Freud

Today is Sigmund Freud's birthday. It is fitting then that I find myself reading Interpretation of Dreams for a Freud reading group tomorrow.

Reading the book this time round makes me think in an apparently inane, obvious but what I think is a fascinating direction. Looking at the sheer wealth of literary quotations in the book I wonder to what extent these literary echoes were built into the unconscious of the analysands who came to see Freud. A lot of his quotes read like reports of the analysands' references.

If we read books as a 'discourse of the Other' and if there are reading traces of that discourse in our unconscious, this can be a fresh way of looking at the literature-psychoanalysis interface. Is the literary tissue integral to the constitution of the unconscious formation, be it a dream or a wit which has a literary structure after all?

What this also goes to show is the bourgeois class character of the 'well read' analytic dialogue...wonder what Karl Marx whose birthday it was yesterday, would say to that or the true blue classless 'zamindar' Rabindranath Tagore whose birthday is coming up tomorrow!!!