PHILOSOPHY OF MIND One half of me is yours, the other half yours— Mine own, I would say That such ‘Freudian slips’ can be revelatory of states of mind that the utterer would prefer to conceal is now very widely accepted But note that the mental state in question is something that can be verified in a perfectly straightforward way, by seeking a truthful confession from the person guilty of the slip Such states are, for Freud, the superficial level of the unconscious; he sometimes called this level ‘the preconscious’ (NIL 96) Matters are rather different when we come to the second method of tapping into the unconscious: the analysis of dream reports The interpretation of dreams, Freud maintained, ‘is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind’ But the interpretation is not something that the dreamer can casually undertake for herself; it calls for long and perhaps painful sessions with the psychoanalyst Dreams, Freud claimed, are almost always the fulfilment, in fantasy, of a repressed wish True, few dreams are obvious representations of a satisfaction, and some dreams such as nightmares seem to be just the opposite But this, according to Freud, is because we dream in code The true, latent content of the dream is given a symbolic form by the dreamer; this is the ‘dream-work’, which produces the innocuous manifest content reported by the dreamer Once stripped of its symbolic form the latent content of the dream can commonly be revealed as sexual, and indeed Oedipal However, Freud warns us, ‘the straightforward dream of sexual relations with one’s mother which Jocasta alludes to in the Oedipus Rex is a rarity in comparison with the multiplicity of dreams which psychoanalysis must interpret in the same sense’ (SE xix 131 ff.) How is a dream to be decoded and the dream-work undone? Every dream can easily be given a sexual significance if one takes every pointed object like an umbrella to represent a penis, and every capacious object like a handbag to represent the female genitals But Freud’s method was nothing like as crude as that He did not believe that it was possible to create a universal dictionary linking symbols to what they signified The significance of a dream item for a particular dreamer could only be discovered by finding out what the dreamer herself associated with that item Only after such an exploration could one discover the nature of the unconscious wish whose fulfilment was fantasized in the dream 204