words

paleography tutorial









...Before there can be any interpretation of dreams, three secular fallacies need to be dismissed. The first is the philosophers' prejudice, which holds that dreams are without objective, reasonable connection and are unworthy of interpretation. As opposed to Hegel [whom, justifiably, he cites only indirectly], Freud prefers to follow the lay opinion, that assumes "a meaning, though a hidden one" in the dream. But popular dream interpretation has remained translation in two complementary ways: it makes the whole dream "symbolic" of global meanings, or it translates parts of a dream by "mechanically transferring" each part "into another sign having a known meaning, in accordance with a fixed key." Both techniques, the analogical and the digital, presuppose that the two media, the dream and language, are either similar or co-extensive. The new science rejects these two views as naive...

Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800 - 1900, Stanford 1990