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One does not have to belabor the significance of Freud's discovery of the Unconscious—least of all to an audience such as this. It was tantamount to learning that it is not only the earth that is not flat; neither is the mind. The laws of the Unconscious provided the compass coordinates for in-depth psychic navigation; the vessel for exploration was language. “In the Beginning was the Word” took on new meaning as Freud showed that diverse phenomena could be translated into words and thus rendered meaningful. Applied to therapeutics, the way was open for the first time to alleviate psychological symptoms by translating them psychoanalytically into language.
Psychoanalysis consists largely of fashioning new verbal constructs to bridge between unconscious thought-feelings and consciousness. One examines a dream as a pictorial rebus containing a disguised verbal message which, if decoded, can help illuminate the dreamer's unconscious mind. One may likewise search literature or mythology for latent unconscious motivation and defense to help account for the power of the work—though this by no means exhausts the meaning of either as maps of the values by which a given society deals with fundamental issues of birth, death, kinship or the transfer of power.
When it comes to nonverbal art like painting or music, however, we come up against special problems. Viewing art as a rebus may provide educated guesses as what the work might have consciously and unconsciously meant to the artist in terms of expressing and mastering underlying personal conflicts. By now, every point on the psychopathological compass