ABSTRACT
Freud's examples in his explanations of condensation and displacement make no distinction between the associative links that depend on likeness (similarity) and those that depend on proximity (contiguity). When a professor's name, 'Gartner' (gardener) reminds Freud of a botanical monograph, wordlikeness is involved; when a laboratory reminds him of a colleague who works there, the association is of A being found with B, one of contiguity. Both these associations come into his discussion of condensation. Under displacement similar linkages operate: climbing stairs is metaphorically linked with 'going up in the world' socially; a girl born in May and married in May associates herself with may-beetles, a plague which once appeared in that month. It is only after Freud that similarity and contiguity have been singled out as the two fundamental poles oflanguage (J akobson 1956, pp. 76-82) and subsequently equated to the rhetorical figures of metaphor and metonymy, by confining condensation to metaphoric shifts of association (based on similarity) and displacement to metonymic ones (based on contiguity). All these tropes are based on one thing being a reminder of another, on one's memories. No limits can be laid down beforehand to dictate to the memory whether it should provide similarities or contiguities or both: that two entities are found together is no bar to their being in some way
second, there is a common identification of the male sexual organ with upright objects, and of the mother's body with horizontal ones or with enclosures of all kinds. The interpretation of such 'typical symbols' has led to what has become known as 'vulgar Freudian symbolism': a given and rigid code in which all images have a specific bodily association. Freud, while under the influence of Wilhelm Stekel, did accord a greater place to the conventional symbol, but in the course of his clinical practice he rejected such a mechanical approach, asserting that the interpretation of any symbol, however public, has to be mediated by the context in which it is found: 'as with Chinese script, the correct interpretation should be arrived at on each occasion from the context' (V, p. 353). Freud was thus no vulgar Freudian, even though as analyst he could not ignore the stock-in-trade of familiar symbols that are present in the culture.
