Morbid manifest content can distract from latent wish-fulfillment in cultural artifacts.

Evidence

Freud has taught us, however, that the manifest totality of a fantasy or a dream (something we can enlarge to include the mesmerization of this kind of cultural artifact) is not a reliable guide, save by inversion and negation, to the meaning of the latent content: dreams of dead loved ones proving in reality to be happy wish fulfillments about something utterly unrelated. I once suggested that there could be conceived a kind of structural implication much tighter and more logical than this, in which the morbid features of the manifest content played a more immediate and functional role in diverting us from whatever in the latent might offend our self-esteem (or our internalized role models). — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 823

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines a structural variant of Freudian inversion: the morbid surface functions actively to divert attention rather than merely inverting meaning.
• XREF: Connects to Jameson’s general method of symptomatic reading; also resonates with the reader’s aim of parsing how the cultural dominant hides its own wish content.