"In the Beginning was the Deed": Sigmund Freud's Auditory Imagination

Such is an elective affinity between literary studies and psychoanalysis that the latter sometime serves as a form of literary pedagogy. The affinity mainly consists in their shared concern for language. The signification of language in psychoanalysis is much similar to that of literature. Many of psychoanalytic terms and theoretical tenets bear witness to its dependence clinically on speech phenomena and theoretically on language in general. It is most true of Sigmund Freud, for whom the unconscious is in effect the linguistic unconscious. The Freudian unconscious, compressing and displacing through images and ideas, works as a text for psychoanalysis, which approach has not only paved one of the ways to poststructuralist anti-essentialism but with which literary studies also feel uncanny familiarity. Freudian psychoanalysis, starting empirically from clinical observations, discovers that words exist independent of meanings in the form of things in the unconscious system. Out of the various sensory elements of a word-thing, in psychoanalytic terms, the auditory is central. Now with the auditory imagination cultivated in the clinic, Freud figures out compression and displacement as the chief unconscious works, of which my main argument is that they are based phonetically on heteronym and homonym associations respectively. Compression and displacement work to be masks, which excites Freud's sense of challenge: his is a kind of poststructuralist approach, in the sense that the closed interrelatedness of words without external referents determines the signification in a given situation. But the works of compression and displacement, viewed in auditory terms rather than mapped on to metaphor and metonymy, can provide a new insight for a literary reading of Freud. Pursuing Freud's auditory imagination is not only an attempt to read his writing as literary text rather than for theoretical discussion, but also an experiment with the possibility of literary reading of a theoretical text in the age of after-theory.