Between a “Poetical Phrase” and Being “Led into Error” in "The Interpretation of Dreams"

Among the many places where Freud himself addresses the question of “visualizing psycho-analysis,” one of the more obvious is Chapter 6 of The Interpretation of Dreams. Here, the visual touches upon the idea of psychical processes specific to psycho-analysis, as Freud discusses the cipher of unconscious thoughts represented by their ostensible visualization in the dream-work. Psycho-analysis offers a theory and practice of the translation of these thoughts between their visualization and verbalization. The poetics of translation offers a cipher, then, for the visualization of psycho-analysis in its own “considerations of representability” [Darstellbarkeit]. Crucially, it is not the visual itself that is of psycho-analytic interest but the question of its verbal translation, where the latter is marked by symptomatic indices of unconscious thought (through slips of the pen or tongue, the momentary forgetting of words or names, and so on).

How this setting is visualized in the associations of the analysand provides a key to and for the work of psycho-analysis, as is described, for instance, by the poet Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) in her account of sessions with Freud, making explicit reference to “the things on his table.”¹ She cites “the Professor’s” reply to her professed commitment to “assemble all the sorry memories in my effort to get at the truth” – that “We never know what is important or what is unimportant until after” – and immediately adds: “I told him how the first impression of his room had overwhelmed and upset me. I had not expected to find him surrounded by these treasures, in a museum, a temple.”² (Reading these voices contrasts with seeing the uncannily full and yet empty rooms in Engelmann’s atmospheric photographs of Freud’s apartment at Berggasse 19 [1998].) Indeed, Freud deliberately introduced H.D. to his collection of antiquities, and she elaborates on the transferential analogy of her associations with them, evoking the question of their “reality” when addressing her “memories” in the present, as a relation between “dream picture” and “work of art”: “We travel far in thought, in imagination or in the realm of memory. Events happened as they happened, not all of them, of course, but here and there a memory or a fragment of a dream-picture is actual, is real, is like a work of art or is a work of art… They are as real in their dimension of length, breadth, thickness, as any of the bronze or marble or pottery or clay objects that fill the cases around the walls, that are set in elegant position in a wide arc on the Professor’s table in the other room. But we cannot prove that they are real…”³ The difference between what is like a work of art and what is a work of art offers a sense of the dynamics of transference, where objects take on the aura of a collection belonging to “the Professor” in the “other room.” This is a visualization in (as much as of) psycho-analysis, enacting the question of “psychical locality” that Freud draws from Fechner. Such conceptual staging is translated by Strachey as a “scene of action,” although it alludes more literally to the phantasy of seeing [ein anderer Schauplatz].⁴

The manifold of H.D.’s evocations could well be the subject of a commentary on visualizing psycho-analysis, while the meaning of these antiquities for Freud himself has already been the subject of critical commentary (not least, in his own letters). One might also think of the legacy – literally, the patrimony – of the Philippson Bible in Freud’s metaphors (explored, for instance, in Rizzuto’s thesis about “Freud’s compulsion to collect antiquities” [1998] and in Bergstein’s “reading of Freud’s visual imagination” [2010]), offering another key to the visualizing of, as much as to visualizing in, psycho-analysis. For all that one might question the supposed relation between “evidence” and “comparing,” Rizzuto writes about her interpretation, for example, that “the evidence to support these assertions is visual [and that] it can be seen by comparing the pictures in the [Philippson] bible with the objects in Freud’s collection of antiquities.”⁵ The discussion in this essay, however, is concerned with one particular “fragment of a dream-picture” (H.D.), the interpretation of which is played out between two points of reference in The Interpretation of Dreams – the “poetical” and “error” – as offering its own metaphor of translation. Between the thought of the analysand and that of the analyst, how do the entwined questions of visualizing and translating engage with what is specific to psycho-analysis – as distinct, for instance, from a poetics of introspection? Indeed, how might visualization – not least, in the sense of analogy and metaphor, distinct from illustration – offer an instance of translation in psycho-analysis, in the pre-eminent “other scene” [anderer Schauplatz] of the dream-work?

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The dream-work offers an everyday manifestation of unconscious thought processes, distinct from the neurotic structures generating symptoms of psychical conflict (such as inhibitions, phobias, obsessional traits) that might bring one to the consulting room. In the psycho-analytic interpretation of dreams, Freud addresses the dream-work in terms of a distinction between the pictorial [bildlich] and the literal [wörtlich], a distinction with which his concept of translation is visualized by analogy with that between Egyptian hieroglyphic writing and the alphabetic writing of ancient Greek. This is itself a model of and for a supposed separation of magic and mysteries (figurative) from the rational and conceptual (abstract) within European culture, or, with respect to dreams, between what Freud envisaged as a hermeneutic science distinct from hermeneutic folklore or superstition. (There is also another palimpsestic layer – or, perhaps, haunting – in this unfolding of cultural memory, with Freud’s reading of Moses as an Egyptian; the idea that “one cannot be a Jew without, in a certain sense, embodying Egypt – or a ghost thereof,” as Peter Sloterdijk describes in his reading of Freud and Derrida.)⁶

Although the European sense of translation between the pictorial and the literal echoes with an enduring wish fulfilment, epitomized by the Hermetic tradition, the “modern” deciphering of hieroglyphics understands that they already include phonetic markers. As Champollion wrote in his Letter to M. Dacier, the hieroglyphic is “at the same time figurative, symbolic, and phonetic, a character could represent either a simple sound, or two consonants, or an idea.”⁷ Resonant in this context is that, by comparison with Champollion’s Egyptian Grammar (1836), Athanasius Kircher’s earlier “translations” of hieroglyphics are entitled The Egyptian Oedipus (1652–1654). The changing potential of visualization here, from the Oedipal to the grammatical – between the Greek and the Egyptian – characterizes the nineteenth century especially, and the forging of an identification with the modern as a corollary of the imperialistic and the archival, which we are trying to unlearn in the present century. Nonetheless, Champollion’s insight that the phonetic was already present in the pictorial is also entailed in Freud’s account, even as he continues to suggest their opposition. One might say that the question of visualizing psycho-analysis is like turning a glove inside out, in order to explore the stitching that makes it wearable beyond its design as simply a hand-shaped garment.

Interestingly, neither visualization nor translation (with an exception to which we will return) appear in the general subject index of the Standard Edition, an absence that indicates that the conceptual concerns of psycho-analysis are always to be (re)discovered through the changing readings it invites – from its “claims to scientific interest” (in the terms of Freud’s eponymous essay [1913]), through such different schools as the Kleinian and Lacanian, to the diversity of its feminist readings. Although the Rosetta Stone (recently the centerpiece of an exhibition on “deciphering hieroglyphs” at the British Museum [Regulski, 2022]) presents an example for the visualization of psycho-analysis, it is also notable that the Standard Edition indexes only a single reference to Champollion (in a footnote in Freud’s essay on Leonardo, with its curious speculations on the maternal imago). Conceiving of Freud as “the Champollion of the psyche” might seem both obvious and obscure, especially if we bear in mind that the work of translation in and of the transference is not simply descriptive but dynamic. Thus Derrida, for instance, cautions against the apparent implication in the Rosetta Stone analogy that a signified text simply pre-exists its translation: “Here again the metaphorical concept of translation (Überstezen) or transcription (Umschrift) is dangerous, not because it refers to writing, but because it presupposes a text which would be already there, immobile: the serene presence of a statue, of a written stone or archive whose signified content might be harmlessly transported into the milieu of a different language, that of the preconscious or the conscious.”⁸ The example of H.D. evoking Freud’s collection of statuettes already shows how intimate the question of what is “transported” from one scene to another may be in psycho-analysis. This gives a more than literal sense to Derrida’s proviso that “[i]t is thus not enough to speak of writing in order to be faithful to Freud, for it is then that we may betray him more than ever.”⁹ Indeed, toward the end of his essay, Derrida observes: “That which, in Freud’s discourse, opens itself to the theme of writing results in psycho-analysis being not simply psychology – nor simply psycho-analysis.”¹⁰

This serves to warn us off mistaking the hieroglyphic text as the given original (“pictorial”) text of and for the Greek translation in the inscriptions of the Rosetta Stone. The intelligibility of the translation renders all three scripts on the stele (Greek, demotic, and hieroglyphic) comparative, displacing claims for the “manifest” (and deciphered) content in each of its iterations. As Derrida, again, notes: “The call of the supplement is primary, here, and it hollows out that which will be reconstituted by deferral in the present.”¹¹ The idea of “supplement” (as itself indicative of “error” in translation) is key to Derrida’s understanding of “writing,” precisely as it concerns the sense of metaphor in the ways by which the poetical and the conceptual inform Western philosophy. For Derrida, the exemplary visualization of psycho-analysis (one that displaces the Rosetta Stone in Freud’s dynamic topographical model), as “a figurative image (anschauliche Vorstellung: intuitive representation, metaphor)” (in Derrida’s quotation of Freud),¹² becomes that of the “mystic writing pad” in the 1925 essay, “A Note Upon the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad’.”¹³ Crucially, the question is how the conception of the relation or “trace” here between writing and thought (or memory) has already undone the Platonic metaphysics through which it is nonetheless represented in order for this new visualization to become possible; for there to be, precisely, a “new psycho-analytic graphology.”¹⁴ This concerns the “considerations of representability” in such a (conceptual) visualization, as Freud discusses them in The Interpretation of Dreams. Rather than instantiating their opposition, this involves the play (or translation) between the literal and the metaphorical, or (as Roman Jakobson indicates) between contiguity and substitution in the “transport” (or transference) between the referential and the poetic (Jakobson, 1960).

To quote Freud himself at some length here, from the already cited “The Claims of Psycho-analysis to Scientific Interest” (which includes “the non-psychological sciences,” starting with philology): “If we reflect that the means of representation in dreams are principally visual images and not words, we shall see that it is even more appropriate to compare dreams with a system of writing than with language. In fact, the interpretation of dreams is completely analogous to the decipherment of an ancient pictographic script such as Egyptian hieroglyphics. In both cases there are certain elements which are not intended to be interpreted (or read, as the case may be) but are only designed to serve as ‘determinatives’, that is to establish the meaning of some other element. The ambiguity of various elements of dreams finds a parallel in these ancient systems of writing; and so too does the omission of various relations, which have in both cases to be supplied from the context. If this conception of the method of representation in dreams has not yet been followed up, this, as will be readily understood, must be ascribed to the fact that psycho-analysts are entirely ignorant of the attitude and knowledge of which a philologist would approach such a problem as that presented by dreams.”¹⁵

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To return to the Rosetta Stone, then, the transformative consequence of Champollion’s work changed the understanding of the past (of “memories” as visualized, for instance, in the transference). Through translation, what had been incomprehensible or unintelligible became contemporary in the particular temporality of psycho-analysis – that is, retroactively (or “after,” as Freud observed to H.D.). The visual code of hieroglyphics had always already been translatable into the alphabetic code that was contemporaneous to it (as Greek was with Egyptian).¹⁶ This becoming comparative of what had previously been seen as separated – before the “scientific” work of translation made possible by the Rosetta Stone – is also echoed in the avant-garde appropriation of the “primitive” in early twentieth-century visual culture.

Among the collection of antiquities that peopled the visual field of Freud’s writing desk (evoked affectively by H.D.) was a statuette of the ancient Egyptian god of writing, Theuth, in the form of a baboon. The Freud Museum in London even sells a replica of this figure, and the webpage advertising it tells us that “[t]he Freud family’s housekeeper Paula Fichtl noted that Sigmund Freud was in the habit of stroking the marble baboon ‘like a pet’ when deep in thought” – as if, in order to deepen our own thought, we might do the same with its simulacrum. This citation of Fichtl – “probably the only person allowed to touch them” (besides Freud) when cleaning – also appears in Rizzuto,¹⁷ who notes the separation of the Freuds’ apartment into the family rooms (decorated by Martha Freud) and the work rooms, to which the antiquities were confined.¹⁸

The relation of thought and memory that is externalized in visual – and, indeed, haptic – form in Freud’s collections, whether the books in his library or an iconic representation of Egyptian divinity (both figurations of the mediation of experience by the technology of writing), is famously evoked by Socrates in Plato’s Phaedrus. In the mythological terms offered by Plato, between Greek and Egyptian, writing (as a visualization of thought) is an ambiguous medium not only of and for memory, but equally of and for forgetting, not to mention both wisdom and ignorance. Socrates refers to Thamus, an Egyptian king, who challenged the claim of Theuth that writing would “increase the intelligence of the people […] and improve their memories.”¹⁹ To the contrary, Thamus replies, “it will atrophy people’s memories. Trust in writing will make them remember things by relying on marks made by others, from outside themselves, not on their own inner resources […]. Your invention is a potion for jogging the memory, not for remembering.”²⁰ As already noted with H.D., in the setting of the consulting room, this relation is played out in the ambiguity concerning the “reality” – visualized in the transference – of memories and antiquities; as fragments of the past in the present become fragments of the present in the past, typically manifested in repetition rather than by remembrance.

For visualizing psycho-analysis, the question of transference might be compared with Phaedrus speaking for Socrates in describing the written word as “the mere image” of the animated and animating word within the soul of speech.²¹ Between a fragment of the past (stone) and its “mere image,” then, the ambiguity of inscription for visualizing translation in psycho-analysis – as key to an interpretation of psycho-analysis itself – is not resolvable, even in Freud’s own example of the mystic writing pad, which substitutes the lithic medium of the stele with a complex wax-paper-celluloid medium for the visualizing of mnemic traces as graphemes. Transposed into print (whether on paper or virtually on a screen), Derrida writes out the very question of the graphic (visualized in the “topography of traces”)²² for an understanding of the psychical: “What questions will these [Freudian] representations impose upon us? We shall not have to ask if a writing apparatus – for example, the one described in the ‘Note on the Mystic Writing-Pad’ – is a good metaphor for representing the working of the psyche, but rather what apparatus we must create in order to represent psychical writing; and we shall have to ask what the imitation, projected and liberated in a machine, of something like psychical writing might mean. And not if the psyche is indeed a kind of text, but: what is a text, and what must the psyche be if it can be represented by a text?”²³

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Before turning to the question of a literal metaphor of translation in The Interpretation of Dreams, we might note that the Rosetta Stone arguably offers a more appropriate visualization of psycho-analysis than the image of Oedipus questioning – or being questioned by – the Sphinx in the famous painting by Ingres, a reproduction of which hung on the wall of Freud’s consulting room. (This too is available from the Freud Museum’s gift shop, printed on the side of a cup, further disseminating the visualization of psycho-analysis through what have become its enduring cultural clichés.) Today, we may see the evidence of Orientalism in Ingres’s iconic image, although it remains both emblematic and enigmatic for visualizing psycho-analysis as a mythical scene (or “consultation”) in counterpoint to the material image of the bilingual, tri-scriptural Rosetta stele that records a long-forgotten edict. An actual fragment, the stone was recycled as material for the building of a fort at a site that did not even exist when the inscription was carved,²⁴ and it has since also been appropriated within the complex history of European Orientalizing imperialism. As noted by Bénédicte Savoy, the visible invisibility of this history (“the return of the colonial repressed”)²⁵ is on display in Bartholdi’s statue of Champollion in the courtyard of the Collège de France, with one of the scholar’s feet resting on the fallen head of a pharaonic statue.²⁶

Is this to say, then, that one might visualize or conceive of Freud as extending the imperialist-modern enterprise into the field of the psyche, not least, as many have charged, leading a patriarchal invasion – and mapping – of its terrain? But what then to make of Freud’s understanding not only of a syntax of the unconscious (distinct from a symbolism) but of its resistance, thereby, to the appropriation of meaning by and for conscious understanding?

Repression in Freud’s account is not a one-way street. Where, for instance, the decipherment of hieroglyphs originally gave voice to cultural meanings that the Church’s understanding of Scripture (and of Biblical temporality) sought to resist, so Freud’s project of psycho-analysis gives voice to what cognitive psychology cannot account for as symptoms in terms of its own frame of reference. The Rosetta Stone remains a fragment; it is not “complete” and is subject to forms of reconstruction. Rather than its manifest content (the particular decree, the form of which was common at the time), it is the principles of and for translation that make the stele significant – as the example of “determinatives that […] establish the meaning of some other element” (Freud)²⁷ articulates a relation between visualization and verbalization in psycho-analysis. (This relation also enciphers affects, of course, such as “love, guilt, and reparation” and “envy and gratitude” – to cite the titles of Klein’s major collections of essays – as well as “mourning and melancholia.”)

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Chapter 6 of The Interpretation of Dreams concerns how, specifically, the dream-work visualizes the dream-thoughts, the famous analogy for which Freud gives with a picture puzzle [Bilderätsel or rebus].²⁸ With this visualization, Freud’s inquiry into the relations between the manifest content and the latent dream-thoughts is specific to what he calls “our procedure,”²⁹ that is, specific to psycho-analysis as distinct from the history of dream interpretation – for example, occult divination or prophetic visualization. Freud writes: “The dream-thoughts and the dream-content are presented to us like two versions of the same subject-matter in two different languages. Or, more properly, the dream-content seems like a transcript of the dream-thoughts into another mode of expression, whose characters [Zeichen] and syntactic laws [Fügungsgesetz] it is our business to discover by comparing the original and the translation.”³⁰ Here we see, precisely, the interest of Champollion rather than Kircher, understanding the “pictorial” in terms of syntactic relations rather than as ideographic symbols. Indeed, as Freud continues (perhaps rather optimistically here): “The dream-thoughts are immediately comprehensible, as soon as we have learnt them. The dream-content, on the other hand, is expressed as it were in a pictographic script [Bilderschrift], the characters [Zeichen] of which have to be transposed individually into the language of the dream-thoughts. If we attempted to read these characters according to their pictorial value instead of according to their symbolic relation, we should clearly be led into error.”³¹ Just as with the example of the Rosetta Stone, one needs to be careful of “symbolic relation” here, as Zeichenbeziehung concerns the (syntactic) relation between letters – the literal – distinct from a pictorial sense of the “symbolic.” In an invocation of the “poetic,” as we shall come to (below), this opens up a question of interpretation (or, precisely, translation) being “led into error.”

The “pictographic script” – thought of in opposition to an alphabetic script (visualized in the image of ancient Egyptian, distinct from ancient Greek) – is, then, the index of what is at first incomprehensible, belonging to a “stratum” of meaning-making that is no longer in direct (rather than archaeological) exchange with the present. Here, of course, we touch upon the analogy (as much visual as conceptual) with “excavation” – not least, at Amarna, revealing the significance of Akhenaten, which was key to Freud’s reading of “Moses and monotheism.” As between Amarna and Athens (given that Alexandria, as indicated by its very name, was already Hellenized), translation signifies both a discontinuity in the access to meaning (between the “archaic” and the “historical”) and the continuity that glosses this divide – where the Greek example already provides the terms of and for comparison with the hieroglyphic. This is another thread in the weave of French and British imperial history in North Africa (emulating that of ancient Rome), the legacies of which remain not only cultural but political up to today, including both the iconography of Ingres’s Oedipus and the Sphinx and the transformative work of Champollion for visualizing psycho-analysis.

Rather than simply taking the dream in its visual appearance, Freud insists on its work of visualization, that is, its “considerations of representability” (as Section D of Chapter 6 has it). Understanding the pictorial “language” of dreams as itself a work of translation (in terms of “syntactical rules”) allows for its retranslation into verbal images – through associations (called “free,” although they are overdetermined) – exploring the paradox of literal metaphors in the analogy of a “poetical phrase” [Dichterspruch].³² The latter is resonant with the idea of condensation, Verdichtungsarbeit (Section A of Chapter 6), which – as the great poet of translated ideograms, Ezra Pound, observed in 1934 – is “ingrained in the very language of German”;³³ expressive of what Jakobson, for instance, explores between the “poetry of grammar and the grammar of poetry,”³⁴ distinct from offering a catalog of poetic figures (such as “the language of flowers”). This shift (or turn) concerning the sense of metaphor (in its grammar) is easily overlooked, however, especially with the lure of the symbolism so beloved of “vulgar Freudianism” (and pastiche Surrealism), where the visualization of psycho-analysis – being “led into error” – becomes another instance of resistance to it through the very appeal of and to its supposed tropes.

Significantly (or, one might say, symptomatically), the absence of reference to translation in the index to the Standard Edition has an exception, that is, as limited to questions of the translation of the Standard Edition itself in “translating Freud’s technical terms” into English.³⁵ This introduces a difference between The Interpretation of Dreams and the interpretation of dreams as concerns precisely their “considerations of representability,” without reducing this to simply a matter of “comparing the original and the translation,”³⁶ as Freud confidently claims. (Strachey’s work, we might also note, is itself a way of visualizing psycho-analysis not only conceptually [even by omission] or, indeed, metaphorically, but materially – with its collection of 24 blue bound volumes that occupy library shelves [like a modern form of “antiquity” generating transference] throughout the world.) The “technical” questions of psycho-analysis, after all, serve to destabilize the apparent opposition between translation and original, where understanding is not defined simply by this all-too-“standard” distinction, but its symptomatic instances, where it fails to explain what it supposedly describes. Such failures engage with the question of translatability, and are the source of and for a specifically psycho-analytic understanding (“considerations”) of visualization [Darstellung]. This brings us to my principal example here – concerning what is, or is not, metaphorical and/or literal in the standard English interpretation of one of the dreams presented by Freud. As a question of the translation of Freud’s interpretation of dreams (and, indeed, of Die Traumdeutung) into English, this offers an instance of the symptomatic difference between the German and English texts in their appeal to a difference between the metaphorical and the literal, as between the pictorial and the syntactic.

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Exploring “considerations of representability,” then, Freud offers the example of the “Fools’ Tower” dream – “in which a considerable part was played by the turning of abstract thought into pictures.”³⁷ This example is presented in the context of Freud’s observation concerning dream interpretation, that “a dream never tells us whether its elements are to be interpreted literally or in a figurative sense [im übertragenen Sinne; metaphorically].”³⁸ The specifics of the dream itself – or rather Freud’s report of it – need not concern us here, as it is presented in terms of Freud’s own understanding. He tells us that “I deliberately refrained from asking for an analysis of the dream. But since I had some knowledge of the dreamer’s personal relations, I was able to interpret certain pieces of it independently of her.”³⁹ What is of concern here is the work of both condensation and displacement in Strachey’s “standard” translation of Freud’s interpretation, in counterpoint to the optimism expressed by Freud that: “Yet, in spite of all this ambiguity, it is fair to say that the productions of the dream-work, which, it must be remembered, are not made with the intention of being understood, present no greater difficulties to their translators than do the ancient hieroglyphic scripts to those who seek to read them.”⁴⁰

After his report of the dream, Freud writes of one of its central images that he “decided to take the tower in the stalls metaphorically.”⁴¹ Or, at least, this is what we are told in the Standard Edition. However, Strachey’s translation of Freud’s proposed translation of the dream’s work of visualization (its “hieroglyphic script”) is literally mistaken; indeed, it substitutes Freud’s wörtlich [literal] with his own sense of the metaphorical. In Freud’s text, the word wörtlich is even italicized – “Ich entschloss mich also, den Turm im Parkett wörtlich zu nehmen”⁴² – so that it is visualized graphically for “those who seek to read” it. The substitution (literally a metaphor) is only apparent in the relation between the two texts, each exposing something about the other that would simply pass unnoticed (“manifestly”) in each taken separately. The lure of mis-taking the literal [wörtlich] for the metaphorical [bildlich], as an example of interpretation, broaches a web of cognate meaning that is condensed in their “standard” opposition – evoking not only transference [Übertragung] but translation itself [Übersetzung].

Freud’s observation concerning the Verdichtung [condensation] of the dream’s work of visualization is, typically, a reduction of the very hermeneutics of ambiguity that his work opens up. It is, after all, “our everyday, sober method of expression” that proves “misleading” where (as already noted) Freud proposes that “if one ambiguous word is used instead of two unambiguous ones the result is misleading [as, in this case, simply opposing the metaphorical and the literal]; and if our everyday, sober method of expression is replaced by a pictorial one, our understanding is brought to a halt, particularly since a dream never tells us whether its elements are to be interpreted literally or in a figurative sense [wörtlich oder im übertragenen Sinne], or whether they are to be connected with the material of the dream-thoughts directly or through the intermediary of some interpolated phraseology.”⁴³

The first English translation of The Interpretation of Dreams, by A. A. Brill (before Strachey’s “standard” edition), interestingly offers a “compromise formation” (itself a technical term in psycho-analysis) between the ostensible poles of what is mis-taken in Strachey’s (and perhaps even Freud’s) interpretation, between the referential and the poetic (Jakobson), or between the real and the transferential (H.D.). Brill (who keeps Freud’s italics, unlike Strachey) translates Freud’s hermeneutic “decision” (with its echo of a “poetical phrase” concerning the metaphorical and the literal): “I therefore decided to take the tower in the stalls verbally.”⁴⁴ This choice is, indeed, ambiguous – being both literally and metaphorically appropriate – rather than the “standard” disambiguation in the choice between two ostensibly opposed terms.

While we can say, superficially, that Strachey’s translation is mistaken, more interestingly, we can take it as an instance of the paradox of translation bearing on visualization (the “pictorial”) in psycho-analysis. That words are translatable does not prescribe a particular (or “standard”) translation, after all. This entails an ambiguity that is repeated in Freud’s reporting of a comment by Ferenczi in The Interpretation of Dreams: “Indeed, dreams are so closely related to linguistic expression that Ferenczi [1910] has truly remarked that every tongue has its own dream-language. It is impossible as a rule to translate a dream into a foreign language and this is equally true, I fancy, of a book such as the present one. [Added 1930:] Nevertheless, Dr A.A. Brill of New York, and many others after him, have succeeded in translating The Interpretation of Dreams.”⁴⁵ What counts as “successful” translation is, on the one hand, attested to by the very example of reading this comment in English rather than German. While, on the other hand (as the very metaphor of hands itself attests to), such success remains ambiguous as regards what is specific to the idea(s), or the theoretical fictions, of psycho-analysis. The relation between visualization and conceptualization in the Freudian interpretation of dreams, after all, concerns the very writing of The Interpretation of Dreams itself.