According to Freud, only speech through intonation and gesture would clarify the ambiguity of these primitive scripts and thus make communication possible. Secondary revision acts as a form of speech:
it reorganises the writing of the dream that is ‘not a vehicle for communication’ and ‘does not want to say anything to anyone’ into a narrative that can be communicated. Freud’s comparison between the purpose of secondary revision and the one of the philosopher finds its meaning in this tension between the narrative speech of the ego and the non-communicable psychical writing of the unconscious. The writing of the philosopher is demonstrative: its purpose is to communicate meaning, and meaning is therefore presupposed to be communicable. The philosopher’s writing distorts the facts of the psyche that resist verbalisation and it subjects the psyche to the logic of a system. If Freud thinks that Adler’s Individual Psychology is incompatible with psychoanalysis it is precisely because Adler has substituted a metapsychological writing with a system:
The Adlerian theory was from the very beginning a ‘system’ – which psycho-analysis was careful to avoid becoming. It is also a remarkably good example of ‘secondary revision’ (…) In Adler’s case the place of dream-material is taken by the new material obtained through psycho-analytic studies; this is then viewed purely from the standpoint of the ego.
(Freud, 1914b, p. 52)
In Freud’s eyes a philosophical writing aims to establish a system: it is a type of writing which rationalises the psyche by locking it up in the categories with which the ego is familiar.