The Navel of the Dream, Fixation and Repetition

Shlomo Lieber

Irma’s Injection dream, the opening dream in ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’, is not only a specimen dream1 2, nor is it only the dream through which Freud discovered, as he reports, “the secret of dreams”; it also contains something else, another secret, the secret of all secrets, I would say it is an encapsulated secret; and the name of that secret is “the navel of the dream”.

The Irma’s character in the dream encompasses two more women (to the very least): Irma’s best friend, whom Freud preferred, as patient, over Irma, and Freud’s wife. As he compares Irma to those two other feminine characters, who “have been recalcitrant to treatment”3, too, Freud stops suddenly but still comments that "I had a feeling that the interpretation of this part of the dream was not carried far enough to make it possible to follow the whole of its concealed meaning”4.But He is not referring hereto whatever else might have been said to expose the ostensibly “full” meaning but to his following statement: "If I had pursued my comparison between the three women, it would have taken me far afield. There is at least one spot in every dream at which it is unplumbable – a navel, as it were, that is its point of contact with the unknown"5.A more fine-tuned translation reveals that we are not speaking of the unknown here, but of the German Unerkannten, i.e., that which cannot entirely be known or identified (I might add in this context that I do not think it is a coincidence that women, being recalcitrant, and the navel of the dream, are all mentioned here in the same breath! The “not all” of the feminine position joins them in one bundle).

But if the dream is the highway to the knowledge of the unconscious, or to the interpretation of the unconscious, as Freud mentions elsewhere6,then the navel of the dream is that which will forever remain unknowable and uninterpretable, the inaccessible part of the unconscious, the un-conscious, as such.

Indeed, Lacan, in his answer to Marcel Ritter’s question7,connects the navel of the dream, and the related concept of Unerkannten, to what Freud calls Urverdrangung, the ‘Primal Repression’. Primal repression, "which consists in the psychical (ideational) representative of the instinct being denied entrance into the conscious"8, is the first stage of repression, a preliminary and indeed necessary stage prior to “repression proper” which is about to follow. Lacan sees (a) the primal repression, which is at the basis of the unconscious’s mechanism of displacement, as an outcome of the very act of speaking, of our being a parlêtre – and (b) the (earlier) concept of the navel of the dream, as two overlapping concepts. What is involved here in what these two concepts denote is of order of what cannot be said, and the impossible as a sign of the real is what connects them. They remain a sealed hole, in Lacan’s words, a “scar” in the body. It is no coincidence, therefore, that the word “navel” was chosen to characterize that hole.

I think we can feel, in view of the above, why Freud immediately makes a connection, in the same paper, between primal repression and ‘fixation’. These two concepts are mutually intertwined. He writes: “With this [the stage of primal repression], fixation is established; the representative in question persists unaltered from then onwards and the instinct remains attached to it”.9 Let us note that the concept of fixation, in this context, does not indicate, as is usually the case in Freud’s writing, a fixation onto some libidinal stage or its vestiges, but, first and foremost, the very fixation of drive to its representation in the unconscious, or, we might say, the very fixation of affect as quantity to the unconscious representation (S1) even before that affect was felt as one that has some quality (tone, emotion, mood, etc.), that is to say, before it has been displaced (S2), in some mythic-logic time. In that sense, the capacity for fixation may possibly be seen here as the initial infrastructure that comes before any fixation becomes possible. Primal repression, and the fixation it contains, operate as a sort of gravity, a black hole, if I may use this term, that pulls in, to an inner sphere forever sealed from us, everything that is close to it or that comes near it ('repression proper').

What, then, in view of the above, might be the nature of repetition? I would say this: repetition will always be a return to a place that is different to what we were supposed to be in, because that place is the place where we never really were, but which nevertheless must exists there as a cause of this repetition itself. But this (impossible) place is also the place where unconscious desire stems from "like a mushroom out of its mycelium”.10And if, as Lacan said, desire is never anything but “a defense against another desire”11, then that “other desire” is the place where our body, the speaking body, can only dream about, by virtue of metaphor and metonymy, and at the same time incarnate it in our experience “as real and present”12 and in “complete sensory vividness”13 , in Freud’s words, and thus leave it inside us as “existing outside” of ourselves. This, I think, is the dream’s inherently elusive and sublime essence – which also holds an exceptional opportunity, and possibly turns it, as Freud wrote towards the end of his life, into “the most favorable object of our study”14. This, in any case, is Freud’s gamble, "in this no-holds-barred expression of his message”.15

References

1 English translation: Dan Shalit Kenig

2 Freud S., "The interpretation of Dreams" (1900), S.E., V, p. 96.

3 Ibid., p. 110.

4 Ibid., p. 111.

5 Ibid

6 Freud S., "Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis" (1910), S.E., XI, p. 38.

7 La Cause du Desire, n 102, June 2019, pp. 35-43.

8 Freud S., "Repression" (1915), S.E., XIV, p. 143.

9 Ibid.

10 Freud S., "The interpretation of Dreams" (1900), S.E., V, p. 528.

11 Lacan J., The Seminar, Book X, Anxiety, Trans: A. R. Price, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2014, pp. 316-318.

12 Freud S., "On Dreams" (1901), S.E., V, p. 647.

13 Freud S., "The interpretation of Dreams" (1900), S.E., V, p. 545.

14 Freud S., "An Outline of Psychoanalysis" (1938), trans: Helena Ragg-Kirkby, London: Penguin Books Ltd. (2003), p. 193.

15 Lacan J., "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud", in Ecrits, trans. B. Fink, New York/London: Norton & company, 2002, p. 424.