Secondary Revision

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SECONDARY REVISION

Secondary revision first appears in The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud, 1900), at the end of the section in Chapter 6 describing the mechanisms of the dream work.

Viewed strictly with respect to dreams, secondary revision is a rearrangement of the seemingly incoherent elements of the dream into a form serviceable for narration. This involves logical and temporal reorganization in obedience to the principles of noncontradiction, temporal sequence, and causality which characterize the secondary processes of conscious thought. Above all, it is instrumental dream censorship and may produce omissions or additions.

But this process, Freud goes on to explain, is also at work in daydreams, which organize remembered materials by "threading them onto the string of desire, between past, present, and future." Furthermore, dreams may rework such fantasies, since they are just nearby in the Preconscious. Secondary revision may also be found in the symptoms of various afflictions, neurotic or otherwise, involving rationalization, the most extreme instances of which may be seen in obsessional neurosis.

Secondary revision is a concept that has been studied relatively little since Freud (except for rationalization in obsessional neurosis), because analysts have preferred to explore the mechanisms of condensation, displacement, and symbolic representation. However, there is no shortage of promising avenues of research in this realm.

First of all, we might consider its most important modes of operation: the act of putting into words, the translation of dream images into verbal images, and the transformation into narrative structure. This is somewhat akin to the rhetorical modes that effect the translation of visual images into figures of speech or style and, inversely, produce images in the mind of the listener. The difference is that the rhetoric of secondary revision serves the ends of censorship more than those of the drives and the primary processes of the unconscious (Duparc, 1995).

Secondary revision seems to be more or less constituted of ready-made, second-hand rhetorical figures that are already stored in a dictionary of such images without occasioning the emergence of much in the way of the affect or desire of the person using them, in contrast to the novel and creative images produced by the representation of unconscious wish. The images in secondary revision are like the prefabricated fantasies that the dream disposes of like the day's residues. They might also be compared to symbols, impersonal or collective materials described by Freud as the remains of ancient linguistic identities and cultural artifacts that work against the emergence of the dreamer's individual unconscious.

For some, the construction of the dream's narrative is one of its most important aspects, perhaps even its driving force. Dreams are always meant to be told, even if only to oneself, and it is the moment of awakening itself, accompanied by the waning of the paradoxical sleep observed by neurobiologists, that triggers the transformation of reactualized remembered material into instinctual manifestations and finally into an organized narrative (Dejours, 1986). Moreover, dreams that have undergone secondary revision are, as Freud puts it in The Interpretation of Dreams, "dreams which might be said to have been already interpreted once, before being submitted to waking interpretation" (p. 490). This aspect might lead us to reflect upon the deferred effect of intellectual revision which analytic treatment aims for and which assumes, insofar as secondary revision is concerned, the somewhat dubious form of constructions involving a significant temporal element.

As for pathology, the predominance of secondary revision over the other mechanisms of representation in dreams and language produces a hypermanifest discourse, in contrast to living discourse that is capable of breathing and resonating with the various levels of representation and figuration (rhythms of speech, mobile shapes, visual images, living rhetorical figures, and contemporary fantasies tied into a network of primal fantasies).

This discourse is composed of what could be called "manifest mechanisms," as opposed to representations with multiple meanings that allow for glimpses of latent thought and the return of the repressed. These mechanisms are a caricature of the mechanisms of dream representation: incessant displacement leading to acceleration, a manic flight by thinking, flooding-dreams (manic defense); massive metaphorization that produces uninterpretable symbolic dreams (for example symbolic equations in the dreams of paranoid patients), major ellipses, or traumatic repetitions in the operative thought of certain psychosomatic patients.

FranÇois Duparc

See also: Day's residues; Displacement; Dream; Dream work; Dream symbolism; Evenly-suspended attention; Manifest; Myth; Working-over.