Toward Reading Lacan: Pages for a Workbook: Introduction

Few interpreters of Freud fail to acknowledge the epoch-making significance of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), and for Jacques Lacan, in particular, the most radical of Freud's contemporary interpreters, this work contains “the essential expression of [Freud's] message” (1977, p.  159/509).1 And nowhere, perhaps, is that message expressed more succinctly than when, at the beginning of Chapter VI (“The Dream-Work”), Freud describes the dream as a rebus:

Suppose I have a picture-puzzle, a rebus, in front of me. It depicts a house with a boat on its roof, a single letter of the alphabet, the figure of a running man whose head has been conjured away, and so on. Now I might be misled into raising objections and declaring that the picture as a whole and its component parts are nonsensical. A boat has no business to be on the roof of a house, and the headless man cannot run [etc.].… But obviously we can only form a proper judgement of the rebus if we put aside criticisms such as these of the whole composition and its parts and if, instead, we try to replace each separate element by a syllable or word that

1. In citations of Lacan, the first pagination refers to the English translation of Écrits, the second to the French original.

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can be represented by that element in some way or other. The words which are put together in this way are no longer nonsensical but may form a poetical phrase of the greatest beauty and significance. A dream is a picture-p