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The French poet, Paul Valéry (1871-1945), became interested in the study of dreams at about the same time that Freud was making his early discoveries. According to Rouart, Valéry was interested in dreams for what they might show about mental life and for the possibility that dreams might help in mastering life. One finds two attitudes toward dreams in Valéry's work: a methodical and objective approach, and a more emotional approach filled with curiosity about what dreams could show him about himself. Valéry insisted upon the heterogeneity and the disorder of dreams, characteristics which he linked to the initial stages of the creative act. He was also concerned with the theme of death in dreams, and he compared dreams to a puzzle. The psychoanalyst will see Valéry's attraction to dreams as infantile curiosity about forbidden knowledge and as a derivative of the fantasy of the primal scene. Valéry's work contains a sketch of a method for studying dreams from a semantic point of view. He saw that in the figurative and linguistic deformations in dreams there was nonetheless a conservation of relations. He was thus aware of the "double leitmotiv" of conservation and transformation. Freud's concepts of condensation and displacement are assimilated to metaphor and metonymy from a linguistic point of view. Valéry did not have the concept of repression, but he did believe that the dream was guided by a "secret aim." Although he recognized certain dynamic factors in dreams, his emphasis on meaning was entirely formal and led to the halting of his research. This represents an essential difference from Freud.