Freud’s Unconscious - The Psychoanalysis of a Dream, and its Dreamer 

I can interpret dreams, I predicted an eclipse when I had a dream of a frying pan over a gas range, and the flames were licking around it like the Corona of the sun, I say to myself, that's like the eclipse and one happened a few days after. I started having extra vivid dreams after 2012 when I was afraid of the talk about the Mayan calendar. Now I can smell and taste in my dreams and everything.

Of course I read the bible in 2012, I think the bible is a mystical book of the dead meant for prediction not morality really, not meant for everyone, maybe not for me either.

Can you suggest some reading on this ?

@@02khal Well, that was just an observation that came to my mind. It's highly disputable. I did recently read an essay by Enzo Melandri, "La Linea e il Circolo", that goes deep into the structure of exegesis, but that book has not been translated, that I know of. I am relying on his analysis of the four (three plus one) levels of interpretation, which is the most satisfactory I ever encountered. I suspect that Peirce looked into the same problems but I don't know where specifically you can find it.

@@lucassiccardi8764 I see. I can start looking for Enzo Melandri and Searls. Thank you !

@@02khal Wait! It's Peirce, not Searle!

@@lucassiccardi8764 Alright ! Thanks a lot !

Yes, see the link in the video description. The paper is in that collection - that's the one I quote from in the video. Owen

all that circumscribed circular over intellectualized rhetoric of desire and signifiers is BS. O'Donoghue hit the mark! Freud did the right thing to end the analysis. Jews were certainly in every way under the gun!

Good point

Why?

@@finding3384 its a term freud spends a good amount of energy exploring the term unheimlich in the sense of uncanny. but given its alternate meaning of counterfeit and freuds family history of counterfeiting currency, perhaps that is why freud felt he must "reveal its secret"

What's disheartening about 2 points of view? I find that quite admirable.

And how do you objectively interpret a dream but by definition it will be just an interpretation.

Hi Ali, well one problem with that suggestion would be that it’s counterfactual. Freud addresses this criticism in the Introductory Lectures (SE XV, p.48-49) where he says if you ask someone what they associate with abc and they say xyz you can’t dismiss that on the grounds that it could just as well have been anything else. You have to respect the fact that THIS is what occurred to the dreamer rather than anything else. The comparison Freud uses is from chemistry - say you wanted to find out the weight of something, you placed it on the scales and took the reading, you wouldn’t be able to dismiss that reading on the basis that it could just as well have weighed anything else. In terms of your reference to language - I think you’re confusing A language (German, French) with language per se (as a structure of differential signifiers). It’s the structure we’re interested in here, and that’s what you see at work in how the dream is constructed. Sure, Freud can have ideas about books, cocaine, etc in German, French, or English. But the dream is not built according to an individual language but language as a signifying structure. To illustrate this, one of the associations Freud makes to the screen memory of the girl with the flowers which he connects to this dream is the French term ‘pissenlit’ (‘dandelion’ in English). The yellow of the dandelions evokes the yellow of the girl’s dress, if I remember correctly (Leclaire actually writes about this in his paper but I chose to leave it out of the video for the sake of brevity). Freud sees that ‘pissenlit’ is a signifier and connects it to the memory of wetting his bed as a child and his father telling him he’ll never amount to anything - ‘piss en lit’ in French translates to ‘piss the bed’ in English. So you see how the ‘dream-work’ as Freud calls it uses the signifier totally irrespective of what language it’s in, only because as a signifier it connects thoughts (ideational content) from different contexts (two memories from childhood, represented by one signifier) that wouldn’t otherwise find conscious connection. As you know, this is what Freud calls condensation. Your point was premised on the idea of connecting thoughts in one language to signifiers in the same language. But as this example shows, that would be to miss the point. Hope that helps. Owen

It is a really interesting discussion. I think what Freud means by language is not restricted to the so-called alphabetic letter. There are numerous linguistic systems such as pictography, ideography, hieroglyphic, phonetic, alphabetic language, etc., which have undergone the non-linear phases of development according to each civilization. In brief, Freud’s concept of language should be considered to be the psychic apparatus which represents things and matters in a strati-graphic mode.

You're referring to the autonomy of the signifier, not the difference between parole and langue. Both are structural, the material of the dreamwork and the associations made by the dreamer are expressed by and in the speaker's parole, which is determined by langue. Making a connection between signifying functions from the material presented is drawing from parole, if you were analysing langue it wouldn't be subjective and it wouldn't have any value for the analysand since you would be simply analysing the language system as such; e.g., the example you gave about pissing the bed is a meaningful connection for the subject, not the language system. It is dependent on the language system, since parole depends on langue for its condition of possibility, but you are dealing with the structural relationships exhibited by one's parole, since the signifying functions you are interested cannot be reduced to properties of the language system as such but are expressions of the analysand (and the subject).