1. Freud was not the first to make a serious study of the problem of dreams, but he discovered in the dream states a variety of operations resulting in the emergence of images and symbols determined by past perceptual experiences, and strong motives. It was actually not until the third edition of his Interpretation in 1911 that, influenced by the works of Wilhelm Stekel and Otto Rank, he turned his attention directly to the importance of symbolism in dreams. After that time Freud’s thinking was progressively more occupied with the interpretation of symbolic elements in imaginative writings, in folklore, in myths, and in the formation of metaphor. And it is here, in the first volume of Interpretation of Dreams that the immensely influential discovery of the Oedipus complex symbolism took place, a discovery which left a permanent imprint upon the culture of our centry and became one of the most celebrated and controversial commentaries on human destiny.
2. Caruso, J. A. “Towards a Symbolic Knowledge of the Human Person,” in Problems in Psychoanalysis. London: Burns and Oates, 1961, pp. 117–36.
3. Cf. Sachs, H. The Creative Unconscious. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1942; Markey, J. F. The Symbolic Processes. London: Kegan Paul, 1928; Spender, S. The Creative Element. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953, pp. 175-77; Cane, M. Making a Poem — An Inquiry into the Creative Processes, New York, 1953. Brooks, Cl. and R. P. Warren. Understanding Poetry. New York, H. Holt & Co., 1951; Hunderland, Isabel C. “Symbols in Poetry,” in Art and Philosophy; Readings in Aesthetics, ed. by Kenninck, W. E. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964.
4. As the energies impinging on the receptor from outside trigger the perceptual process, the process cannot be qualitatively reduced to them; similarly the symbolic function is a quality irreducible to the quality of its stimulus. Disagreement with the notion that the unconscious is a basic generative condition of the symbolic function is not merely based on a semantic difficulty. If one labels as “unconscious” every mental event beyond conscious control and then proceeds to consider such an unknown quality as a condition of a known phenomenon he is purporting to define something of which he is admittedly ignorant, and the assertion lacks cogency. By way of an example: if one is to make a linguistic translation, he is expected to know both languages involved. A “translation” from unknown to known is as much a misnomer as is the “explanation” of known by unknown. No doubt supporters of the theory of the unconscious as the primary determining function of symbol-making, will invoke the authority of Freud’s ideas about the importance of the unconscious processes. Freud is undoubtedly responsible, to some extent at least, for the existing lack of clarity. He made the unconscious an all-powerful, impersonal and supreme principle of human life. Instincts are seen by Freud as the primary movers of the unconscious that “has no organization, no unified will,” and yet is something that holds “true psychic reality.” *On the other hand, the unconscious was not for him simply one mental process pregnant with meanings ready to be rescued. He assumed the existence of latent elements which he called preconscious, as contrasted with the unconscious proper, the repressed unconscious, so that on a descriptive level he actually postulated two kinds of unconscious, and on the dynamic level only one. The unconscious proper is incapable of becoming conscious in the ordinary way, while the preconscious is capable of organization of the inarticulated elements so that they can become subjects of conscious elaboration. Here the root of confusion can be located. The interpreters of an unconsciously determined and yet explicable symbol may have disregarded this rather subtle dichotomy and used the Freudian dynamic, repressed unconscious as an explanatory medium of the symbolic process. They have developed a logical inconsistency, as mentioned before, and on top of that have misrepresented Freud’s own position. It is conceivable that Freud’s unconscious proper or repressed unconscious appeals more strongly to some of the interpreters since, first, it appears to contain a certain quality of the impenetrable mystery of the human condition, and, secondly, it echoes rather faithfully Freud’s theory that the unconscious represents man’s terminal stage of “sickness” in which the symbolic act originates as the noblest revolt against an unchangeable fate.**
5. Freud, S. The Interpretation of Dreams, p. 531.