Suppose I have a problem: Should I buy a Maserati, or a Lamborghini? If my money is just enough for a Fiat Cinquecento, any thoughts concerning Maserati and Lamborghini are castles in the air. Castles in the air, because they have ignored something that comes first: the reality of my wallet. The problem "Maserati or Lamborghini" is a pseudoproblem.

Freud's problem is what he calls "gaps" *, for example the gap, the discontinuity between dreaming and being awake. Freud wants to bridge it. Like the man in our example, he dwells in the delusion that he can want whatever he wants. It is a delusion because just like the man's "want" being far away from his wallet's reality, Freud's "want" is far away from the reality of dreaming, whereas its reality indicates that dreaming is radically different, even a totally Other to being awake.

Such "want" takes nothing into account. It will be realized anyway. How will it be realized? The man with the problem "Maserati or Lamborghini" will become an adventurer: he will get excessive loans, he will deceive, he will steal, he will cut out fake money. And Freud? In a letter to Fliess in 1900 he writes: "I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador - an adventurer [...] with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort." **

Now how is Freud an adventurer? He feeds on the roller of the "want", which claims that everywhere has to be a connection, a continuity, for example between dreaming and being awake. Freud, driven by this will, compares dreaming to being awake, and it is in the view of this comparison that their mutual otherness presents itself as a "gap" between them. He ruthlessly sets their reality aside: "In our view the appearances perceived must retreat in front of the just supposed strivings." ***

The connection, the continuity is produced by the trick of interpretation: dreaming and being awake become alike, as it happens with the unlike fractions. The common denominator, to whom both of them are reduced, is the construction of the "mental apparatus" with its "supposed strivings". The formerly discontinued, for example dreaming and being awake, are being exiled to this internal world, they are represented as inner psychological formations and - get bridged. That is: Dreaming is being renamed to an inner psychological "Dreamwork" ("Traumarbeit"), and the latter metabolizes the "strivings" of the awoken, which one may have never been aware of (then we tell him they were "unconscious"), and leads them towards their dreamt, that is their illusionary and disguised satisfaction. Pseudosolutions to pseudoproblems.

Where does the pseudoproblem derive its seduction from? From the fact that it lulls the concern of one seeking for explanations and being embarassed by the "gaps". Thus the reality set aside by Freud's adventurous "temperament", allready prior to the "gaps", has also this dimension: His concern is real, too. But he does not look at it, he does not listen to it, he does not address it. He dribbles it, he overtakes it by a coup: He drowns it in a theory. He encloses himself in an autistic microcosm where things are represented as he likes them to be. (Like the concern that my wife is unfaithful, and me fleeing to the solution to close her in a dungeon.)