Dream-Work

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (46)

1. #01

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

   **TOWARD A POETICS OF TERROR FOR THE CULTURE OF THE REAL: OUR DREAM OF CREATIVE READING**

   Theoretical move: This passage, drawn from Freud's early dream theory, establishes that objective sensory stimuli during sleep are insufficient as sole dream sources, and that the psychic transformation of stimuli into dream content requires additional determining factors beyond the stimulus itself — pointing toward the independence and overdetermination of dream formation.

   the striking skill of the dream in interweaving into its structure sudden impressions from the outer world in such a manner as to present a gradually prepared and initiated catastrophe

2. #02

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

   **TOWARD A POETICS OF TERROR FOR THE CULTURE OF THE REAL: OUR DREAM OF CREATIVE READING**

   Theoretical move: The passage surveys pre-psychoanalytic theories of dream formation—somatic stimulus theories, typical dreams, psychic exciting sources, and dream forgetting—to demonstrate that none of them can fully account for the dream's psychic dimension, thereby preparing the ground for Freud's disclosure of an "unsuspected psychic source of excitement" (the unconscious wish).

   dream compositions are by their very nature incapable of being remembered, and they are forgotten because they usually crumble together the very next moment

3. #03

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

   **TOWARD A POETICS OF TERROR FOR THE CULTURE OF THE REAL: OUR DREAM OF CREATIVE READING**

   Theoretical move: The passage surveys 19th-century academic psychology's characterizations of dream-life as psychically degraded—marked by incoherence, absence of logical critique, and withdrawal from the outer world—while registering that certain remnants of psychic activity (memory, emotion, associative laws) persist, thereby framing the problem that will require a genuinely new theory of dream interpretation.

   it would be possible to change back the hallucinations of the dream into presentations and the situations of the dream into thoughts, and thus to perform the task of dream interpretation

4. #04

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

   **TOWARD A POETICS OF TERROR FOR THE CULTURE OF THE REAL: OUR DREAM OF CREATIVE READING**

   Theoretical move: This passage surveys the pre-Freudian literature on dreams, mapping the range of contradictory positions—from radical depreciation of dream-life to its over-estimation—across the dimensions of associative logic, psychic capacity, memory, time, and moral feeling, thereby establishing the theoretical problem-space that Freud's own dream-interpretation will claim to resolve.

   the dream has the ability to take up the intellectual work of the day and bring to a conclusion what has not been settled during the day, that it can solve doubt and problems

5. #05

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

   ***The Analysis of a Sample Dream*** > **DREAM OF JULY 23-24, 1895**

   Theoretical move: Freud introduces the Irma dream as the paradigmatic case requiring systematic dream-analysis: the manifest content is demonstrably connected to day-residues yet its significance remains opaque until a thorough analysis of its latent structure is undertaken, establishing the method of free association applied to dreams.

   In order to learn the significance of all this, I am compelled to undertake a thorough analysis.

6. #06

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

   ***The Analysis of a Sample Dream*** > **ANALYSIS**

   Theoretical move: This passage performs the foundational Freudian move of demonstrating that dream-content is systematically overdetermined wish-fulfillment: through layered free association to each dream element, Freud shows that the manifest dream condenses multiple latent wishes (chiefly exculpation from medical responsibility) and displaces blame onto patients, colleagues, and circumstance, while also illustrating the composite/condensed nature of dream-figures.

   In careful analysis one feels whether or not the 'background thoughts' which are to be expected have been exhausted.

7. #07

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

   **(A) RECENT AND INDIFFERENT IMPRESSIONS IN THE DREAM**

   Theoretical move: Freud argues that manifest dream content preferentially uses indifferent day-impressions as allusions to psychically significant ones through a process of displacement, whereby weakly charged ideas acquire intensity by absorbing the charge of stronger ideas—a mechanism that, while appearing morbid in waking life, is in fact a more primitive but not pathological psychic operation.

   The recollection of the monograph on the genus cyclamen is employed as though it were an allusion to the conversation with my friend, very much as mention of the friend in the dream of the deferred supper is represented by the allusion 'smoked salmon.'

8. #08

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

   **(A) RECENT AND INDIFFERENT IMPRESSIONS IN THE DREAM**

   Theoretical move: Freud argues that all dream content—however trivial or "harmless" it appears—is the product of dream-disfigurement via displacement, wherein psychically significant material transfers its accent onto indifferent recent impressions; the apparent innocuousness of dreams is therefore always an artifact of the dream-censor's work, not evidence of insignificant stimuli.

   relations between this impression and the real source of the dream do not always exist from the beginning; as we have seen, they are established only subsequently, in the course of the dream-work, as though in order to serve the purpose of the intended displacement.

9. #09

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

   **(B) INFANTILE EXPERIENCES AS THE SOURCE OF DREAMS**

   Theoretical move: Freud demonstrates through detailed free-association analysis that infantile experiences (childhood enuresis, megalomanic promises) are the latent sources of manifest dream content, while also illustrating how the dream-work condenses multiple memory-scenes (school conspiracies, revolutionary politics, bodily excretion) into a composite facade, and how an internal censor blocks full analytic disclosure.

   The first situation of the dream is concocted from several scenes, into which I am able to separate it... the phantasy, however, which subtilely attaches itself to the thoughts which the sight of the Count Thun has given rise to, is only like the façade of Italian churches

10. #10

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(D) TYPICAL DREAMS**

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that typical dreams (Oedipus dreams, parturition dreams, anxiety dreams) encode unconscious sexual and infantile content through a stable symbolic vocabulary that belongs not to dreaming per se but to the unconscious thinking of the masses, and demonstrates how this symbolism operates through displacement, reversal, and condensation.

    The second half of the dream, therefore, represents thoughts concerning the elopement, which belonged to the first half of the underlying latent content; the first half of the dream corresponded with the second half of the latent content, the birth phantasy.

11. #11

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(D) TYPICAL DREAMS**

    Theoretical move: The passage deploys sexual symbolism (stairs = coitus) to decode typical dreams, then pivots to introduce the concept of dream-work as the transformation between latent dream thoughts and manifest dream content, using the rebus/picture-puzzle analogy to argue that the manifest content must be read as a sign-system, not as a literal or aesthetic composition.

    We are also confronted for the first time with a problem which has not before existed, that of examining and tracing the relations between the latent dream thoughts and the manifest dream content, and the processes through which the former have grown into the latter.

12. #12

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(A) THE CONDENSATION WORK**

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that dream formation operates through condensation, whereby each dream element is overdetermined—functioning as a nodal point that concentrates multiple dream thoughts—and conversely, each dream thought is represented by multiple dream elements, making condensation an irreducible structural principle rather than mere ellipsis.

    The whole mass of the dream thoughts is subjected to a certain elaboration, in the course of which those elements that receive the greatest and completest support stand out in relief.

13. #13

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(A) THE CONDENSATION WORK**

    Theoretical move: Through detailed dream analyses, Freud demonstrates how condensation works as the primary mechanism of dream-formation: multiple latent dream-thoughts are fused into single manifest elements via inversion, symbolic allusion, and associative chains, such that any one dream element may condense several distinct meanings simultaneously.

    We shall see without effort in this example that the condensation work has used more than one means for the formation of the dream.

14. #14

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(B) THE WORK OF DISPLACEMENT**

    Theoretical move: Freud establishes dream displacement as the second primary mechanism of dream-work (alongside condensation), arguing that it operates through a transference and displacement of psychic intensities—stripping high-value elements of their intensity and elevating low-value elements—driven by the censorship/repression function, thereby producing the distorted dream content that conceals the underlying dream-wish.

    The process which we assume here is nothing less than the essential part of the dream activity; it merits the designation of dream displacement.

15. #15

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(C) MEANS OF REPRESENTATION IN THE DREAM**

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that dreams cannot represent logical alternatives, negation, or contradiction, and instead reduce these to unity through condensation; the primary logical relation dreams can represent is similarity, achieved through identification and composition, which also serves to circumvent the censoring function.

    The mechanism of dream formation is favourable in the highest degree to only one of the logical relations... The effort towards condensation shown by the dream activity assists in the representation of the relation of similarity.

16. #16

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(C) MEANS OF REPRESENTATION IN THE DREAM**

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that dream vividness is determined by condensation activity and wish-fulfilment, and that the formal properties of dreams (clarity, confusion, gaps, impeded motion) are themselves representational devices encoding latent dream-thoughts—including the expression of negation and volitional conflict—rather than incidental features of the dreaming process.

    The dream activity had extended its operations, as it were, into waking thought, and had presented to me in the form of a judgment that part of the dream material which it had not succeeded in reproducing with exactness.

17. #17

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(E) EXAMPLES-ARITHMETIC SPEECHES IN THE DREAM**

    Theoretical move: Freud demonstrates through concrete dream examples how the dream-work transforms abstract thoughts into concrete representations through literalization of idioms, wordplay, phonetic resemblance, and arithmetic distortion, arguing that these mechanisms reveal the psychic resistance and wish-fulfillment operative in dream formation.

    Wherein the dream work consists, and how it manages its material, the dream thoughts, can be shown in a very instructive manner from the numbers and calculations which occur in dreams.

18. #18

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(E) EXAMPLES-ARITHMETIC SPEECHES IN THE DREAM**

    Theoretical move: Freud demonstrates that dream-work does not calculate or compose new speeches but instead recombines fragments from waking life—numerals, words, and speech fragments—to serve the dream's expressive purposes, with over-determination and wish-fulfillment structuring even the most apparently logical dream content; through the "Non vixit" dream, Freud further shows how condensation fuses hostile and friendly trains of thought into a single formation.

    Dream activity does not calculate at all, whether correctly or incorrectly; it joins together in the form of a calculation numerals which occur in the dream thoughts... It thus utilises numerals as material for the expression of its purposes in the same manner as it does names and speeches known as word presentations.

19. #19

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(F) ABSURD DREAMS—INTELLECTUAL PERFORMANCES IN THE DREAM**

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that the apparent absurdity in dreams is not evidence of meaningless mental activity but is either the result of condensed or displaced verbal expression, or is deliberately manufactured by the dream-work to represent repressed thoughts—including unconscious wishes and reproaches—that cannot be admitted directly; absurdity is therefore itself a meaningful product of the dream-work.

    In the example which I now cite I can detect the dream activity in the act of purposely manufacturing an absurdity for which there is no occasion at all in the subject-matter.

20. #20

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(F) ABSURD DREAMS—INTELLECTUAL PERFORMANCES IN THE DREAM**

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that absurdity in dreams is not a sign of meaninglessness but a specific expressive instrument of the dream-work: it represents the dreamer's latent judgment of "that is nonsense," encodes mockery and contradiction, and—crucially—transforms latent content into manifest form through condensation and displacement, while dream censorship permits untruth about forbidden figures rather than direct critical truth.

    it is only for this purpose that the dream activity produces anything ridiculous. Here again it transforms a part of the latent content into a manifest form.

21. #21

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(F) ABSURD DREAMS—INTELLECTUAL PERFORMANCES IN THE DREAM**

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that apparent intellectual performances within dreams—judgments, criticisms, absurdities—are not products of the dream-work itself but belong to the latent dream thoughts, and that the dream-work deploys absurdity as a representational technique to express ridicule or derision, just as a jester uses nonsense to convey forbidden truths.

    my next concern is to show that the dream activity is primarily brought about by the co-operation of the three factors which have been mentioned—and of a fourth one which remains to be cited—that it accomplishes nothing short of a transposition of the dream thoughts

22. #22

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(F) ABSURD DREAMS—INTELLECTUAL PERFORMANCES IN THE DREAM**

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that apparent acts of judgment, inference, and argumentation within dream content are not spontaneous cognitive performances of the dreaming mind but are always traceable to—and borrowed from—the dream thoughts themselves; additionally, he introduces "secondary elaboration" as a fourth factor in dream-formation that imposes a specious coherence on dream material.

    analysis shows that in this case the dream activity has not had the task of making a free copy, but it has been required to use subject-matter from the dream thoughts for its purpose.

23. #23

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(G) THE AFFECTS IN THE DREAM**

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that affects in dreams are not distorted by the dream-work the way presentation contents are — affects remain intact while ideas undergo displacement and substitution — and that this dissociation between affect and idea is the key to understanding the apparent incongruity of emotions in dreams, a logic that equally governs psychoneurotic symptoms.

    the dream activity is at liberty to detach the occasion for an affect from its context in the dream thoughts, and to insert it at any other place it chooses in the dream content.

24. #24

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(G) THE AFFECTS IN THE DREAM**

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that dream-affects are not simple transpositions of waking emotions but are overdetermined confluences of multiple affective sources — some censor-approved, others suppressed — whose co-operation or mutual reinforcement explains both the qualitative justification and quantitative excess of neurotic and dream emotions, thereby complicating the wish-fulfilment thesis.

    The complex of processes—of suspension, subtraction and inversion—through which the affects of the dream thoughts finally become those of the dream, may well be observed in the suitable synthesis of completely analysed dreams.

25. #25

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(H) SECONDARY ELABORATION**

    Theoretical move: Freud distinguishes dream-work from waking thought as qualitatively different rather than merely inferior, articulating its four mechanisms (displacement, condensation, regard for presentability, secondary elaboration), and then uses the "burning child" dream to pivot toward the limits of interpretation and the need for a new psychology of psychic apparatus.

    Now, this peculiar dream-work is much further removed from the model of waking thought than even the most decided depreciators of psychic activity in dream formation have thought.

26. #26

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(A) FORGETTING IN DREAMS**

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that the forgetting and distortion of dreams in recollection are not arbitrary deficiencies but are themselves products of the same censorship/resistance that produces the dream-work, making them analytically significant rather than epistemically disqualifying; doubt, forgetting, and verbal revision are all instruments of psychic resistance and should be read as clues rather than obstacles.

    we find another instance of what we have designated as the often misunderstood secondary elaboration of the dream through the influence of normal thinking. But this distortion is itself only a part of the elaboration to which the dream thoughts are regularly subjected by virtue of the dream censor.

27. #27

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(A) FORGETTING IN DREAMS**

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that the forgetting of dreams is primarily caused by psychic resistance rather than the gap between sleeping and waking states, and that the sleeping state enables dream formation precisely by diminishing the endopsychic censor—a conclusion demonstrated through clinical practice, delayed dream interpretation, and the structural analogy with neurotic symptoms.

    the skilfulness displayed by the dream-work in hitting, so to speak, with its ambiguous manner of expression, seven flies with one stroke

28. #28

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(C) THE WISH-FULFILMENT**

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that the wish-fulfilment theory of dreams requires refinement: in adults, the true dream-inciting wish must be an infantile one rooted in the unconscious, which reinforces and "recruits" preconscious day-remnants; the dream is thus the product of a dynamic alliance between unconscious infantile wishes and conscious/preconscious residues, not of either alone.

    there need be no connection, nor was there one in any of our examples… The day thought, which was no wish in itself but rather a worry, had in some way to find a connection with the infantile now unconscious and suppressed wish

29. #29

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(D) WAKING CAUSED BY THE DREAM—THE FUNCTION OF THE DREAM—THE ANXIETY DREAM**

    Theoretical move: The passage advances a functional theory of the dream as a psychic compromise-formation: the dream serves as a "safety-valve" that allows unconscious wish-energy to discharge through regression to perception while the preconscious restricts and neutralises that energy at minimal cost, thereby preserving sleep—thus the dream is not merely a distortion but a mechanism that brings the unconscious back under preconscious domination.

    Through the dream-work the dream process now gains either sufficient intensity to attract consciousness to itself and arouse the preconscious…or, its intensity being insufficient it must wait until it meets the attention which is set in motion immediately before awakening.

30. #30

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(E) THE PRIMARY AND SECONDARY PROCESSES—REGRESSION**

    Theoretical move: Freud synthesizes competing theories of dream formation by subordinating them to his unified framework of wish-fulfilment and dream-work, then advances the argument by distinguishing the preconscious stream of thought from the unconscious wish that energizes it—establishing that the most complex mental operations occur without consciousness, and that regression and the primary process are the hallmarks of the dream-work proper.

    We have had to separate the dream-work from this activity as being something entirely different and far more restricted.

31. #31

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **EGO PSYCHOLOGY, OBJECT RELATIONS, LINGUISTICS, FEMINISM, POST-STRUCTURALISM, AND GAY AND LESBIAN STUDIES** > **<span class="underline">Z</span>**

    Theoretical move: The passage uses a clinical case of a dental-irritation dream to validate Freud's claim that such dreams encode masturbatory wishes, demonstrating how day-residues, repression's somatic displacement (lower to upper jaw), and infantile autoeroticism converge in dream-work; the dream is argued to be a wish-fulfillment not merely of the sexual motive but also of the desire to confirm the Freudian interpretation itself.

    Theoretically this case seems to show a double interest. First it verifies the connection revealed by Freud, inasmuch as the ejaculation in the dream takes place during the act of tooth-pulling.

32. #32

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **COMMENTS**

    Theoretical move: This passage is a collection of contemporary and retrospective critical commentaries on Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, offering no original theoretical argument but summarizing and evaluating Freud's core concepts (manifest/latent content, wish-fulfillment, the unconscious) from multiple external perspectives.

    The interpretation of dreams is, in a sense, as old as history... the belief has again been unearthed and vindicated, and dreams are found to have a value and a meaning after all.

33. #33

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_ncx_113"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_page_0132"></span>***M*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_ncx_122"></span>**metaphor**

    Theoretical move: Lacan's concept of metaphor, derived from Jakobson's linguistic theory, redefines metaphor as the substitution of one signifier for another that produces signification by crossing the bar of the Saussurean algorithm, and deploys this structure across the Oedipus complex, repression, condensation, identification, and love.

    Lacan also follows Jakobson in linking the metaphor-metonymy distinction to the fundamental mechanisms of the dream work described by Freud.

34. #34

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part19.xhtml_ncx_87"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part19.xhtml_page_0105"></span>***I*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part19.xhtml_ncx_95"></span>**interpretation**

    Theoretical move: Lacan's renewed theory of interpretation displaces the classical model (which unmasks hidden meaning via symbolism/decoding) in favour of a technique that disrupts meaning altogether, reducing signifiers to non-sense so that irreducible, determinant signifiers emerge — thereby inverting the signifier/signified relation and returning the analysand's message to him in its true, inverted form.

    The model of interpretation was set down by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud, 1900a); though only concerned explicitly with dreams, Freud's comments on interpretation in this work apply equally to all the other formations of the unconscious (parapraxes, jokes, symptoms, etc.)

35. #35

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part15.xhtml_ncx_57"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part15.xhtml_page_0075"></span>***E*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part15.xhtml_ncx_64"></span>**existence**

    Theoretical move: The passage draws a systematic distinction between two opposed senses of 'existence' in Lacan: existence-in-the-symbolic (what is positively integrated into the signifying chain) versus existence-in-the-real (the impossible, unsymbolisable kernel of the subject), and introduces the neologism 'ex-sistence' to capture the decentred, ex-centric nature of subjectivity as radically Other to itself.

    Lacan also speaks of the 'ex-sistence (Entstellung) of desire in the dream' (E, 264), since the dream cannot represent desire except by distorting it.

36. #36

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_ncx_113"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_page_0132"></span>***M*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_ncx_123"></span>**metonymy**

    Theoretical move: Lacan's concept of metonymy, derived from Jakobson, defines the diachronic, combinatorial relation between signifiers along the signifying chain as the structural condition for signification and the very logic of desire; the formula for metonymy shows that the bar between signifier and signified is maintained (no new signified produced), and metonymy is identified with displacement and posited as the condition of possibility for metaphor.

    Lacan also follows Jakobson in linking the metaphor-metonymy distinction to the mechanisms of the dream work described by Freud.

37. #37

    Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures · Mark Fisher

    <span id="Chapter18.htm_page172"></span>Electricity and Ghosts: Interview with John Foxx

    Theoretical move: Fisher and Foxx develop a theory of hauntology-adjacent aesthetics through the figure of derelict, overgrown urban space and found-object/collage art-making, arguing that low-fidelity, amateur, and accidental forms of cultural production (Ed Wood, super-8, sampling) can prefigure or surpass avant-garde concepts, while also tracing an affective register of eerie calm and 'radiance' that cuts against media acceleration.

    I still dream sequences from it, or rather I seem to have permanently incorporated sections of it into my dream grammar.

38. #38

    Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures · Mark Fisher

    <span id="Chapter14.htm_page145"></span>Nostalgia for Modernism: The Focus Group and Belbury Poly

    Theoretical move: Fisher argues that Ghost Box's hauntological aesthetic inverts postmodern nostalgia by producing a "nostalgia for modernism" — a longing not for the past per se but for a lost public modernity, deploying dyschronia, uncanny domesticity, and dream-work compression to conjure a past that never was while implicitly demanding the return of the concept of the public.

    Their artwork fuses the look of comprehensive school text books and public service manuals with allusions to weird fiction, a fusion that has more to do with the compressions and conflations of dreamwork than with memory.

39. #39

    Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures · Mark Fisher

    <span id="Chapter18.htm_page172"></span>Electricity and Ghosts: Interview with John Foxx

    Theoretical move: The passage makes two theoretical moves: first, an aesthetic-phenomenological argument (via the Foxx interview) that temporal deceleration in music/art opens an alternative perceptual ecology in which events become significant through scarcity; second, a cultural-diagnostic argument that post-2008 electronic pop (Darkstar, Kanye, Drake) registers a structural shift from collectively-experienced rave affect to privatised, introspective emotion, which Fisher names as a symptom of hauntology—living in an interregnum where the future has failed and melancholy saturates consumer hedonism.

    I realised that it is not simply the image you present yourself with, in a dream, which is important – it's also the emotional tone of the scene. You can see a cloud, but this will be accompanied by a sense of wonder or by a sense of dread, and it is that accompaniment which determines its meaning.

40. #40

    A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.150

    A month later: > Lalangue

    Theoretical move: Dolar argues that lalangue names the internal divergence between the signifier's differential logic and the voice's logic of sonic resemblance/contamination, displacing the early Lacanian formula "the unconscious is structured like a language" with one in which enjoyment (jouissance) is not proscribed beyond speech but operates as the inner torsion of speech itself—the Möbius-strip surface on which signifier and voice are the same yet irreducibly split.

    All these mechanisms are, of course, closely akin to the processes of dream-work described as condensation and displacement

41. #41

    A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.215

    Chapter 6 Freud's Voices

    Theoretical move: This passage is a footnotes/endnotes section for Chapters 6 and 7, but it contains substantive theoretical moves: linking Dream-Work to Wish-Fulfillment, articulating the Drive's mythological status, connecting the fundamental fantasy to the drive, and theorizing the Voice and Objet petit a as the eternally lacking object that circumvents oral satisfaction, while also noting the structural role of the Matheme against phonological structuralism.

    The latent dream-thoughts are the material which the dream-work transforms into the manifest dream.... In addition, it regularly takes possession of something else... the equally unconscious wish [desire] for the fulfillment of which the content of the dream is given form.

42. #42

    Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide · Richard Boothby · p.79

    <span id="Boot_9781635422610_epub3_c07_r1.xhtml_page_76" class="pagebreak" role="doc-pagebreak" title="76"></span><span id="Boot_9781635422610_epub3_c07_r1.xhtml_page_77" class="pagebreak" role="doc-pagebreak" title="77"></span>*7*

    Theoretical move: The passage enacts the analytic session as a site where dream-work, traumatic association, and unconscious guilt converge: the dreaming subject's images (black lake, renovated cottage, self-shooting) are mobilized in the transference with the analyst (Barbara), ultimately forcing the analysand to articulate the guilt-laden fantasy that his son's death was his own fault — a move from free association to confession that the analytic frame makes both possible and unbearable.

    A second, forgotten part of the dream then flashes into mind unexpectedly... How could I have missed it? I, of all people, who knew all the secret places?

43. #43

    The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.278

    A Play of Props > **Medical Drama**

    Theoretical move: By tracing the German etymology of "prop" (Pfropf: cork, stopper, clot) through the Irma dream's verbal series "*propyl, propyls… propionic acid*," the passage argues that the dream's stuttering, stop-and-go signifier encodes the traumatic dialectic of plugging and unplugging in Emma Eckstein's botched surgery, making the founding dream of psychoanalysis structurally premised on that near-fatal medical catastrophe.

    the stuttering series of 'props' leading up to 'trimethylamin' shows itself, once more, to be a defining moment in Freud's dream

44. #44

    The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.274

    A Play of Props

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the alliterative chain "propyl, propyls…propionic acid" in Freud's Irma dream is not mere phonetic noise but a quilting point that crystallizes the therapeutic passage from empty speech to full speech, and that the concept of repetition—as theorized by both Freud and Lacan—is the key to unlocking this bridge between their otherwise distinct analyses.

    the day-residue of 'amyl' that intrigued Freud and the dream work of 'trimethylamin' that interested Lacan

45. #45

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.57

    The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Parallax of the Critique of Political Economy

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Marxian "parallax" consists in the irreducible, non-synthesisable gap between the logic of economy (commodity-form as socio-transcendental a priori) and the logic of politics (antagonism), such that the bracketing which produces each domain is not merely epistemological but inscribed in "real abstraction" — and that post-Marxist "pure politics" (Badiou, Rancière, etc.) mistakes by reducing economy to an ontic sphere while Karatani's Kantianism fails to go beyond a transcendental X that leaves the fetishism of Power intact.

    It is the dream-work which produces this form, and it alone is the essence of dreaming—the only explanation of its singularity.

46. #46

    Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? · Mark Fisher

    ‘...if you can watch the overlap of one reality with another’: capitalist realism as dreamwork and memory disorder

    Theoretical move: Fisher argues that capitalist realism operates through a "dreamwork" logic—producing confabulated consistency that covers over structural contradictions—and that the attendant "memory disorder" (inability to form new memories, retrospective confabulation) is both the psychological correlative of postmodern temporality and an adaptive strategy demanded by capitalism's perpetual ontological instability.

    the model for its smooth functioning would be dreamwork. When we are dreaming, we forget, but immediately forget that we have done so; since the gaps and lacunae in our memories are Photoshopped out, they do not trouble or torment us.