The poetic image is a sudden salience on the surface of the psyche

In scientific thought, the concept functions all the better for being cut off from all background images. In its full exercise, the scientific concept is free from all the delays of its genetic evolution, an evolution which is consequently explained by simple psychology. The virility of knowledge increases with each conquest of the constructive abstraction.

If there is any realm where distinction is especially difficult, it is the realm of childhood memories, the realm of beloved images harbored in memory since childhood. These memories which live by the image and in virtue of the image become, at certain times of our lives and particularly during the quiet age, the origin and matter of a complex reverie: the memory dreams, and reverie remembers.

Very often, I confess, the teller of dreams bores me. His dream could perhaps interest me if it were frankly worked on. But to hear a glorious tale of his insanity! I have not yet clarified, psychoanalytically, this boredom during the recital of other people's dreams. Perhaps I have retained the stiffness of a rationalist. I do not follow the tale of justified incoherence docilely. I always suspect that part of the stupidities being recounted are invented.

By listening to certain words as a child listens to the sea in a seashell, a word dreamer hears the murmur of a world of dreams.

For in the end, the irreality function functions as well in the face of man as in the face of the cosmos. What would we know of others if we did not imagine things?

In writing, you discover interior sonorities in words. Dipthongs sound differently beneath the pen. One hears them with their sounds divorced.