The poetics of dreams

Abstract

The Interpretation of Dreams provided the central model for psychoanalytic literary criticism, and has generally been understood to offer a model of surface and depth, in which the function of criticism is to reveal or ‘decode’ latent and unconscious content. For this reason Freudian literary reading is most closely associated to a ‘deep’ or ‘suspicious’ hermeneutics of surface and depth. Yet the Interpretation also contains a second account of interpretation, premised on association, which conceives of dreams as if they were poems, rather than symptoms. This strain of associative interpretation in Freud’s writing on dreams suggests a latent, ‘negative’ theory of aesthetics.