Dreaming of a reflection

Abstract

Who is the dreamer of a dream? This is the key question of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, not the “what” of the dream nor the “how”. Who dreamt the dream that I am now, awake, recounting? Am I really awake? Am I really asleep? Behind the meaning of a dream there is something resisting the dream and its meanings, something we dream without our knowledge. In this fracture between us, the readers and narrators of dreams and, as Lacan calls him, Nemo, Nobody, the foreigner dreamer who dreams our dreams, we find the most radical otherness in that which we hold most intimate. In this place, and not by chance through a dream, the famous one of Irma’s injection, Freud discovers not only the nature of Unconscious but, perhaps even more importantly, the ethical posture that the analyst must hold towards the analysand.