Essay, Play and Form: On Finding a Place for Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams

Censorship, authority and the construction of reality through mental operations—repression, disguise, wish-fulfilment, and interpretation—how could The Interpretation of Dreams fail to hold a significant place in twentieth-century intellectual history? But despite this web of questions the exact nature of that place remains elusive. In what follows, I shall try to characterize it in two steps.

The first step consists of a fairly close look at a somewhat unlikely text for this purpose: T.W. Adorno's ‘The essay as form’, written about 1954. In my reading of it, I shall follow the idea that the dream is an essay or, in more cautious terms, that the form of the dream and that of the essay are closely related. I shall also point out that the thought of Adorno and that of Jacques Derrida share at least one important feature, associated with the question of form, which they owe to their reception of Freud.

In a second step, Wittgenstein's ambivalent attitude towards psychoanalysis is set against what appears to be an exaggeration in Adorno's and Derrida's reception of Freud—an exaggeration, however, which at least lies dormant in the text of The Interpretation of Dreams. If Adorno and Derrida take the principles of dream-work and of free association, including the models of the psyche to which they belong, and turn them into philosophico-historical categories, the result is, as we shall see, a notion of creativity without limiting conditions. This notion amounts to a fourth narcissistic humiliation after which we are not only no longer masters in our own house, but this house turns out not to have been ours anyway. Against this over-productive power of speculation, Wittgenstein's notion of the language-game can act as a principle of containment and as a theoretical medium in which to negotiate the boundaries between dream and reality, between convention and invention.