29

Freud advises the psychoanalyst to pursue the analysis of a dream as far as possible. But this pursuit runs up against a point of impossibility, which he calls the “navel of the dream”. This discovery, enshrined in The Interpretation of Dreams , was occasioned by Irma’s dream. When one thinks of dream as articulated around this ‘knot-hole’, the perspective of its interpretation changes ; it is less a matter of deciphering its sense than of grasping it as a space of writing in which the birth of the symbolic is conjoined with the origin of desire.