There's not a lot, personally, that I see happening in this discussion of
Freud that has anything other than hypothetical--or, more properly,
analogical--value with respect to cinema. But at the very least, those who
are discussing Freud might try to treat his _Interpretation of Dreams_ a
bit more subtly. Freud is so very careful to show that the interpretation
of a dream is _not_ a matter of decoding the "manifest" content into a
latent content. The latter content, the wish-fulfillment, can be traced
back, potentially ad infinitum, to childhood (this is why Freud begins by
discussing the dreams of children, which are virtually transparent and 
which have not accumulated the sediment of so many memories, nor the
censoring powers of adults) [cf. "Infantile Material as a Source for
Dream" in chapter V]. The "treasure" of the dream does not lie in a
latent meaning, as if that subtext could "solve" the dream. To believe as
much would be to repeat Freud's own early (and mistaken) belief that by
"saying" the cause of the symptom, whether consciously or under hypnosis,
one would catalyze an "abreaction."
	The key to interpretation, in a rigorous Freudian sense, is this:
one does not really interpret a dream at all so much as one (say, an
analyst) brings his/her patient to see the dream itself as an
interpretation of the unconscious. The point is not to render a latent
content from a manifest content but, rather, one "investigates the
relations between the manifest content and the latent dream-thoughts"
[cf. the begining of chapter VI]. As such, there is no simple
"opposition" between manifest and latent, but rather a process
of distortion that renders the dream a "rubric or picture puzzle." While
the lure of the dream is precisely to reach a deeper meaning, what Freud
locates in the dream--in the most important part of the dream--is
precisely a "navel" where meaning (symbolization, even censorship) falters
altogether. See, for instance, Freud's own "dream of Irma's injection,"
where the analyst dreams of examining one of his patients at a party. When
Freud discusses the dream, his narrativiztion runs aground at the
recollection of certain lesions on Irma's throat; he retreats into
claiming that, based on the patient's history, the dream reveals his own
professional anxieties--but what Freud has in fact brushed up against is 
the dream's navel, the place where the signifier fails. The dream is
important because it interprets this jouissance (das Es), which usually
eludes us ("Wo Es war, soll Ich werden"). 

Gregg Flaxman
Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory
University of Pennsylvania
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