to be or not to be

I agree with Monica that Freud seems to go a little overboard with his interpretations of his patients’ dreams. What if I had never read any of the texts to which Freud seems to find reference in the dreams he interprets? What if I had never read anything at all? Or been privy to a culture’s myths and fairytales (supposing my specific culture did not care for storytelling)? Would I be in anyway deficient, or less capable of accessing this language of my unconscious? Presumably signifiers would appear from my experience and daily life which I could then endeavor to interpret with the at times logic defying dexterity that Freud exhibits in “The Interpretation of Dreams.” But what if I had no access to language, not that I was incapable of it, but had been raised in isolation? What effect would this have on my dreams? This question becomes more pertinent when applied to Lacan’s theory that the unconscious is structured like a language, for without language it would seem that Lacan suggests my very being would be put in peril. Returning to the Cartesian model (“I think therefore I am”), thinking assures my being. Thought according to Lacan and Freud is constitutive of language. Without language, one cannot think and thus one “is” not. Perhaps this is a valid point. Perhaps if I had been raised in isolation without language and without means to communicate, I would not dream and this would merely be illustrative of my lack of being.

            Since this is a literary theory class and we have all been reasonably well socialized and are, I assume, quite literate, such musings have little importance here. What I find fascinating, however, is the way in which Lacan and Freud emphasize the arbitrary nature of our realm of meaning -- as dictated by the signs and signifiers we construct both in the “real” and in the dream-world.  We do not seem to be able to escape this abyss of meaning. In man’s perpetual quest for truth, we seek truth in the sliding signifiers of our unconscious (Freud’s rebus). This, it strikes me, is where art and literature come into play –and perhaps where Freud and Lacan’s theories become most relevant today: as tools in our literary theory/critical repertoire. In constructing a chain of signifiers in a work of art, we eliminate this arbitrary nature of the sign and assert our own truth, albeit that of a constructed narrative. When it comes to interpreting a text, just as Freud proposes we interpret a dream, we take those elements in the puzzle (signifiers) and synthesize them in order to arrive at a meaning….now whether that is the one and only interpretation, the one truth of the text, is up for debate (I believe the whole process is much more “open”)…Conversely one could view it as Lacan himself saw the matter: “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden.” Via art, we take the Ego where the Id is, exploring the moorings of what it means “to be” – the elusive truth of being.