Lotringer that matters for Freud: to demonstrate the existence of a repression, even if its causes remain hypothetical, is to root in reason his concept of the unconscious. It follows then that to dislodge Freud from the protective perch of the symbolic, to return to the excavation of Pompeii without any pre-conceived ideas, is to re-open the whole case of the unconscious. INTERPRETAT1VE DELUSION "The delusions of paranoics have an unpalatable external similarity and internal kinship to the systems of our philosophers" S Freud --
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Norbert takes to the highroad. He walks in a twilight state6 running away, knowing neither the cause nor the destination. Towards the South, towards liberty, pushed into wandering by �'a nameless feeling." The inten sive fever that animates him prolongs in appearance only the delusion (the false idea) provoked by a dream in which Gradiva is threatened with death by the eruption of Vesuvius. The dream succeeds in confirming Norbert's primitive hypothesis that Gradiva was both Greek and Pompeiian. In the working out of the delusion we recognize the power of conviction that all interpretation, regardless of its nature, spawns; the "episodic" delusion that arises from the dream, in a very strict sense, adheres closely to the very functioning of the analytic machine: "The fact, finally, is familiar to every psychiatrist that in severe cases of chronic delusions (in paranoia) the most extreme examples occur of ingeniously elaborated and well*supported absurd ities" (S.E., IX, 72). This is why Freud feels so much at home with delusions, into whose classic expression he tirelessly incorporates Norbert's nomadic motion*emotion. Inversely, this is the reason Norbert must "forget" the all*too-convincing dream in order to set himself in motion. Freud recognizes it in his own way at the moment he injects repression into Norbert's "trip": "How could this forgetting of the dream, this barrier of repression between the dream and his mental state during the journey , be explained, except by supposing that the journey was undertaken not at the direct inspiration of the dream but as a revolt against it, as an emanation of a mental power that refused to know anything of the secret meaning of the dream?" (S.E., IX, 68). But that's precisely the problem: the motion-emotion is in open revolt against the attribution of a secret meaning to the dream. For the dream does not deal with knowledge (the deciphering of enigmas) but with power. Interpretative power that exercises its authority beneath the battered banners of the truth. They make you hunt for something beneath an alleged, deformed produc tion that the oneiric images form, while in reality you're caught in a net of images, in a play of meanings. The more you try to understand, the harder it becomes to get out. The more you are subjugated, the closer you are to
being "cured." The forgetting, in which Freud does not fail to recognize immediately a symptom characteristic of hysterics, in fact assumes an affirmative role to
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