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As with dreams, Freud discovered the inordinate usefulness of a fixed, immutable text in literature to demonstrate the expertise of his newly-invented, singular creation, psychoanalysis. It was expedient to show his first psychoanalytic formulations to the public, as creator and author in his own right (not the joint author of Studies on Hysteria, 1893-5, which were ‘studies’, ‘essays’, we might say ‘work-in-progress’, without the fuller confidence of the work on dreams) in the analysis and interpretation of dreams.
For dreams, like literature, were, and are, symbolic artefacts with a clinical basis. Someone dreams, and someone fictionalises, so that a human figure, dreamer or artist, can be claimed from behind the artefact, and, by means of this obvious link, the validation of the psychoanalytic process and the demonstration of its methodology can be attempted. How the dream and the dreamer, and the literary creation and its creator, connect was to become, through Freud, the stuff of history, and the continuing outpouring of psychoanalytic writings, good, bad and indifferent, has followed from it.
This fixed immutability of text, of terra firma (dream, slip of the tongue, joke, and thence, with increased confidence, play, poem, poetic or dramatic character, thence artistic character, or, indeed, virtually any art-form), so unlike the vagaries and