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The paradigm: Dreams are perfect—the bullet, the baby, the flying, the spider, the poison, the gift, the bodies, the love—all of these are perfect, entire, and real.
And when, awake, we escape the spider and bullet, lose the baby and lover, fly no longer—the perfect and entire is transformed into the remembered—suddenly, now, the partial and the fragmented.
This transformation, though, is merely apparent. Dreaming's perfection was, in fact, real; it remains intact—there and then, in that “other scene,” as Freud put it—even if not preserved, not eternal, not here and now, in this one.
And as for this waking state, well, it too is perfect and entire, ruled throughout—throughout—by cause, effect, and law.
Dreaming or awake, the conscious frame is always filled. There are no blank zones, for even were one to seem to appear, we would notice it, name it—“blank,” say—and thus, by virtue of the mere name, keep the frame full.
This fullness—fully determined, that is—gives expression to each zone's perfection. Once filled, nothing in the frame can be otherwise.
Psychoanalysis takes root at the intersection of these two incompatible zones of perfection. We map that intersection, monitor its traffic, the passage back and forth of force and meaning, and we give that intersection a name: we call it “mind.” The theory's grounding terms—wish and drive—regulating the intersction's traffic, simultaneously bind and keep separate these two zones.
The origin of both wish and drive is the body, while their common sites of operation are the representations of the body in the mind.