This essay focuses on the profound relationship between psychoanalysis and deconstruction. It reads Jacques Derrida's suggestion that an "effect of deferral" both drives and disrupts the entire Freudian corpus. It suggests, in turn, that Freud's engagements with this "effect of deferral" are, like the navel of the dream, knots in the Freudian text, entanglements which speak of what will nevertheless remain unspeakable. My reading goes via the "Project for a Scientific Psychology" to Freud's letters to Fliess, letters where Freud reads the notion of Nachträglichkeit (or deferred action) in the shameless entanglements of a novella by Conrad Ferdinand Meyer.