I want to draw attention to the passage below on p. 300 of Freud's Interpreting Dreams (in the new translation by J. A. Underwood), referring to what Strachey had previously translated as 'overdetermination' in the dream-work, rendered by Underwood as 'multiple determination':
Each element of the dream-content turns out to be multiply determined - represented in the dream-thoughts several times. .... So I see what sort of relationship exists between dream-content and dream-thoughts: not only are the elements of the dream determined several times by dream-thoughts: individual dream-thoughts are also represented in the dream by several elements.
No doubt the same principle underlies all imaginative writing, as Freud states explicitly on p. 279:
Like every neurotic symptom, in fact (like dream itself, which is capable of repeated interpretation, at a deeper and deeper level - even requires it if the dream in question is to be understood), every genuine poetic creation will also have proceeded from more than one motive and more than one stimulus in the poet's mind and admit of more than one interpretation.
The principle of multiple determination is, however, particularly useful for interpreting internal relationships between textual and visual elements in a multi-modal text, such as Five Wounds, which also (perhaps not coincidentally) includes numerous accounts of dreams.
In fact, I didn't read Interpreting Dreams while composing Five Wounds. I should have - and I even bought a copy at the time, but it lay unread on my shelves while I was revising the novel. The role of dreaming in Five Wounds is therefore influenced more by early modern ideas on prophecy and divination. In fact, it was one of Freud's major insights that the meaning of dreams could be found in the dreamer's past rather than her future (p. 636):
For it is from the past that dream springs - in every sense. Granted, even the age-old belief that dreams show us the future is not wholly without truth-content. By showing us a wish as having been fulfilled, dream does in fact lead us into the future; however, the future that the dreamer takes as present is moulded by the indestructible wish into a mirror of that past.
As an additional point, I note that Interpreting Dreams uses a metaphor I thought I'd invented for the introduction to the 'The Art of Grief' (an autobiographical essay that provides several unattributed quotations in Five Wounds, and therefore relates to the novel as latent content relates to manifest content in a dream). On pp. 508-9 of Interpreting Dreams, Freud writes (in a variation of the archaeological metaphor for analysis of which he was so fond):
Like dreams, [daydreams] are wish-fulfilments; like dreams, they are largely based on the impressions of childhood experiences; like dreams, they enjoy a certain relaxation of censorship as regards their creations. Looking closely at how they are put together, one becomes aware of how the wish-motive that operates in their production, seizing the material of which they are constructed, has jumbled that material up, rearranged it and assembled it to form a fresh whole. To the childhood recollections to which they hark back, they stand in something like the same relationship as some of Rome's baroque palaces stand to the classical ruins whose columns and dressed stones provided the materials for their reconstruction in modern forms.
I would argue that in it, the unconscious is structured, not like a language (as Lacan famously insisted), or like an image (as Freud states explicitly within Interpreting Dreams), but rather, like a comic strip – or an illustrated novel.
Each element of the dream-content turns out to be multiply determined - represented in the dream-thoughts several times. .... So I see what sort of relationship exists between dream-content and dream-thoughts: not only are the elements of the dream determined several times by dream-thoughts: individual dream-thoughts are also represented in the dream by several elements.
No doubt the same principle underlies all imaginative writing, as Freud states explicitly on p. 279:
Like every neurotic symptom, in fact (like dream itself, which is capable of repeated interpretation, at a deeper and deeper level - even requires it if the dream in question is to be understood), every genuine poetic creation will also have proceeded from more than one motive and more than one stimulus in the poet's mind and admit of more than one interpretation.
The principle of multiple determination is, however, particularly useful for interpreting internal relationships between textual and visual elements in a multi-modal text, such as Five Wounds, which also (perhaps not coincidentally) includes numerous accounts of dreams.
In fact, I didn't read Interpreting Dreams while composing Five Wounds. I should have - and I even bought a copy at the time, but it lay unread on my shelves while I was revising the novel. The role of dreaming in Five Wounds is therefore influenced more by early modern ideas on prophecy and divination. In fact, it was one of Freud's major insights that the meaning of dreams could be found in the dreamer's past rather than her future (p. 636):
For it is from the past that dream springs - in every sense. Granted, even the age-old belief that dreams show us the future is not wholly without truth-content. By showing us a wish as having been fulfilled, dream does in fact lead us into the future; however, the future that the dreamer takes as present is moulded by the indestructible wish into a mirror of that past.
As an additional point, I note that Interpreting Dreams uses a metaphor I thought I'd invented for the introduction to the 'The Art of Grief' (an autobiographical essay that provides several unattributed quotations in Five Wounds, and therefore relates to the novel as latent content relates to manifest content in a dream). On pp. 508-9 of Interpreting Dreams, Freud writes (in a variation of the archaeological metaphor for analysis of which he was so fond):
Like dreams, [daydreams] are wish-fulfilments; like dreams, they are largely based on the impressions of childhood experiences; like dreams, they enjoy a certain relaxation of censorship as regards their creations. Looking closely at how they are put together, one becomes aware of how the wish-motive that operates in their production, seizing the material of which they are constructed, has jumbled that material up, rearranged it and assembled it to form a fresh whole. To the childhood recollections to which they hark back, they stand in something like the same relationship as some of Rome's baroque palaces stand to the classical ruins whose columns and dressed stones provided the materials for their reconstruction in modern forms.
I would argue that in it, the unconscious is structured, not like a language (as Lacan famously insisted), or like an image (as Freud states explicitly within Interpreting Dreams), but rather, like a comic strip – or an illustrated novel.
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