Sodeza

When confronted with a recurring symbol, especially when it comes from a dream, there is something that the person is consciously avoiding, or it has a meaning that is buried very deeply and is making an attempt to come to the surface. It is impossible to really analyze any dream symbol in any meaningful way, especially given the legacies of empirical psychology which make these meaning-making systems dependent on the individual dreamer. There are some speculations, however, where the simple image might suggest larger meanings which are somewhat common. So it’s not totally off the mark to say that in general tires will have something to do with movement, metaphorical or otherwise.

It’s also common to interpret a car, or a truck, as meaningful representations of the dreamer’s body. Again, the trouble with cultural definitions does come into play, where there are many ways of thinking about the body in general. This has become particularly apparent in the past century of psychoanalysis, where experiments with subjects from various backgrounds have demonstrated that although the subconscious may have its own language, that language is particular to the culture in which it is born. This is enough so that the specific details of vehicles in dreams are also significant, and rarely incidental. If the dreamer only remembers a red truck, then the analyst can pick up from that point. But if the dreamer remembers the kind of truck, the hankook tires, and specific names of other characters in the dream, one must assume that they are also significant.

This all points to that very elemental idea that everyone is much more complex than they would first appear. The old symbol for the ego, represented by the iceberg, is an apt one. That material that is below the surface is much more than the visible tip suggests. It is easiest to access the illustrations of the complexity of the psyche through looking at dreams and symbols, because every interpretation is not only possible, but very likely to be part of the picture. Even empirical psychology, in its purest form, if there is such a thing, is capable of revealing only a shadow of the shadows that are contained in every human subject. A car may very well only be an extension of a body, and a car crash in a dream might mean a life out of control, but there is also more to the story, and very likely more symbols that are active and apparent, but will defy any attempt at reasonable understanding.

Freud and Jung have been at the center of mainstream thought on contemporary psychology, and somewhere just behind them is Jacques Lacan.  There are many places in the world where the order of importance is reversed, with Lacan at the top, but it’s not necessarily the case in most parts of the English-speaking world.  It could very well be an issue of translation.  Not that the other two are difficult to translate, but there is a certain precision of the word with which it is harder to contend.  In part, this is due to the precise French language, versus its more flexible borderland language German, but it’s much more likely because of the content of his thought.  For Lacan, words really are the beginning and the end of it all.

That the unconscious is structured was a radical idea when it was first put into words, and it still can be radical, depending on the context.  That its structure is made of language, however, is where Lacan radically separates from Freud and Jung.  In the realm of philosophy and literary theory, this is very useful, and somewhat exciting.  The roots of post-structuralism that have guided a lot of the contemporary continental thought on reality are connected to Lacan’s own roots, making for a very interesting and rhizomatic web of interlacing conditions.  It is almost satisfying to read the world this way, in the guise of philosophy.

However, under a psychoanalytic cover, it becomes something else entirely.  The implications in literary theory are interesting, and somewhat useful, but the theory as applied to the human psyche becomes something a little more threatening.  It’s not as liberating as the notion that language creates meaning, and by extension, reality. Although this is true under Lacan, there are conditions that make any real freedom very tenuous.  The human, or speaking subject, becomes aware, through the psychoanalytic process, that their vision of reality is based on an interplay between a fantasy world, and one represented by symbols.  Beneath, and behind, and indeed above, all of this is a real, which is too powerful to be really knowable.  The real is the raw material of everything, and as such it serves to motivate or underline nearly all thought and action to some degree.  Since the subject is always contending with the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real, language has no lever, and no point of escape, and this is the crux of where the theory begins to unfold.  The speaking subject has never been the same since.