Suppressing the Mental Fright of Castration and a Creative Language of Dreams in Temma F. Berg’s “Suppressing the Language of Wo(Man): The Dream as a Common Language”

Özet

This paper analyses Temma F. Berg’s “Suppressing the Language of Wo(Man): The Dream as a Common Language.”1 As the title suggests, Berg argues that a common language, which does not exclude either man or woman, is possible. She rereads Sigmund Freud’s conception of dreams from a Kristevan perspective and removes sexual differences in reconceptualizing the literary language. She maintains that dreams can be useful to understand the nature of such a common language that will be “fluid, nonteleological, crammed, condensed, subversive and erupting with the power of the repressed” (p.15). According to Berg, Jacques Lacan excludes the (m)other/the feminine from his ‘Symbolic Order’ and considers language as a necessarily male realm. Luce Irigaray, on the other hand, in her This Sex Which Is Not One, is fascinated with her femininity and the imaginary and is particularly concerned with feminine writing/language.2 As for Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, they are involved in women’s own subversive language including new words to express women’s experience.