‘The Witch's Kitchen’, Freud, ‘Faust’, and the Transference.: By Sabine Prokhoris. Translated by G. M. Goshgarian. With a Foreword by Monique Schneider. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. 1988. Pp. 195.

Dreams and dreaming are the unsure ground upon which the activity Freud designated as ‘psychoanalysis’ is based. His starting-point for reading and attempting to understand mental activity was dreaming—nocturnal mental functioning as opposed to that of the daytime mind—and his own nocturnal productivity in particular, relayed in fragments in letters to his friend Fliess.

The formal rendering of this unsure ground came in the first psychoanalytic text, the one in which Freud took greatest pride throughout his life, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900, S.E. 4-5). Without dreams and dreaming (and thereafter daytime phantasising and all that followed from that) and Freud's lifelong study of them, informal and fragmentary, prescribed formally in his metapsychological texts or theory of mind, we could say there could not have been ‘psychoanalysis’, something else perhaps.

The meaning of ‘unsure’ in this context is that of unknowing, or undermining knowing, or in contrast or counterpoint to knowing, to address the essential and defining paradox at the heart of Freud's revelations and thinking about dreams and dreaming. It is also to retain the meaning that is usual, that ‘unsure’ means unsteady, unclear, unlit, with no easy path or route anywhere, indeed possibly a path away from clarity and security, a path towards illusion and delusion.

Starting with dreams and dreaming is starting at an intersection or crossroads at which the illumination and vision of the nocturnal states, in the benign sense, prophecies, wishes, desires, intuitions, the poetic and creative imagination sit alongside nightmares, hauntings, obsessions and preoccupations, aberrations, hallucinations, ‘the hearing of voices’, delusional states, madness. We could call this the location at which absense is allied to, and spawned from, sense.

Staying at this intersection is staying with psychoanalysis and the psychoanalytic. This intersection is famous in psychoanalysis because it was almost synonymously with the