Dreaming Plague and Plaguing Dreams: The Teachings of Psychoanalysis

Abstract

The analogous bond between plague and psychoanalysis corroborated by Freud’s quip to Jung, as they entered New York Harbour, that the Americans ‘don’t realise we are bringing them the plague’, is accompanied and confirmed by the psychoanalytic inheritance of Sophocles’ plague play Oedipus the King, the contagion of taboos and the reception of Oedipus within the history of psychoanalytic thought that was established and discussed in Chapter 3.¹ Treating seriously the Freudian joke of psychoanalysis-as-plague, this chapter closely examines the teachings and the practices of Freudian psychoanalysis and demonstrates how, within the analytic session, use is made of terminology, explanations and schemas which are structurally infectious, particularly within dream interpretation. However, it is not just psychoanalytic practices that are at stake; anxieties about plagiarism and the transmission of knowledge have consequences outside the psychoanalytic domain and beyond what Deleuze and Guattari term the problem of the ‘Oedipus bacillus’.² Plague’s legacy makes itself felt across diverse areas of Freud’s method of treatment in the way that psychoanalytic knowledge comes to infect the dreamer-analysand; how the language psychoanalysis employs for naming and analysing the action of the dream-work participates in a lexicon of infection; and in the way dreams can plague, both in a general sense and specifically, in the context of a dream of Freud’s recounted in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900–30).