6 ‘Le seul avantage qu’un psychanalyste ait le droit de prendre de sa position, lui fût-elle reconnue comme telle, c’est de se rappeler avec Freud qu’en sa matière, l’artiste toujours le précède et qu’il n’a donc pas à faire le psychologue là où l’artiste lui fraie la voie.’
7 Letter of 30 January 1927 from Freud to Werner Achelis (in Freud, 1961, p. 375).
8 Strachey’s translation of Heine’s lines goes as follows: ‘With his nightcaps and the tatters of his dressing-gown he patches up the gaps in the structure of the universe.’ In Lucien Leuwen, Stendhal similarly mocked the grandiloquence of ‘the depth of German philosophy’ (Lucien Leuwen, first part, chapter VIII).
9 Ron Britton defines secondary revision as the ‘part played by daydreams in the formation of real dreams’ (Britton, 1998, p. 113).
10 In my view, the key point is to describe this ‘image-rich dream language’ as a psychical writing.
11 It is worth noting that in his book, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, the American orientalist, Ernest Fenollosa developed a similar intuition that studying ideograms would help the understanding of primal mental mechanisms (Fenollosa, 1918).
12 These lectures were published as a book named Dream Analysis (1978 [1937]).
13 Mary Jacobus has noticed that in this quote, Sharpe was paraphrasing John Middleton Murray: ‘Metaphor is as ultimate as speech itself, and speech as ultimate as thought’ (Jacobus, 2005, p. 6 fn. 10).14 I believe an interesting avenue of research would be to compare the philosophical intuitions of the young Derrida with the metapsychology of Sharpe and Bion.
