BEYOND THE REBUS PRINCIPLE? Psychoanalysis and Chinese Dream Interpretation Dany Nobus Abstract — 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 (Freud 1896a, 1896b), The 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 byproducts of sleep or as divine oracles sealing the fate of the dreamer, Freud argued that all dreams can be explained as concealed fulfilments of unconscious wishes harboured by the dreamer during waking life (Freud 1900a:160). 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' (Masson 1985:405) and daydreaming about a laudatory marble tablet being placed on the house where he had dreamt the specimen dream of his book (ibid.:417). 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' (Freud 1900a:607-608). 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 — 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 (Solms 1995, 1997). 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, this road can only be cleared through the interpretive impact of psychoanalysis, so that the revelation of the unconscious stands or falls with the value of psychoanalytic interpretations. Some authors (Kitcher 1992, Welsh 1994, Grünbaum 1995) 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 therefore be read as a piece of fiction, constructed in the best tradition of the gothic novel (Young 1999). 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 Jacob (Freud 1900a:96-97). When the Pharaoh told Joseph that he had first dreamt of seven fatfleshed and well favoured kine, followed by seven leanfleshed 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 . . .' (The Bible 51). Apart from this traditional procedure whereby a dream's content is interpreted symbolically as an indivisible unity, Freud also takes issue with the so-called `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' (Freud 1900a:98). 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 conceptualize 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 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 dream-content, 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 dream-thoughts. 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 . . . (Freud 1900a:277-78) At least three points in this paragraph merit particular attention. First of all, Freud is adamant that the manifest dream content, i.e. 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 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 outlook 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 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 up of characters and follows specific syntactic laws, etc. 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 (Lacan 1977[1953]:56-61). Yet in addition, Lacan also employs Freud's gloss on the symbolic nature of dreams, alongside fragments from The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Freud 1901b) and Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (Freud 1905c), 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 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 (Freud 1916-17[1915-17]). 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 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. (Freud 1916-17[1915-17]:176-177) 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' (Freud 1916-17[1915-17]:228-239). Rekindling a comparison he had already used in The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud 1900a:277), Freud equals the dreamscript 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 dreamscript. 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 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 (Freud 1916-17[1915-17]:230-231). 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 (ibid.:231), 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 dreamscript 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 1970s (Cheng 1991, 2000) have had a more profound motive than mere intellectual curiosity? Needless to say that 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 (Saul 1938), or neglected in their specific linguistic qualities (McCartney 1926). 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 (Dai 1959, 1965), yet without paying much attention to the value of dreams and primarily adopting the social psychiatric perspective popularized by the rise of cross-cultural psychiatry during the 1950s (Yap 1951, Rin & Lin 1962, Tseng & Hsu 1969-70). The only report on a psychoanalytic treatment that has been forwarded directly from China in recent years (Meng 2000) does not include any mention of dreams, and the only Chinese account of the clinical use of dreams (Tong 1999) 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 (Blowers 1994), the general organisation of mental health care in the Chinese world (Joseph 1986, Halberstadt-Freud 1991), the rise and fall of psychoanalysis in China (Gerlach 1995), the general applicability of psychoanalysis to the Chinese people (Ng 1985), 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 (DeFrancis 1984, Coulmas 1989, Billeter 1990, Gaur 1994, Robinson 1995). 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. Soulié de Morant for an audience of psychoanalysts (Soulié de Morant 1927). To the best of my knowledge, the text in question is not available in English, and I cannot judge the value of Soulié de Morant's translation, yet because it was published in French in a psychoanalytic journal it is presumably more accessible to many psychoanalysts than the original. 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 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 DeFrancis (1984) 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-Analysis (Freud 1916-17[1915-17]:176-177), 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' (Tom Sun 1923:183) or compound representational character (Robinson 1995:186). The classic example 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 (Tom Sun 1923:184). `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 (ibid.:184). 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 nü. However, when both characters are combined in the ideogram for `good', the latter is not pronounced tsunü or nütsu, but hao. 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 (Robinson 1995:186). 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 xiàng. Similarly, one and the same character stands for `come' as well as `wheat' because the two words are homophonous, both being pronounced as lái. 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 `I'. 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 `U' represents `you', `2' stands for `too', etc. 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 homographic 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 nü) 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 can 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 (ibid.:188-189). 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 900 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 homographic 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 personal pronoun `I' is intended, but also when the sound `aai' appears in words such as `why', `cry', `lie' etc. In these instances, rebus puzzle designers would normally have recourse to a combination of the semantic-ideographic component (the graphical representation of an eye) and the acoustic-phonographic element (the letters `w', `cr', `l', 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 (nü 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' 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 writing similar to that of a rebus puzzle, it is worth investigating how the Chinese themselves have approached and `analyzed' the linguistic structure of dreams. As indicated above, I will base my remarks on some striking examples taken from G. Soulié de Morant's translation of the chapter on dreams in the Yu-sia-tsi (Memoires 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' (Soulié de Morant 1927:739). Another example in the same section runs as follows: `A Song emperor had an illness. One night he dreamt that the water of the Stream dried out. Saddened, he considered the prince to be the image of the dragon [who inhabits the Stream]. Now if the Stream dries out, the dragon will no longer have a place to lodge. He then questioned his ministers, who told him: “The Stream without water is the character , power, healing. The illness of Your Majesty will heal.” The emperor rejoiced: he was soon cured from his illness' (ibid.:742). Let me add one more example to the list: `Léang 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 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 exam.” And indeed he was' (ibid.:744). 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 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 with the rebus principle will not be equally deceptive in the context of a language whose writing system is predominantly based on semantic-phonetic 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. But whereas the Chinese semantic-phonetic characters are used on a daily basis for communicating written messages, rebuses do not play a central part 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 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.Bibliography Billeter, J.-F. (1990) The Chinese Art of Writing, New York NY: Skira/Rizzoli. Blowers, G.H. (1994) `Freud in China: The Variable Reception of Psychoanalysis', in Graham Davidson (ed.) Applying Psychology: Lessons from Asia-Oceania, Carlton South VIC: Australian Psychological Society Publications, pp. 35-49. Cheng, F. (1991) `Le Docteur Lacan au quotidien', l'Ane, 48, pp. 52-54. --- (2000) `Lacan et la pensée chinoise', in Ecole de la Cause freudienne (ed.) 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(1962) `Mental Illness among Formosan Aborigines as Compared with the Chinese in Taiwan', Journal of Mental Science, 108, pp. 134-146. Robinson, A. (1995) The Story of Writing: Alphabets, Hieroglyphs and Pictograms, London: Thames & Hudson. Saul, L. (1938) `Section Meeting on Culture and Personality', The American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 8(4), pp. 609-610. Solms, M. (1995) `New Findings on the Neurological Organization of Dreaming: Implications for Psychoanalysis', The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 64(1), pp. 43-67. --- (1997) The Neuropsychology of Dreams: A Clinico-Anatomical Study, Hillsdale NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Soulié de Morant, G. (1927) `Les rêves étudiés par les Chinois', Revue française de Psychanalyse, 4(1), pp. 733-749. The Bible: Authorized King James Version, with an Introduction and Notes by R. Carroll & S. Prickett, Oxford-New York NY: Oxford University Press. Tom Sun, J. [Joseph Thompson] (1923) `Symbolism in the Chinese Written Language', The Psychoanalytic Review, 10(2), pp. 183-189. Tong, H. (1999) `Initial Study of the Clinical Meaning of Dreams', Chinese Mental Health Journal, 13(4), pp. 240-241. Tseng, W.-S. & Hsu, J. (1969-70) `Chinese Culture, Personality Formation and Mental Illness', The International Journal of Social Psychiatry, 16(1), pp. 5-14. Welsh, A. (1994) Freud's Wishful Dream Book, Princeton NJ-London: Princeton University Press. Yap, P.M. (1951) `Mental Diseases Peculiar to Certain Cultures: A Survey of Comparative Psychiatry', Journal of Mental Science, 97, pp. 313-327. Young, R.J.C. (1999) `Freud's Secret: The Interpretation of Dreams was a Gothic Novel', in Laura Marcus (ed.) Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams: New Interdisciplinary Essays, Manchester-New York NY: Manchester University Press, pp. 208-231.Dany Nobus is a Lecturer in Psychology and Psychoanalytic Studies at Brunel University (London). He is the author, most recently, of Jacques Lacan and the Freudian Practice of Psychoanalysis (Routledge 2000), alongside numerous papers on the history, theory and practice of psychoanalysis.
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