechanisms inform the evolution and processing of language. It is emphasized that Freud theorized a linguistic configuration of consciousness that emerges in the process of identity formation. The chapter summaries describe the argumentation and structural progression of the proposed theses.
