In terms of another
What does the highlighted "in terms of another" in the following context mean?
Context:
However, Freud’s concept of the dream-work and the role it plays in relation to art is very different from the interpretation of dream symbolism per se. It has less to do with translating an image or scenario into words or symbolic meaning than it has to do with the dynamics of translation in itself. On the one hand, there are artists who, directly inspired by the content in The Interpretation of Dreams, used its imagery as readymade symbols to construct symbolic narratives through which they could engage their psychic fantasies and traumas – the Surrealists are clearly in this camp; on the other hand, Freud’s discovery of an untranslatable core to the dreamwork around which its associational imagery revolves makes it difficult simply to interpret one element, an image, in terms of another, its reporting in words. Considering the dream machine as a dynamic interplay between images that correspond to one another in an associational, accumulative manner, liberates us from reducing images and image production to singular meaning. It also allows us to consider Surrealist imagery in more ambiguous terms rather than, for example, simply equating its symbols to the Oedipus Complex, a psychoanalytic narrative that greatly inspired the Surrealist Max Ernst.
Top answer
catttt What does the highlighted "in terms of another" in the following context mean? I don't follow her train of thought, and no wonder, since I am not well schooled in Freud or in art criticism, but the phrase means "with reference to some other thing (in this case, an element of the dreamwork, to wit, verbal description), using the concepts inherent in that other thing". It seems to me she took the long way round to arrive at something everybody knows, that an image speaks for itself.
- catttt What does the highlighted "in terms of another" in the following context mean?
- I don't follow her train of thought, and no wonder, since I am not well schooled in Freud or in art criticism, but the phrase means "with reference to some other thing (in this case, an element of the dreamwork, to wit, verbal description), using the concepts inherent in that other thing".
- It seems to me she took the long way round to arrive at something everybody knows, that an image speaks for itself.
- But she seems to be saying more than that about interrelatedness and how that fouls up attempts at verbal description.
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cattttWhat does the highlighted "in terms of another" in the following context mean?
I don't follow her train of thought, and no wonder, since I am not well schooled in Freud or in art criticism, but the phrase means "with reference to some other thing (in this case, an element of the dreamwork, to wit, verbal description), using the concepts inherent in th
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