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This is a difficult book, and it can be an irritating one. The richness of its theoretical constructions and clinical examples is seriously undermined by a self-conscious mystical obscurity, announcing between the lines that those who understand what life really is will understand that it can only
be described in ways that cannot be understood. For instance, we are instructed that
It is in obscurity that mystery dwells. The understanding of the dream message is a cryptography of mystery. Artemidorus operates a strict semiological approach to the meaning of dreams. The dream occupies a space and, like the body, it has different meanings according to its various constituent parts. There is a topography of the dream as there is a geography of the body. Artemidorus studies the meaning of the various parts of the body in dreams, the body of cultural man also to be found in folklore and in the popular thought of the time: the interpretation of dreams is not dissociated from the social. (p. 33)
There is an endnote number after the word “social,” but if one hopes for clarification of this obscure passage, one clearly knows nothing about mystery. Here is the endnote:
The interpretation of the body, in both dreams and waking, is always a reading of the mind (anima). For Aristotle the body is a sign of the existence of not only the anima, but also its mask. “To be” means to inhabit the body, to see and to be seen, and therefore to seem, to have a visible mask. The body is the habitat of the soul. “Habitat” and “to inhabit” imply a place to be occupied, mean “to possess” and ultimately “to have” (habere). It is in the body, in its habitat and its habitus, that the living and dreaming being lives. The habitus is the way of being, the appearance, the body's physiognomy, clothing, dress. The interpretation of dreams also involves a study of the “habitus” or of the way in which the dream and its characters are dressed. (p. 44)
Most of the book is like this, an odd mixture of primary