My title alludes to an essay by Jean-François Lyotard, ‘The Dream- Work Does Not Think’, which in turn alludes to Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. The issue is whether the Freudian theory of psychoanalysis construes the individual psyche as having any capacity to think whatsoever. It might be problematised thus: if the psychic mechanism is compelled to repeat, can any of its intellections be considered as thought or cogitation, as opposed to Pavlovian reaction? The compulsion to repeat is one – perhaps the arch – element making the psychic mechanism mechanical, hence the structural role it plays, and consequently its tolerance of being notated and theorised. Theoretically it calls for a concept of the death-drive whose presence it betrays: we repeat patterns of mental and social behaviour so as to keep psychic expenditure to a minimum, not risking any authentically new investments, preferring old wine in new bottles no matter how sour in reality it always was. This profoundly conservative attitude is tantamount to a death-drive insofar as a state of minimum exertion, or maximum inertia, is its telos – its end, purpose and nature. Thought, were that activity to contain any requirement of intellectual effort, would be anathema to it and could be countenanced only in circumstances where it represented the sole remaining route back to the state of rest, repetition having become for whatever reason unviable.