What appears in the clinic is a script of a different nature. The main steps in Freud’s discovery of the unconscious correspond to the unveiling of forms of writing independent of the oral circuit of communication: firstly, the bodily text of the hysterical symptom; secondly, the pictorial text of the dream; and thirdly, the text born from the clinical setting. The formations of the unconscious – neurotic symptoms, dreams, parapraxis, jokes and wit – reveal a form of infantile writing, which is autonomous of, and irreducible to, verbalisation. To a certain extent, the analytic session is also a production of the unconscious, because through its framework the analytic dialogue is partly transformed into a language of primary processes, an archaic writing. The analytic dialogue is not a two-voice conversation but, rather, a two-voice monologue, which tends towards the status of an autonomous text.
This text, generated by the psychoanalytic context, does not aim to communicate. When he compared the dream to archaic forms of writing, Freud already insisted:
that the system of expression by dreams occupies a far more unfavourable position than any of these ancient languages and scripts. For after all they are fundamentally intended for communication: that is to say, they are always, by whatever method and with whatever assistance, meant to be understood. But precisely this characteristic is absent in dreams. A dream does not want to say anything to anyone. It is not a vehicle for communication.(Freud, 1916–1917 [1915–1917], p. 231)
In as much as the analytic encounter tries to supplant the tools of verbal language by the primary process of the dream, it creates forms that do not communicate meaning.