To enter the text as into a dream: tracing the unconscious effects of reading experience

Abstract

In this article, I suggest that, when readers speak about reading, the language they use is closely related to the modes and movements of speech employed by the dreamer recounting their dream. With reference to the psychoanalytic formulations of unconscious desire and transferential attachment, this article – with its focus on methodology – addresses the question of how to approach the often-illegible discursive effects of reading experience. While describing a scene in which a reader relates to a text through a dreamlike re-enactment of prior experience, I argue that a qualitative analysis of reading experience must begin with the question of how to consider unconscious effects, despite their disguised, incomprehensible, and incomplete nature.