D.-Nobus-Beyond-the-Rebus-Principle-Psychoanalysis

BEYOND THE REBUS PRINCIPLE?
Psychoanalysis and Chinese Dream Interpretation*
Dany Nobus
Dream interpretation constitutes a central axis of psychoanalytic
treatment. According to Freud, analysts need to approach the manifest
dream content as a form of pictographic writing, similar to a rebus, and
should not be misled by the visual image of the representation. Freud also
links the dream script to ancient forms of expression and even singles out
Chinese as the writing system that comes closest to the composition of the
dream text. Drawing on Freud's own comparison and the linguistic features
of Chinese characters, this paper investigates whether Freud's portrayal of
the manifest dream content maintains its validity beyond the boundaries of
Western alphabetic writing systems. Given the peculiarities of ancient
Chinese dream interpretation, as exemplified in the Yu-sia-tsi, and the
majority of semantic-phonetic symbols in contemporary Chinese, I argue
that Chinese dreams are likely to contain ideograms instead of actual
rebuses, and that these ideograms will exploit phonological rather than
semantic connections. The composition of a Chinese dream is, therefore,
radically different from that of a Western dream, and dream interpretation
should proceed along the opposite path as that advocated by Freud: from
phonology to logography and from sound to signification.
*** *
The birth of psychoanalysis is commonly associated with the
publication of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams in November 1899.
Although Freud had introduced the term 'psychoanalysis' in 1896,1 The
* Paper presented at the 2001 International Symposium on Psychoanalytic Research (ISPR),
Beijing University Health Science Centre, 14-16 April 2001.
1
S. Freud. (1896a) Heredity and the Aetiology of the Neuroses. S.E., EI, pp. 143-156.
9
Interpretation of Dreams was the first book in which he explained its principal
tenets in a rigorous and systematic fashion, simultaneously applying his
new insights to the everyday phenomenon of dreaming. Unlike many of his
predecessors, who regarded dreams either as nonsensical by-products of
sleep or as divine oracles sealing the fate of the dreamer, Freud argued that
all dreams could be explained as concealed fulfilments of unconscious
wishes harboured by the dreamer during waking life.2 Illustrating with
numerous vignettes how the manifest content of a dream (the dreamer's
account of what he or she has dreamt) is but a disguised expression of an
array of latent dream thoughts, Freud contended that the hidden meaning
of a dream (the repressed unconscious wishes supporting it) may be
uncovered via specific psychoanalytic techniques of interpretation, which
are aimed at undoing the multifarious distortions of the dreamwork.
Freud was profoundly unhappy with the way in which his work was
received by the scientific community, yet he continued to believe in the
revolutionary significance of these findings, referring to his creation as a
'dream-child' 3 and daydreaming about a laudatory marble tablet being
placed on the house where he had dreamt the specimen dream of his book.4
In support of the priceless value of his dream theory for the clinical
applications of psychoanalysis, he also enriched the final chapter of his
work in 1909 with the well-known sentence: 'The interpretation of dreams is
the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind'. 5
In view of the cardinal importance of The Interpretation of Dreams for
the history of psychoanalysis and the crucial role of dreams within clinical
psychoanalytic practice, any judgement of the professional and scientific
status of psychoanalysis can take its bearings from a re-evaluation of its
claims concerning the nature and function of dreams. It is, therefore, not by
accident that recent attempts at securing a respectable place for
psychoanalysis amongst the sciences - whether natural, human or social S. Freud. (1896) Further Remarks on the Neuro-Psychoses of Defence. S.E., EI, pp. 162-185.
2
S. Freud. (1900) The Interpretation of Dreams. S.E., IV, V. p. 160.
3
J.M. Masson. The Complete Letters ofSigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliep 1887-1904. Cambridge
MA-London, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985. p. 405.
4
ibid. p. 417.
5
S. Freud (1900) op.cit, pp. 607-608.
10
rather than amongst the arts and humanities have predominantly focused
on its contribution to the study of dreams, and related issues of vision,
reality and consciousness.6 Nor should it come as a surprise that some of
the most trenchant criticisms of psychoanalysis have zoomed in on Freud's
dream theory and, more precisely, on his method of dream interpretation.
The dream may very well be the royal road to the unconscious, but since
this road can only be cleared through the interpretive impact of
psychoanalysis, the revelation of the unconscious stands or falls with the
value of psychoanalytic interpretations. Some authors 7 have, therefore,
done their best to demonstrate that Freud's proposed technique of
interpretation is quite wishful in itself and that The Interpretation of Dreams
should rather be read as a piece of fiction, constructed in the best tradition
of the gothic novel. 8
Freud's method of dream interpretation - if method there is - cannot
be dissociated from his conception of the dream as an object of
interpretation. Indeed, if Freud repudiates 'symbolic dream-interpreting' as
well as the 'decoding method' - two popular techniques of dream-reading it is primarily because each of these methods promotes an idea of the dream
to which he cannot reconcile himself. In the symbolic approach, the dream
content is considered as an organic whole whose mysterious
communication becomes transparent when it is replaced with an alternative
message which stands in a meaningful relationship with the dream content
and which often foretells the future. Freud adduces the example of the
Pharaoh's two dreams in Genesis 41, as interpreted by Joseph the son of
6
M. Solms. 'New Findings on the Neurological Organization of Dreaming: Implications for
Psychoanalysis in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 64(1), 1995. pp. 43-67.
M. Solms. The Neuropsychology of Dreams: A Clinico-Anatomical Study. Hillsdale NJ, Lawrence
Erlbaum, 1997.
7
P. Kitcher. Freud's Dream: A Complete Interdisciplinary Science of the Mind. Cambridge
MA-London, The MIT Press, 1992; A. Welsh. Freud's Wishful Dream Book, Princeton NJLondon: Princeton University Press, 1994; A. Grunbaum. Is Manifest Dream Content a
Compromise Formation with Repressed Wishes? A Critique of Freud's Pre-analytic and
Psychoanalytic Dream Theory, Paper presented at the International Congress on Freud's Preanalytical Writings, University of Ghent (Belgium), 12-15 May 1995, unpublished.
8
R.J.C. Young. 'Freud's Secret: The Interpretation of Dreams was a Gothic Novel' in Sigmund
Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams: New Interdisciplinary Essays. Ed. Laura Marcus.
Manchester-New York NY, Manchester University Press, 1999. pp. 208-231.
11
Jacob.9 When the Pharaoh told Joseph that he had first dreamt of seven fat
fleshed and well favoured kine, followed by seven lean fleshed and ill
favoured kine who ate the fat ones, and subsequently about seven full and
good ears followed by seven withered and blasted ears who devoured the
good ones, Joseph responded: 'The dream of Pharaoh is one; God hath
shewed Pharaoh what he is about to do. The seven good kine are seven
years; and the seven good ears are seven years: the dream is one'.10 Apart
from this traditional procedure whereby a dream's content is interpreted
symbolically as an indivisible unity, Freud also takes issue with the socalled 'decoding method', in which the dream content is broken down into a
series of signs whose meaning is determined by a fixed translation key.
This procedure underpins many a popular dream-book, and generally
disregards both the context of the dream and the particularities of the
dreamer. By comparison with the symbolic method, whose allegorical type
of interpretation seems difficult to sustain when the dream content is
chaotic and confused, the decoding method seems especially suited for
confused dreams, since 'the work of interpretation is not brought to bear on
the dream as a whole but on each portion of the dream's content
independently'. 11 Nonetheless, Freud remains highly sceptical of the
decoding practice because there is no guarantee that the fixed key is reliable.
We may add here that both the symbolic and the decoding methods
conceptualise the dream as a unity, the only difference between the two
methods being that in the former approach the unit equals the entire dream,
whereas in the latter the units coincide with the dream's constitutive
elements.
*****
To Freud, dreams should not be regarded as monadic phenomena.
Neither the dream in its entirety, nor one of its essential features should be
conceived of as an elementary psychic particle whose meaning is
9
S. Freud (1900) op.cit., pp. 96-97.
The Bible: Authorized King James Version, with an Introduction and Notes by R. Carroll and
S. Prickett. Oxford-New York NY, Oxford University Press. 51.
11
S. Freud (1900) op.cit, p. 98.
10
12
unambiguous, universal and demonstrable. Challenging these beliefs,
Freud summarizes his own position in a crucial paragraph at the beginning
of the sixth chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams which, owing to its
fundamental import, deserves to be quoted at length:
The dream-thoughts and the dream-content are presented to
us like two versions of the same subject matter in two
different languages. Or, more properly, the dream-content
seems like a transcript of the dream-thoughts into another
mode of expression, whose characters and syntactic laws it is
our business to discover by comparing the original and the
translation.
The
dream-thoughts
are
immediately
comprehensible, as soon as we have learnt them. The dreamcontent, on the other hand, is expressed as it were in a
pictographic script, the characters of which have to be
transposed individually into the language of the dreamthoughts. If we attempted to read these characters according
to their pictorial value instead of according to their symbolic
relation, we should clearly be led into error. Suppose I have a
picture-puzzle, a rebus, in front of me ... [W]e can only form a
proper judgement of the rebus if we put aside criticisms ... of
the whole composition and its parts and if, instead, we try to
replace each separate element by a syllable or word that can
be presented by that element in some way or other ... A
dream is a picture-puzzle of this sort.12
At least three points in this paragraph merit particular attention. First of all,
Freud is adamant that the manifest dream content, that is, the way in which
the dream presents itself to the dreamer, poses a problem for the interpreter,
whereas the latent dream-thoughts are 'immediately comprehensible'. This
proposition is diametrically opposed to a common feature of the symbolic
and decoding practices. Here, the master-interpreter knows immediately
what the significance of the dream is, but it does not necessarily contribute
to a better understanding of what is happening. In Genesis 41 the Pharaoh's
12
ibid, pp. 277-78.
13
dreams are completely transparent to Joseph's divine inspiration, yet it is
only because the Pharaoh is willing to accept Joseph's reliance on God that
he accepts the prophesy of seven prosperous and seven meagre years. In
Freud's view the analyst is not an expert dream-reader on the model of
Joseph, no matter how extensive his or her psychoanalytic training and
however inspired he or she may feel. The manifest dream content remains
an obstinate conundrum whose deciphering requires a great deal of
patience and circumspection on the side of the analyst, the more so in that
they can hardly build on their previous experience for making accurate
inferences.
Secondly, Freud's choice of words in the above paragraph indicates
sufficiently that he takes the dream as a linguistic phenomenon: manifest
content and latent dream-thoughts are two different languages, the manifest
content is a translation of the latent dream-thoughts, the dream content is
made u p of characters and follows specific syntactic laws, and so on.
Whereas to some readers of The Interpretation of Dreams it may seem that
Freud is merely constructing an analogy here, linguistic processes were
highlighted as the quintessential mechanism of dream formation by Jacques
Lacan during the early 1950s. In his famous Rome Discourse Lacan draws
attention to Freud's designation of the dream as a system of two languages
mediated by translation, first of all in order to demonstrate how human
psychic functions are embedded within and organised by the symbolic
structure of language, a constellation which he believed to be all too
frequently neglected by psychologists and psychoanalysts alike.13 Yet in
addition, Lacan also employs Freud's gloss on the symbolic nature of
dreams, alongside fragments from The Psychopathology of Everyday Life14 and
Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious,15 in order to argue that Freudian
psychoanalytic practice betrays itself if it is no longer geared towards the
dimensions of speech and language. In other words, psychoanalysis denies
the symbolic foundations of the human psyche as they have been delineated
by Freud, and does not qualify as psychoanalysis anymore, if its clinical
13
J. Lacan. (1953) 'The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis', in Ecrits: A
Selection. Trans. A. Sheridan. London-New York N, Tavistock, 1977. pp. 56-61.
14
S. Freud. (1901) The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. S.E., VI.
15
S. Freud. (1905) Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious. S.E., VHI.
14
practice is exclusively oriented towards the treatment of behaviours,
feelings, expressions and attitudes beyond the framework of language.
The third, and in my opinion most important assertion in the above
paragraph concerns Freud's description of the dream content as a
pictographic script, a picture-puzzle or rebus, a series of characters which
need to be read not in terms of their pictorial value, but in accordance with
their symbolic relations. In a sense, this assertion is a specification of the
previous statement, inasmuch as Freud advances that the language of
dreams does not emerge through the medium of speech, but in the figures
of writing. Rather than products of speech, dreams are words processed
into text. Moreover, Freud points out that the dream script does not follow
the rules of an alphabetic writing system, but appears as a rebus, so that the
text cannot be read immediately and only a careful strategy of deciphering,
in keeping with certain rules of decoding, can generate the conveyed
message.
The transformation of dream thoughts into a pictorial script, or what
is also known as a logographic system of writing, continued to fascinate
Freud, and he discussed this aspect of the dreamwork again during the mid
1910s in his Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis.16 In the eleventh lecture
of this series, Freud argues that the transition from dream thoughts to visual
images is 'psychologically the most interesting' realisation of the
dreamwork, yet also an assignment whose implementation encounters
many difficulties:
[L]et us suppose that you have undertaken the task of
replacing a political leading article in a newspaper by a series
of illustrations. You will thus have been thrown back from
alphabetic writing to picture writing ... [Y]our difficulties will
begin when you come to the representation of abstract words
and of all those parts of speech which indicate relations
between thoughts ... In the case of abstract words you will be
able to help yourselves out by means of a variety of devices ...
Thus you will be pleased to find that you can represent the
'possession' [Besitzen] of an object by a real, physical sitting
16
S. Freud. (1916-17 [1915-17]) Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. S.E., XVI, XVH.
15
down on it [Daraufsitzen]. And the dream-work does just the
same thing. For representing the parts of speech which
indicate relations between thoughts ... you will have no
similar aids at your disposal ... You will feel pleased if there
is a possibility of in some way hinting, through the subtler
details of the pictures, at certain relations not in themselves
capable of being represented. 17
If visual images can only represent abstract ideas and relationships between
thoughts in a highly inaccurate and exceedingly ambiguous fashion - sitting
down on an object may visualize 'possession', but it could presumably also
represent 'occupation', 'being preoccupied', 'annexation', 'laying claim', etc. the analytic interpretation of a dream, working backwards from the visual
image to the underlying thought, seems to entail a fairly arbitrary and
utterly unreliable enterprise. Which guarantee does the analyst have that
his or her translation of a logographic character is correct, if the same
character can function as a pictorial guise for a multitude of abstractions and
relationships? How can the analyst avoid reading into the dream content
only what he or she wants to discover?
Freud addresses this issue in his last lecture on dreams (Lecture 15)
of the Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, appropriately entitled
Uncertainties and Criticism.18 Rekindling a comparison he had already used
in The Interpretation of Dreams,19 Freud equates the dream script here to
ancient systems of expression, such as Semitic script, Egyptian hieroglyphs
and Persian cuneiform. Yet he reserves a special place for Chinese, whose
monosyllabic structure, rudimentary grammar and general absence of
inflections induces a degree of indefiniteness similar to that associated with
the text of the manifest dream script. Freud confesses that he does not
understand a word of Chinese and that he has merely informed himself
about it with the prospect of finding a similarity between Chinese writing
and the pictorial representations of the dream. Yet because Chinese does
seem particularly suited as a model for writing in dreams, and the
17
ibid, pp. 176-177.
ibid, pp. 228-239.
19
S. Freud (1900) op.cit, p. 277.
18
16
indefiniteness of its writing system does not create massive ambiguity, the
conclusion is that the interpretation of dreams is less arbitrary than the
critics assume. 20
Freud's comparison of oneiric script to the structure of Chinese is
definitely worth pursuing, if only because few psychoanalysts have
investigated the issue and Freud's explication leaves many questions
unanswered. For if Freud's description is accurate, why would the dream
work have recourse to the principles of an ancient, non-alphabetic writing
system in transforming dream-thoughts into manifest dream content? If the
dream content is not meant to be understood, as Freud suggests, 21 and
therefore written in characters whose composition and relationships are
reminiscent of Chinese, does that imply that Chinese dreams, whose content
is presumably not supposed to be understood either, are written in an even
more ancient script? How have the Chinese interpreted their people's
dreams? What does Chinese dream interpretation reveal about the written
language of dreams, Chinese as well as Western? And if it does turn out
that the dream script is structured like Chinese, should we urge every
trainee analyst to learn Chinese as part of his or her training programme?
Could Lacan's decision to take up the study of Chinese during the early
1970s22 have had a more profound motive than mere intellectual curiosity?
*** *
Needless to say, I will not be able to answer all these questions,
partly because I am not a sinologue and partly because as a clinician I have
not had the opportunity to undertake an in-depth study of Chinese dreams.
Also, in the small number of cases of Chinese patients described by Western
psychoanalysts within the professional literature, dreams are either
disregarded altogether,23 or neglected in their specific linguistic qualities. 24
20
S. Freud (1916-17) op.cit, pp. 230-231.
ibid, p. 231.
22
F. Cheng, 'he Docteur Lacan au quotidien' in VAne, 48,1991, pp. 52-54; F. Cheng 'Lacan et
la-penseechinoise* in Ecole de la Causefreudienne.(ed.) Lacan, Vecrit, Vintage, Paris: Flammarion,
2000, pp. 133-153.
23
L. Saul. 'Section Meeting on Culture and Personality' in The American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 8(4), 1938. pp. 609-610.
21
17
Bingham Dai, a Chinese psychiatrist who trained under H.S. Sullivan and L.
Saul during the 1930s, devoted some essays to the relationship between
Chinese culture and mental health problems, 25 yet without paying much
attention to the value of dreams and primarily adopting the social
psychiatric perspective popularised by the rise of cross-cultural psychiatry
during the 1950s.26 The only report on a psychoanalytic treatment that has
been forwarded directly from China in recent years 27 does not include any
mention of dreams, and the only Chinese account of the clinical use of
dreams 28 does not mention psychoanalysis. Western psychologists and
psychoanalysts who have commented on the state of their discipline in
China are concerned with the reasons for the slow recovery of
psychoanalytic ideas in contemporary Chinese culture, 29 the general
organisation of mental health care in the Chinese world, 30 the rise and fall of
psychoanalysis in China 31 and the general applicability of psychoanalysis to
24
J.L. McCartney. 'Epilepsy Amongst the Chinese: With the Analysis of a Case' in The
Psychoanalytic Review, 16(1), 1926. pp. 12-27.
25
B. Dai. 'Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders in Chinese Culture' in Culture and Mental Health, Ed.
M.K. Opler. New York NY: MacMillan, 1959. pp. 118-143.
B. Dai. 'Culture and Delusional Systems of Some Chinese Mental Patients' in The International
Journal of Social Psychiatry, 6(2), 1965. pp. 203-228.
26
H. Rin, and T. Lin. 'Mental Illness among Formosan Aborigines as Compared with the Chinese
in Taiwan' in Journal of Mental Science, 108, 1962, pp. 134-146; W.S. Tseng and J. Hsu.
'Chinese Culture, Personality Formation and Mental Illness' in The International Journal of
Social Psychiatry, 16(1), 1969-70. pp. 5-14; P.M. Yap. 'Mental Diseases Peculiar to Certain
Cultures: A Survey of Comparative Psychiatry' in Journal of Mental Science, 97,1951. pp. 313-327.
27
X. Meng. 'A Report about a Man with Insomnia Treated with Psychoanalysis' in Chinese Journal
of Clinical Psychology, 8(2), 2000. pp. 124-127.
28
H. Tong. 'Initial Study of the Clinical Meaning of Dreams' in Chinese Mental Health Journal,
13(4), 1999. pp. 240-241.
29
G.H. Blowers. 'Freud in China: The Variable Reception of Psychoanalysis', in Applying
Psychology: Lessons from Asia-Oceania. Ed. Graham Davidson. Carlton South VIC, Australian
Psychological Society Publications, 1994. pp. 35-49.
30
E.D. Joseph. 'Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis in the People's Republic of China: A Transcultural
View' in Current Issues in Psychoanalytic Practice, 3(1), 1986. pp. 95-98; H.-C. HalberstadtFreud. 'Mental Health Care in China' in International Review of Psychoanalysis, 18(1), 1991. pp.
11-18.
31
A. Gerlach. 'China', in Psychoanalysis International: A Guide to Psychoanalysis Throughout the
World, Vol. 2: America, Asia, Australia - Further European Countries. Ed. Peter Kutter. Stuttgart-
18
the Chinese people, 32 but not with the study of dreams and their
relationship with Chinese language.
Restricted by this lack of materials as well as by my own knowledge
and experience, I will construct my argument mainly on the basis of what
general works of reference and secondary source materials have to say
about Chinese language. 33 As regards Chinese dream interpretation, I will
take my lead from a collection of dreams included in the Yu-sia-tsi, as
translated into French by G. Soulie de Morant for an audience of
psychoanalysts. 34 To the best of my knowledge, the text in question is not
available in English, and I cannot judge the value of Soulie de Morant1 s
translation, although it is presumably more accessible to many
psychoanalysts than the original since it was published in French in a
psychoanalytic journal. I hope other researchers with more expertise in
Chinese language and culture and broader clinical experience will be
capable of correcting my inevitably flawed exposition.
*** *
Unlike modern European, Arabic and Hebrew scripts, Chinese
writing is non-alphabetic. However, this does not imply that Chinese
characters convey meaning in a purely semantic way. Like all fully
developed writing systems, Chinese writing integrates both logographic
(ideographic, semantic) symbols and phonographic (phonetic, acoustic)
signs. If Chinese were only to follow the logographic principle, it would be
technically possible for people who do not know each other's idiom to
communicate through Chinese characters, since meaning does not depend
Bad Cannstatt, Frommann-Holzboog, 1995. pp. 94-102.
32
M.L. Ng. 'Psychoanalysis For the Chinese - Applicable or Not Applicable?1 in International
Review of Psycho-Analysis, 12(2), 1985. pp. 449-460.
33
F. Coulmas. The Writing Systems of the World. Oxford-New York NY, Blackwell, 1989; J.
DeFrancis. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. Honolulu HI, University of Hawai
Press, 1984; J.-F. Billeter. The Chinese Art of Writing. New York NY, Skira/Rizzoli, 1990; A.
Gaur. A History of Calligraphy, New York NY, Cross River Press, 1994; A. Robinson. The Story
of Writing: Alphabets, Hieroglyphs and Pictograms. London, Thames & Hudson, 1995.
34
G. Soulie de Morant. 'Les reves etudies par les Chinois' in Revue francaise de Psychanalyse,
4(1), 1927. p. 739.
19
anymore on the sound-value and pronunciation of the inscriptions.
Although some authors still seem to believe in the ideographic nature of
Chinese writing, researchers such as DeFrancis35 have mustered persuasive
evidence to support the argument that the majority of contemporary
Chinese characters integrate semantic and phonetic elements. Despite being
non-alphabetic, the Chinese script thus relies on a combination of symbols
conveying entire ideas and others indicating the correct pronunciation, just
like European writing systems such as English, French and German. The
difference between Chinese characters and European systems, apart from
their non-alphabetic organisation, does not lie in the fact that the former are
logographic and the latter phonographic, but rather in the varying
proportion of semantic and phonetic symbols. Chinese script contains a
much higher share of semantic symbols than English; the latter includes
more phonetic and less logographic components than Chinese.
In the course of history, the proportion of semantic-phonetic
characters within Chinese writing has also fluctuated. In ancient Chinese,
during the Shang dynasty (1400-1200 BC) for example, pictographic signs
were much more prevalent than in modern, post-revolutionary Chinese.
Hence, from a palaeographical perspective, it appears that the Chinese
script has evolved from a more exclusively logographic to a more integrated
semantic-phonetic system. Scholars generally explain this development in
terms of the difficulty of representing abstract notions with ideographic
means, which is exactly the same problem as the one Freud discussed
within the context of the dream work. Initially the Chinese seem to have
relied, if not uniquely at least predominantly, on pictographic symbols,
some of which may still be found in modern Chinese. Amongst these
pictograms feature the characters for rain, mountain, sun, moon and tree.
As Freud pointed out in his Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis36
problems arise when abstract ideas, relationships, and less intrinsically
visual phenomena need to be represented. The Chinese endeavoured to
solve this problem by combining two known pictograms into a new
'ideogram' 37 or compound representational character.38 The classic example
35
J. De Francis (1984) op.cit.
S. Freud (1916-17) op.cit, pp. 176-177),
37
J. Tom Sun [Joseph Thompson].'Symbolism in the Chinese Written Language1 in The
36
20
of this principle is the character for 'bright', which combines the
pictographic characters for 'sun' and 'moon'. Other, less obvious examples
include the characters for 'good' and 'dictionary'. The ideogram for 'good'
was constructed through an assimilation of the pictograms for 'female
person' and 'boy', the idea being that for a Chinese man the greatest good in
life is the simultaneous possession of a wife and a male child.39 'Dictionary'
combines the characters for 'child' and 'roof, and here the idea seems to
have been that only the person who has enjoyed the luxuries of a sheltered
childhood, away from the mentally draining predicament of forced labour,
can become a lexicographer. 40
The latter two instances of ideogram formation are especially
interesting because they challenge Freud's example of how the dreamwork
may arrive at a representation of 'possession' (Besitzen). Freud argues that
the abstract concept of 'possession' could possibly appear within the
manifest dream content under the guise of a 'physical sitting down'
(Daraufsitzen) on an object. Inasmuch as Freud's illustration is indeed
exemplary of the dream work, one cannot but acknowledge the
phonological connection, at least in German, between the object of
representation (Besitzen) and the represented object (Daraufsitzen). In other
words, in Freud's example it appears that the acoustic similarity between
the sound of the notion to be represented and the sound associated with the
meaning of the representing image has facilitated the transition from
abstract thought into concrete image. One may even wonder whether the
same form of image would have emerged in the dream of an English
speaking subject, because in English there is no phonological link between
'possession' and 'sitting on', 'sitting down', etc. Yet the way in which the
Chinese ideograms for 'good' and 'dictionary' came about does not seem to
suggest any reliance on phonological similarities. The pictographic
character for 'boy' is pronounced tsu and the pronunciation of the pictogram
for 'woman' is nil. However, when both characters are combined in the
ideogram for 'good', the latter is not pronounced tsunii or niitsu, but hao.
Psychoanalytic Review, 10(2), 1923. pp. 183-189.
A. Robinson, op.cit., p. 186.
39
J. Tom Sun, op.cit., p. 184.
40
ibid, p. 184.
38
21
The link between the ideogram and its two constitutive pictograms is
entirely determined by Chinese sociocultural values. The sedimentation of
thought into script does not pass through the phonological associations of
spoken language, but operates within the limits of thought alone. With
regard to dreams and their interpretation, this circumvention of the
phonetic aspects of language in the representation of abstract ideas through
ideograms within Chinese script implies that the interpreter of a 'Chinese
dream' - assuming that the dream work there proceeds along the same
principles of representation as those governing Western dream scripts - will
not be able to take advantage of the linguistic connections between sounds
and pronunciations. Rather than the acoustic element of the signifier, it is
the signification that has determined the emergence of a particular
ideogram.
Apart from pictograms and ideograms, Chinese script also includes
so-called phonograms, which can be separated into two distinct groups:
rebus characters and semantic-phonetic characters.41 The first group
encompasses characters that are used for representing two or more
completely different notions, because these notions are pronounced in
exactly the same way, that is to say because they are homophonous. As
such, the same character is employed for the words 'image' and 'elephant',
since they are both pronounced as xiang. Similarly, one and the same
character stands for 'come' as well as 'wheat' because the two words are
homophonous, both being pronounced as Ui. Modern European languages
have generally lost this rule of associating a sound equivalence (an equality
on the level of speech, a homophony) with an equivalence of inscription (an
equality of the level of writing, a homography), although the principle
returns within rebus puzzles and has also proved useful again for reducing
the amount of letters, and making the most out of one's allocated space,
when sending text messages via mobile telephone networks. The classic
example of English rebus writing is the pictographic symbol of an eye,
which is meant to represent the first person singular, because 'eye' is
homophonous with T. In a well constructed text message, a mobile phone
user will often use a combination of letters and numbers in order to convey
entire words: the letter 'U1 represents 'you', '2' stands for 'too', etc.
41
A. Robinson, op.cit, p. 186.
22
Without disputing the accuracy of designating the first category of
Chinese phonograms as rebus characters, the semantic-phonetic characters
come much closer to our contemporary understanding of Western rebus
writing than their nomographic counterparts. For these characters display a
combination of logography and phonography, which is precisely what
Western rebus puzzles build upon. The textbook example of a Chinese
semantic-phonetic symbol is the character for mother, pronounced as ma.
This character combines the character for woman/female person
(pronounced nu) and that for horse (pronounced ma), yet contrary to what
may be expected and what supporters of the ideographic cause have tried to
prove, the character for mother is not an ideogram. In other words, there is
no evidence to substantiate the thesis that the Chinese have arrived at the
character for mother because they believed that all mothers could be
classified as female horses. In the character for mother, the character for
horse has merely a phonetic value. It should be noted that the
pronunciation of the character for mother (ma) is not identical to the
pronunciation of the character for horse (ma), yet the phonetic element
evidently gives the reader a good indication of how the character for mother
should be pronounced. As a matter of fact, in semantic-phonetic characters
the phonetic component provides the reader with a much more reliable clue
as to the pronunciation of the entire character than the semantic component
offers information about its meaning.42 For a reader of Chinese, the upshot
is that it will be much easier to learn the general pronunciation of the
characters, although there are still some nine hundred phonetic elements in
the renowned Soothill syllabary, than to understand what they mean. Yet
this perhaps also applies to learning and reading an alphabetic writing
system such as English. Isn't it easier to guess the correct pronunciation of
an English word than to guess what it actually means?
As I mentioned above, in their combination of logographic and
phonographic components Chinese semantic-phonetic characters resemble
our Western rebus writing much more closely than the nomographic
phonograms, for a Western rebus puzzle comprises pictographic symbols
for the homophonous elements as well as strictly phonetic letters and
words. A fine rebus not only contains an image of an eye whenever the
42
ibid, pp. 188-189.
23
personal pronoun T is intended, but also when the sound 'aai' appears in
words such as 'why', 'cry1, lie' etc. In these instances, rebus puzzle designers
would normally have recourse to a combination of the semanticideographic component (the graphical representation of an eye) and the
acoustic-phonographic element (the letters 'w', 'cr', '1', etc.). They might
even try to engineer more sophisticated configurations of one semantic part
surrounded by two or more phonetic elements in order to write words such
as 'mighty', 'behind', etc. Considering the prevalence of semantic-phonetic
characters in modern Chinese and their resemblance to Western rebus
writing, we may feel inclined to typify Chinese as a rebus-script. Yet this
designation remains adequate only if we restrict ourselves to the integration
of logographic and phonographic elements in both types of writing. For in
Western rebus puzzles, the semantic component is at least as accurate a
sound representation as the phonetic element, whereas in Chinese the
sound of the semantic component (nu for woman, for instance) is exchanged
completely for that carried by the phonetic indicator in the pronunciation of
the semantic-phonetic character (ma in mother, due to the ma for horse).
Contrary to Western rebus puzzles, the semantic component in Chinese
semantic-phonetic characters also frequently maintains a meaningful
relationship with the signification of the character as a whole. Whereas in
our classic rebus puzzle, the pictographic symbol for eye does not signal
that the message is somehow related to 'seeing' and 'vision', most Chinese
semantic symbols in semantic-phonetic characters do provide some kind of
indication as to the meaning of the entire character. Whenever Chinese
readers discover the character for water in a semantic-phonetic character,
they are entitled to think with a reasonable degree of certainty that the
meaning of the semantic-phonetic character, regardless of its pronunciation,
may refer to wetness, rivers, sprinkling, etc. In Chinese 'rebus writing 1
semantics, therefore, occupies a much more important place than in
Western rebus puzzles.
*** *
Bearing in mind how Chinese characters have developed over the
years into a system comprising pictograms, ideograms and phonograms,
and given Freud's depiction of the manifest dream content as a type of
24
writing similar to that of a rebus puzzle, it is worth investigating how the
Chinese themselves have approached and 'analysed' the linguistic structure
of dreams. As indicated above, I will base my remarks on some striking
examples taken from G. Soulie de Morant's translation of the chapter on
dreams in the Yu-sia-tsi (Memoirs of the Jade Casket), a philosophical-scientific
compendium of opinions on a wide variety of topics originating in the third
century AD. In the second section of the dream chapter, which contains
examples of premonitory dreams, the following instance is reported: 'When
the duke of Prei was still the guardian of the roads, he dreamt that he was
chasing a ram and tore off his horns and tail. Tann-lo explained:
*
A ram yang "^ of which the horns and tail are removed
makes wang, ^ king'. And indeed, later he became the king
of Rann to accomplish this prediction. 43
Another example in the same section runs as follows:
A Song emperor had an illness. One night he dreamt that
water of the Stream dried out. Saddened, he considered
prince to be the image of the dragon [who inhabits
Stream]. Now if the Stream dries out, the dragon will
longer have a place to lodge. Heathen questioned
ministers, who told him: 'The Stream '*
the
the
the
no
his
without water ' is
the character ' * , power, healing. The illness of Your Majesty
will heal'. The emperor rejoiced: he was soon cured from his
illness.44
Let me add one more example to the list:
Leang Yng, ten days before his examination, dreamt that a
man gave him a slice of dog meat. The next day, and since he
was saddened and unhappy, his dream was explained in the
43
44
G. Soulie de Morant, op.cit, p. 739.
ibid, p. 742.
25
following way: 'a dog
^
is the right half of the word
tchoang, to come first in the literary examinations ^ ; and the
word slice ^ is the left half thereof. You will definitely be the
first in the exam1. And indeed he was. 45
My amateur knowledge of Chinese does not allow me to judge the validity
of these linguistic inferences, nor does it enable me to decide whether the
chosen examples are paradigmatic for Chinese dream interpretation or
merely representative of one particular period in Chinese history.
However, one does not have to be an expert in Chinese to observe that
Chinese dream interpreters did not need Freudian psychoanalysis to realise
that the dream content is a script, that dream interpretation can only be
carried out via the medium of written words, and that the activity of dream
reading should be taken literally. Each of the above examples also
demonstrates that the Chinese did not rely on phonetic associations for the
construction of their interpretations. As far as I can see, the conclusion that
the Song emperor's dream signifies 'power and healing' is not reached
through a linguistic operation on the sound value of the images involved,
similar to how Freud would infer the dream thought of possession (Besitzen)
from what the visual image of 'sitting on an object' sounds like when it is
retransmitted through speech (Daraufsitzen).
To flesh out the differences between ancient Chinese and Freudian
dream interpretation further, let us engage in the following thought
experiment. Assume somebody reported that she had dreamt of being a
child again and having to seek shelter from the aggression of other children
under the roof of a barn. According to the Freudian principle, important
clues as to the meaning of this anxiety dream will have to be sought beyond
the visual image of the child hiding from its assailants in a barn, through
how the pronunciation of this pictographic symbol conjures up
homophonous words (barney, bar, barring, barred, etc.). In the Chinese
style of interpretation, the manifest dream content would presumably be
read as the ingenious representation of an operation on two characters.
Here the dream would be seen to epitomize the combination of two
45
ibid, p. 744.
26
separate characters, that for child and that for roof/shelter/barn, into a
newly created compound, the character for dictionary (see above). Whereas
Freudian dream analysis interprets the logographic components as phonetic
elements, strictly in accordance with the rebus principle, ancient Chinese
dream interpretation points towards the textual dimension behind the
speech fabric.
*** *
What can we conclude then from this brief exploration of Freudian
dream interpretation in relation to the peculiarities of Chinese writing? In
its attempt to satisfy both the pressures of the repressed unconscious wishes
and the demands of the preconscious agency of censorship, the Western
dream displays a concealed compromise between two conflicting areas of
psychic functioning. The Western dream, therefore, wants us to believe that
there is a meaningful connection between the manifest dream content and
the latent dream thoughts with regard to the representing object (the
pictographic symbol of the rebus). Yet as Freud claimed, the manifest
dream content does not really want to be understood, and in its striving
towards the achievement of this aim it tries to mislead any potential
interpreter, including of course the dreamer him- or herself. If Freud's
example of the 'sitting on an object' as a representation of 'possession' is
correct, then the dream interpreter should not mistake the visual image of
the dream content for an accurate representation of the dream thoughts.
Instead he or she ought to situate the image within a context of signifiers
(acoustic images), thus emphasizing the phonological quality of the
representation over its semantic value. If the dream is indeed a writing, the
dream interpreter ought to disregard the visible logographic features of the
letter in favour of its phonographic impact as a signifier.
However, we have no reason to think that a subject, whose culture
has embraced a non-alphabetic writing system with a markedly higher
proportion of logographic symbols, processes thoughts into a dream script
in the same way as a subject whose language has converged into an
alphabetic and predominantly phonological script. For if we agree that the
manifest dream content is meant to be deceitful, and deception constitutes a
universal characteristic of the dream work, dream scripts operating in line
27
with the rebus principle will not be equally deceptive in the context of a
language whose writing system is predominantly based on semanticphonetic characters. It is exactly because modern European writing systems
contain a high proportion of phonographic elements that the manifest
dream content will seek solace in logographic symbols (pictograms,
ideograms), and that the interpretation of these dreams needs to discover
the signifiers through the quagmire of signifieds. In a writing system with a
high proportion of semantic symbols, such as Chinese, deception would
have to proceed along the opposite pathway, in the direction of phonology,
and interpretation would have to re-establish the signified behind the
signifier, the picto- and ideograms behind the phonogram.
As I have stated earlier, Chinese script is not purely ideogrammatic,
for it also contains rebuses and a majority of semantic-phonetic symbols.
The latter do not differ significantly from our Western conception of a
rebus, as a puzzle integrating semantic (pictograms) as well as phonetic
elements (letters) which can only be brought to a solution through the
phonetic interpretation of the semantic elements and their subsequent
association with the other phonetic components. However, whereas the
Chinese semantic-phonetic characters are used on a daily basis for
communicating written messages, rebuses do not play a central role within
Western writing systems. One could argue that this is exactly why the
dream work has recourse to them in the representation of dream thoughts.
In Chinese, where rebuses do play an important role, the dream work, again
on the assumption that the dream content is not supposed to be intelligible,
is likely to exchange the rebus principle for a more 'original' type of
representation such as ideograms. And because these ideograms have
developed through the history of Chinese writing on the basis of
relationships between ideas and beliefs, rather than phonological
connections, the dream work can be expected to exploit these phonological
principles again within the transformation of dream thoughts into manifest
dream content. This is why the Chinese dream interpreter, or the
interpreter of Chinese dreams for that matter, ought to recognize the
logographic message of the ideogram behind its phonetic value, the
signified underlying the signifier, the signification behind the sound.
If my proposition is correct, analysts may feel tempted to draw the
conclusion that there is no need whatsoever for learning Chinese as part of
28
their professional training as long as they do not decide to work with
Chinese clients. I fully agree, with the caveat that many analysts
unwittingly continue to interpret their Western clients' dreams as if they
were Chinese, so that the study of Chinese may actually help them in
overcoming the perils of closet Chinese dream interpreting.
Address for correspondence:
Brunei University
Dept of Human Sciences
ClevelandRoad
Uxbridge
Middlesex UBS 3PH
United Kingdom
E-mail: [email protected]
29