The automatic image metonymy f-holes (= violin) also gures as a metaphor (one thing is substituted for another) of the

female body (violin female body). What Lacan refers to as the occulted signier (and Jean Laplanche proposes as the enigmatic signier in his theoretical model) is the part of the sign that remains present throughout the rhetorical substitutions, but is nevertheless hidden from view. In Man Rays picture this is the unresolved conict in reading the picture as a violin or a womans body (see Chapter for analysis). Lacan in fact links the surrealist image to the model of Freuds dream-work, where the dream-image produced is not the unconscious itself, but rather a representative of an unconscious thought which has been subject to, worked over and shaped by repression and censorship. This is precisely the relation of manifest content (secondary conscious and preconscious processes) to latent dream thoughts (primary unconscious processes). The latent dream thought (unconscious) forces its way into consciousness as manifest content. That a dream-image typically arises during sleep, whereas the surrealists made efforts to invoke such surreal images while partially awake, should not divert our attention from the fact that we are just as susceptible to the efficacy of the unconscious in the waking state as when we are asleep. Freuds book, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, is a veritable catalogue of examples of how any sign in all its manifestations (a gesture, an action, speech, writing, intention etc.) can be distorted, mutated, replaced, confused, forgotten, activated or obliterated through the presence of unconscious processes during the waking state. As in dreams, the material is not intended to make sense because the material is only permitted to emerge into consciousness as the failure of a censorship. Censorship does not entirely prevent the material emerging, but functions to distort the representative signier, forcing a rhetorical mutation through the dream-work: condensation, displacement, means of dramatization and secondary revision (in whatever form, visual, verbal, motor etc.). Like the game of charades where syntax is lost and picture sign scenes are used to replace linguistic phrases, the unconscious wish has to nd substitute images to force its way into a preconscious content.
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