‘The Most Obscure Problem of All’: Autonomy and its Vicissitudes in the Interpretation of Dreams

The unconscious is implicated in Romantic and liberal discourses of autonomous individuality, and these insinuate themselves in complex ways into Freud's descriptions of the psyche. Focusing on The Interpretation of Dreams, the paper examines the fortunes of notions such as autonomy and selfhood, beginning with a consideration of Freud's languages of determinism, and moving on to the theory of the wish. In particular it examines ambiguities in the accounts of sexual and egotistical wishes, and in the portrayal of egotism itself. It is suggested that behind such ambiguities lies a deeper ambivalence in Freud's understanding of the I and its autonomy, which is in turn related to indeterminacies in the liberal concept of self. These ambiguities are further explored via the unstable political metaphors Freud attaches to the father–son relationship. The paper argues that such instabilities in the idea of selfhood radically unsettle the terms of the psychoanalytic account.