Freudian interpretation is popularly thought to be a matter of attributing sexual connotations to objects, so that towers and ladders, for instance, are seen as phallic symbols. This kind of thing had become a joke even in Freud's own lifetime, and we should remember that he once [allegedly] said, 'Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar'. (Freud was a heavy cigar smoker, mind you, so he had a vested interest in saying that.)

• In reality, Freudian interpretation is often highly ingenious, rather than highly simplistic. For example, let's imagine how a dream featuring a Roman soldier might be interpreted. Freud believes that a dream is an escape-hatch or safety-valve through which repressed desires, fears, or memories seek an outlet into the conscious mind. The emotion in question is censored by the conscious mind and so has to enter the dream in disguise, like a person barred from a club who gets in by dressing up as somebody else. The Roman soldier might be connected with the real subject of the dream by a chain of associations. Let's say that the dreamer is a young adult still under the thumb of an authoritarian father but wanting to break away from his influence, and experience adult life to the full. The Roman soldier might represent the father by a process of association: the father is associated with ideas of strictness, authority, and power in the domestic sphere; the Roman soldier is linked to the same things in the political sphere; so the one is substituted for the other. So the soldier in the dream is a symbolic representation of the father.

• But several meanings might be condensed into this symbol. Suppose the dreamer is tempted to rebel against the father by entering into a sexual liaison of which the father would certainly disapprove. The Roman soldier might also represent this person, the envisaged lover; perhaps the cliched phrase 'Latin lover' might have prompted this. Thus, both the feared father and the desired lover are condensed into the single dream figure of the Roman soldier.

• The purpose of devices like displacement and condensation is two-fold. Firstly, as we said, they disguise the repressed fears and wishes contained in the dream so that they can get past the censor which normally prevents their surfacing into the conscious mind. Secondly, they fashion this material into something which can be represented in a dream, that is, into images, symbols, and metaphors. Material has to be turned into this form for dreams, since dreams don't say things, they show things. In this sense especially, as we have indicated, they are very like literature. Hence the interest of literary critics in Freudian methods of interpretation.

• This should raise questions in your mind about how we decide when a Freudian interpretation is plausible and when not.

• I want to take one more example, this time from a book by Freud called The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. In spite of its title, this is one of Freud's most enjoyable and accessible publications. Its subtitle explains what it's about: 'Forgetting, slips of the tongue, bungled actions, superstitions and errors'. (Bungled actions are when you do things like unwrapping a sweet, putting the paper in your mouth, and throwing away the sweet.)

• The underlying assumption is that when some wish, fear, memory, or desire is difficult to face we may try to cope with it by repressing it, that is, eliminating it from the conscious mind. But this doesn't make it go away: it remains alive in the unconscious, like radioactive matter buried beneath the ocean, and constantly seeks a way back into the conscious mind, always succeeding eventually.

• As Freud famously said, 'There is always a return of the repressed'. Slips of the tongue or pen, the forgetting of names, and similar 'accidents' show this repressed material in the act of seeking a way back.

• The example is from Freud's own experience and it attributes significance to the forgetting of a word from a quotation. It is worth spending a little time on, since it typifies the quality of complexity and ingenuity which I have suggested is common in Freudian interpretation. Freud explains that while on holiday with his family he met an academic young man who, like Freud, was Jewish and they discussed the anti- semitism which might hinder their careers.

• The young man voiced strong feelings on this matter, expressing the wish that such wrongs might be put right by a future generation. He made this point with a quotation from the Latin poet Virgil, using words spoken by Dido, Queen of Carthage, when she is abandoned by Aeneas. Her words are 'Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor', meaning 'May someone arise from our bones as an avenger', but in quoting the line in Latin the young man accidently leaves out the word 'aliquis' (which means 'somebody'). Freud corrects the quotation, and the young man (who has read Freud's books) challenges him to explain the significance of this simple act of forgetting. Freud accepts the challenge, and asks the young man to say 'candidly and uncritically whatever comes into your mind if you direct your attention to the forgotten word without any definite aim'.

• This produces the following sequence of associations:

• Firstly, similar-sounding words like relics, liquefying, fluidity, and fluid.

• Secondly, St Simon of Trent, whose relics he saw some years ago.

• Thirdly, an article in an Italian newspaper called 'What St Augustine says about women'.

• Fourthly, St Januarius, whose blood is kept in a phial in a church at Naples and on a particular holy day it miraculously liquefies. He says 'the people get very agitated if it is delayed'. Freud points out that two of these saints {Januarius and Augustine) have names which link them closely with the calendar, and he has already worked out why the young man forgot the word 'aliquis'. The young man has been uneasy about a certain event, and if he had said the word 'aliquis' that would have reminded him again of this anxiety: so the unconscious protects him by deleting the word from his conscious memory. Perhaps you can already work out what the event is which the young man is worried about. He breaks off and says in some embarrassment 'I've suddenly thought of a young lady from whom I might easily hear a piece of news that would be very awkward for both of us'. He hesitates, and Freud asks 'That her periods have stopped?' The young man is astonished, and Freud explains how he knew: 'Think of the calendar saints, the blood that starts to flow on a particular day, the disturbance when the event fails to take place.'

STOP and THINK...

In its elaborateness, and its use of what literary critics would call 'symbolism', this example is fairly typical of aspects of psychoanalytic interpretation. How convincing do you find it? Try to pin- point your own reaction in a specific way. What is your judgement based upon? Do you distrust the example because of its elaborateness? (I am assuming some degree of distrust, since that is what I have encountered whenever I have used it.) Should there be a limit to the number of associative steps allowable between the slip and its interpretation? Without some such limit, could not the chain of associations be made to stretch to almost any interpretative destination? Or is it the nature of the steps, rather than their number, which makes the example finally unconvincing? If so, what is it about them which has this effect?

Note that the example seems to require the unconscious to anticipate the flow of conscious thought, to see that any word suggesting liquid will act as a reminder of the feared pregnancy, and then to eliminate the Latin word 'aliquis', preemptively, from the conscious mind.

My own feeling about it is that there is an attractive complexity about this example, far removed from the banalities of interpretations which are popularly called 'Freudian'. The anxiety felt by the young man is shown to suffuse the mind, in what seems to me a very plausible way, rather than being locked away in some specific compartment; hence, it is likely to surface anywhere at all. But perhaps this is simply to say that the elaborateness is what I like about this example.

Freudian interpretation, then, has always been of considerable interest to literary critics. The basic reason, again, is that the unconscious, like the poem, or novel, or play, cannot speak directly and explicitly but does so through images, symbols, emblems, and metaphors. Literature, too, is not involved with making direct explicit statements about life, but with showing and expressing experience through imagery, symbolism, metaphor and so on. However, because the 'statements' made are not explicit there is an inevitable 'judgmental' element involved, and in consequence psychoanalytic interpretations of literature are often controversial.