Freud gives us a useful view of psychoanalytic methodology, giving first what one might call the fabula of the dream, then coursing through his associations with various aspects thereof. He describes his insight as follows:
"I then suddenly perceived that my dream was connected with the events of the previous evening. I had walked hom precisely with Dr. Konigstein and had got into conversation with him about a matter which never fails to excite my feeling whenever it is raised. WHile I was talking to him in the entrance-hall, Professor Gartner [Gardener] and his wife had joined us; and I could not help congratulating them both on their blooming looks. But Professor Gartner was one of the authors of the Festschrift I have just mentioned, and may well have reminded me of it. MOreover, th Frau L., whose disppointment on her birthday I described earlier, was mentioned -- though only, it is true, in another connection -- in my conversation with Dr. KOnigstein" (398).
As we follow Freud following the trace of association, his path feels as arcane as his resourcefulness seems admirable. We move along the peripheries, the side-roads, of a highway of thought. The royal road here is Freud's feeling, and for all the brilliance of his observation, he never manages to state (and likely never finds) how he feels. The analysis thereby must proceed in the dark because Freud remains stranger to himself.
We have been left two hints. "I then suddenly perceived" shows that the preceding recall and analysis, the scraping-through of details, has been done in partial blindness. The insight that occurs, then, requires all or at least multiple preceding details considered jointly, globally. Next, the matter that sparks his sudden insight is the detail that "never fails to excite" feelings.
What Freud must scrape for is what he does not feel. What he does not feel is his unconscious, we may be told; just this is Freud's great discovery or invention. He does not feel that because it is his unconscious; it's his unconscious because he does not feel it.
We're apparently not conscious of what-all lies or sits in the unconscious. Perhaps we can undestand that several things therein seem to get conflated. To handle the most mundane matters first, one seldom traces the course of somatic functions: one doesn't focus on one's beating heart, breathing lungs, or delicately weeping pancreas. Then, clearly, a certain, possibly variable threshold of neural firing in distal sensory nerves appears necessary to stimulate response in more central neural processing. The itch must gather intensity to excite our attention. Waving a hand before one's face, one habitually ignores the quite clear trail of visually apparent hands that follow it. Looking across a room, one recognizes a single 3-dimensional visual panorama although one knows full well that this is a composite fiction generated from the input of two practically 2-dimensional sets of receptors at the back of one's eyes.
All of this is unconscious, and in whatever sense that a the unconscious exists, these are components thereof. Yet this is not in any way the target, or at least the proper target, of psychoanalysis. It's not the target because it's not pathological. Were anyone fixedly attentive to his or her kidneys or pancreas, that would be pathological. Were cardiac activity to require waking attention, the condition would quickly become fatal.
Since we have no reason to believe such neural impulse attempts to become evident to waking consciousness, we have no reason to believe that such information gets repressed. Freud talks about "unconscious" and "instinctive" drives, but were such drives or desires simply and naturally unconscious, like kidney function, we would simply and naturally remain unaware of them in the same way.
The single class of event that quite clearly gets pared away from consciousness is trauma. We can verify this abundantly. The victims of social violence -- soldiers and their victims, slaves, unwanted children, the very poor, the victims of traffic accidents -- frequently suffer symptoms that suggest repression of information.
Freud would have better stayed with his early, trauma-related theory, rather than move to appraisals of repression of vague matters like "instinct" or "unconscious drive." Granted the two might be similar. One might call the species-wide desire that infants have for their mothers an "instinct." One might wish to so distinguish that from a "need," because babies do survive without their mothers, granted surrogate care and suffering. But whether we call the removal of the mother "nonfulfillment of instinctive drives" or unfulfillment of needs, the result pains and damages the infant, and what one represses is not simply an instinct -- a traumatized infant may be convinced to suck; a neurotic adult may love, if often poorly -- but the pain of the specific memory of wound or denial.
One thing this means for psychoanalytic terms is that only Sophocles had an Oedipus complex -- assuming that indeed he did. Shakespeare may have had a similar Hamlet Complex and T.S. Eliot might be accused of a suspiciously familar J. Alfred Prufrock Complex. On the one hand, the insight of dynamic psychology have much to tell us about literature. On the other, the glib way critics throw around abstract and derivative terms like "castration" is ridiculous. What gets repressed is not some inherited fear of loss of one's testicles, some abstracted and theoretical entity derived from genital sensation in one's sense of self, or even exactly a way to please one's mother or father. What gets repressed is traumatic experience and its associated agony.
Since trauma involves event, each neurotic must invent his or her neurosis in response to trauma, as a means of survival. We in the 21st century are indeed impacted by the Oedipus complex, but because we have read it as a literary reference.
Thus Freud jumps to conclude about his dream, he does indeed choose a feeling, a thing he wants to say, but he neglects the past component of what "always raises his emotion." With the emotion comes the insight.
Why not start with the feeling?
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