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already repressed, located in the unconscious, a desire which has nothing whatsoever to do with the 'latent dream-thought'. 'A normal train of thought' -- normal and therefore one which can be articulated in common, everyday language: that is, in the syntax of the 'secondary process' -- 'is only submitted to the abnormal psychical treatment of the sort we have been describing' -- to the dream-work, to the mechanisms of the 'primary process' -- 'if an unconscious wish, derived from infancy and in a state of repression, has been transferred on to it'. 2
It is this unconscious/sexual desire which cannot be reduced to a 'normal train of thought' because it is, from the very beginning, constitutively repressed ( Freud's Urverdrängung) -- because it has no 'original' in the 'normal' language of everyday communication, in the syntax of the conscious/preconscious; its only place is in the mechanisms of the 'primary process'. This is why we should not reduce the interpretation of dreams, or symptoms in general, to the retranslation of the 'latent dream-thought' into the 'normal', everyday common language of intersubjective communication ( Habermas's formula). The structure is always triple; there are always three elements at work: the manifest dream-text, the latent dream-content or thought and the unconscious desire articulated in a dream. This desire attaches itself to the dream, it intercalates itself in the interspace between the latent thought and the manifest text; it is therefore not 'more concealed, deeper' in relation to the latent thought, it is decidedly more 'on the surface', consisting entirely of the signifier's mechanisms, of the treatment to which the latent thought is submitted. In other words, its only place is in the form of the 'dream': the real subject matter of the dream (the unconscious desire) articulates itself in the dream-work, in the elaboration of its 'latent content'.
As is often the case with Freud, what he formulates as an empirical observation (although of 'quite surprising frequency') announces a fundamental, universal principle: 'The form of a dream or the form in which it is dreamt is used with quite surprising frequency for representing its concealed subject matter'. 3 This, then, is the basic paradox of the dream: the unconscious desire, that which is supposedly its most hidden kernel, articulates itself precisely through the dissimulation work of the 'kernel' of a dream, its latent thought, through the work of disguising this content-kernel by means of its translation into the dream-rebus. Again, as characteristically, Freud gave this paradox its final formulation in a footnote added in a later edition:
I used at one time to find it extraordinarily difficult to accustom readers to the distinction between the manifest content of dreams and the latent
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