Mortal Secrets

There is, Freud asserted, an intimate relationship between 'the story of the patient's suffering and the symptoms of their illness'. Hysteria is a disguised narrative. It will only be truly understood if traumatic experiences are ordered, like chapters in a book.

The legend most strongly associated with Knossos is that of Theseus and the Minotaur, and it is arguably the oldest surviving European story.

This is intoxicating speculation. If we excavate our dreams, to the lowest level, we will find the remains of our ancestors. Freud's evolutionary psychology comes perilously close to mysticism: 'Every dream has at least one point where it eludes explanation - a sort of umbilicus linking it to the unknown.'

Although stories have always had morals and underlying purposes (as in fairy tales and fables), the explicit requirement of codebreaking is very much a post-Freudian, modern phenomenon. We are being asked to read novels in a novel way.

The means by which the latent content of a dream is disguised Freud termed the 'dream work'. He identified several mechanisms. Condensation or 'compression' occurs when two or more images are combined without loss of meaning or implication. A figure might appear, for example, who is simultaneously the sleeper's mother and wife. Displacement occurs

Novels set within dreams or in worlds that have become dreamlike are now a recognisable literary genre; authors such as Hermann Hesse, Anna Kavan, Angela Carter, Kobo Abe, Kazuo Ishiguro, Haruki Murakami and Vladimir Sorokin have all produced outstanding examples.

The predictive brain has much in common with Freud's general understanding of how the mind functions. Predictions are comparable to desires (or wishes), and desires encounter limitations imposed by reality. Behaviour is a compromise, a middle way negotiated between internal drives and the environment. These compromises are, in effect, revised 'pred

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein found Freud's dream theory logically inconsistent. How can a wish be fulfilled in a dream if the dreamer isn't aware of having had that wish in the first place? And how can a symbol function as a symbol if the dreamer doesn't know what it is supposed to be symbolising? The simple answer to these questions is that

…none of us really believe in our own demise. Some things are so vast or overwhelming that we effectively pretend they aren't there until reality forcefully obtrudes and our defences crumble.