On the One Hand Dreaming, on the Other—Writing

I find myself for a moment in the interesting position of not knowing whether what I have to say should be regarded as something long familiar and obvious or as something entirely new and puzzling. But I am inclined to think the latter. (Freud, 1938/1964, p.275)

A writer today couldn't be blamed for wishing their contribution to be both new and puzzling; however, the new and the puzzling are produced by an engine that runs on more than wishes—be they new or repressed—alone. I'd like to use the following essay to test the relationship between writing and a phenomenon in psychoanalysis typically associated with the new and puzzling—the dream—and see how the question of what psychoanalytic writing is might be elaborated by its links with and departures from an account of the dreamt experience.

It seems to me that analytic writing—namely the writing of analytic work by practitioners, and “practitioners” accounting for analysts and analysands alike—must acknowledge and utilize certain limits (and their resultant rims, edges, etc.) as marks of implication. The dream might be thought of as the fundamental site in psychoanalysis where an encounter with the limit (of both consciousness and of logical sensibility) takes place. What's more, for reasons that follow from Freud's own work, the writing of analysis, itself bound up with the formation of an analyst, may also be understood as the writing of dreams. Or, said differently, for some, in writing, something of a dreaming occurs. Some others dream yet-written books.

I have frequently found myself returning to a passage from Erik Porge's Truth and Knowledge in the Clinic: Working with Freud and Lacan (2016), with specific attention to the relationship between analytic formation and the marking of an analysis' conclusion through the act of publication. Referring to Freud's reflections on the deferred publication of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900/1953), Porge (2016) notes:

Freud does not say that the Traumdeutung (known as ‘