Symbolisation in Dreams

Symbolisation in Dreams designates the activity by which the dreaming phantasy refuses to represent an object through its own direct image and instead substitutes a "strange picture" — an oblique, figurative stand-in that renders the object recognisable only in broadest outline. As Scherner theorised (and as the passage in the Barnes & Noble Freud edition surveys), this symbolic substitution is not arbitrary decoration but the constitutive operation of dream-phantasy: the phantasy actively dislikes literal self-presentation and gravitates toward the indirect, the outline, the estranged figure. The body in particular becomes a symbolic territory — its organs, cavities, and rhythms are "copied" not mimetically but symbolically, translated into architectural, animal, or spatial imagery.

The theoretical move in the source text is to position Scherner's symbolising phantasy as one pole of the pre-Freudian field — the pole that recognises an irreducible gap between the latent content (the object, the bodily state) and its manifest representation (the strange picture). Freud inherits and reworks this insight: symbolisation in dreams is neither a mere failure of literal representation nor a purely arbitrary association, but a structured indirection governed by the dream-work. Read against Freud's own categories, Scherner's symbolising phantasy is an early, intuitive recognition of what condensation and displacement will later formalise — the systematic transformation that prevents direct presentation of the latent thought and substitutes a formally related but phenomenally alien image in its place.

Within the source (barnes-and-noble-classics-sigmund-freud-gina-masucci-mackenzie-a-a-brill-transla), this concept occupies a historiographical position: it appears in the survey of pre-Freudian dream theories that frames Freud's own approach as a synthesis. Scherner's symbolising phantasy is presented as the most theoretically ambitious of the pre-Freudian positions because it already grasps that the dream-image is not a copy but a substitution — that there is a structural gap between what is "meant" and what appears. Freud's project is implicitly to salvage this gap while grounding it mechanistically rather than in a free-floating creative faculty.

In relation to the cross-referenced canonical concepts, Symbolisation in Dreams is best understood as the proto-form of what condensation and displacement will rigorously articulate. Condensation explains how multiple latent thoughts converge on a single strange image; displacement explains how affective intensity migrates away from the significant object onto the oblique substitute. Scherner's "strange picture" is precisely the result of both operations working together — the "dislike for expressing an object by its own picture" is displacement's indirection, and the compression of a bodily organ into a single architectural outline is condensation's economy. The concept also anticipates the Lacanian account of Fantasy ($◇a), insofar as the symbolising phantasy already stages the fundamental structure of desire's indirection: desire does not present its object nakedly but only through a mediating frame that simultaneously conceals and reveals it. And insofar as the symbolising activity marks the limit of literal representation — the point where direct imaging fails and the oblique substitute takes over — it touches on what the Real names in the Lacanian register: the impossibility of full, transparent symbolisation that the dream-work both enacts and conceals.

The Interpretation of DreamsSigmund Freud · 1899 (page unknown)

It shows a dislike for expressing an object by its own picture, but prefers a strange picture... This is the symbolising activity of the phantasy.

The phrase "dislike for expressing an object by its own picture" is theoretically loaded because it attributes an active, quasi-intentional aversion to the phantasy — framing symbolisation not as a failure of mimesis but as a structural preference for indirection; "strange picture" then names the positive product of this aversion, the substitute image that is formally related to but phenomenally alien from the original, anticipating what Freud will theorise as the overdetermined, displaced manifest element of the dream-work.