Evocation of the Undreamed

The teachings of psychoanalysis have admittedly broadened understanding in many fields of human inquiry. To the mutual nature of such interaction sufficient heed has not always been paid. Take the semantic insistence on distinguishing between the referent (object) and the word; it has an important bearing on psychotherapy. Obviously, the morbid fear that a neurotic may manifest at hearing the word ‘snake’ is not due to the word but to its identification with the object. In conscious life it is easy to prove the falseness of such identification. In our unconscious life, however, the word ‘snake’ may not stand for the referent, but for phallic ideas or situations, hence the therapeutic value of unconscious semantics must depend on the discovery of the meaning of meaning.

Regarding this inner meaning psychoanalysis has no monopoly as it is not exclusively symbolic. It may arise from speech and association mechanisms about which semantics may teach us just as much as we can teach them about symbolism. There is, for instance, a semantic principle called the Evocation of the Unsaid. With a slight change, under the name of Evocation of the Undreamed, it can be turned into a useful tool for dream interpretation.

To quote Margaret Schlauch:1

“Apparently it is natural for us to think of qualities in pairs—each one together with its opposite. When I say ‘bright’ I am unconsciously thinking of ‘not dark’. As Jost Trier, a German scholar expressed it concisely in a recent study ‘every word spoken evokes its own opposite meaning’. We exclude the opposite, while at the same time we are aware of it as a kind of negative definition.”

From the psychoanalytic point-of-view the statement contains nothing new because Freud had called attention from the earliest psychoanalytic days to the use of the opposite or to the exploitation of negatives, comparison, contrast and other associative patterns of the mind. We may even go 2,000 years further back and credit Heraclitus with the discovery tha