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Toward the end of his influential essay, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,” Roman Jakobson (1956) sketches out areas of research that might benefit from an analysis of the predominance of one of the two poles of metaphor and metonymy. According to him there is “a competition between both devices” that “is manifest in any symbolic process, either intrapersonal or social” (p. 94). Proposing a framework for a study of intrapersonal symbolic processes, “an inquiry into the structure of dreams,” he claims that “the decisive question is whether the symbols and the temporal sequences used are based on contiguity (Freud's metonymic ‘displacement’ and synecdochic ‘condensation’) or on similarity (Freud's ‘identification and symbolism’)” (p. 95). A footnote to this sentence directs the reader to Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, an indication we will follow shortly. Yet, if we are to follow Jakobson's lead, we must also beware of some of the problems that approach poses. Namely, “the actual bipolarity” that Jakobson insists on in the essay involves a strict complementarity between its parts such that the relative absence of the one is evinced by the preponderance of the other. His essay concludes: