The Significance of Dreams

Bridging Clinical and Extraclinical Research in Psychoanalysis

Peter Fonagy, Horst Kachele, Marianne Leuzinger-Bohleber, David Taylor, Peter Fonagy, Horst Kachele, Marianne Leuzinger-Bohleber, David Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429922176
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book looks at dreams from a twenty-first century perspective. It takes its inspiration from Freud's insights, but pursues psychoanalytic interest into both neuroscience and the modern psychoanalytic consulting room. The book looks at laboratory research on dreaming alongside the modern clinical use of dreams and links together clinical and empirical research, integrating classical ideas with the plurality of psychoanalytic theoretical constructs available to modern researchers. Psychoanalysts writing about dreams have traditionally represented the cutting edge of clinical and theoretical development, and this book is no exception. Many of the contributions, as well as the epistemological position taken by the writers, represent a kind of radical openness to new ways of thinking about the clinical situation and about theory. In line with the ambition of the editors, this volume represents an integration of theories and disciplines, and a scientific context for modern psychoanalysis. The link between clinical research and extraclinical research via the royal road of dreaming is a theme that runs through all the contributions.

PART I

CLINICAL RESEARCH ON DREAMS

CHAPTER ONE

The re-awakening of psychoanalytic theories of dreams and dreaming

David Taylor

In 1908, Henri Poincaré (1854–1912), the French mathematician and philosopher of science, gave a celebrated series of lectures at the Société de Psychologie in Paris. One of his lectures had as its principal subject the psychology of mathematical discovery. The interest of his observations endures. They were published later that same year as chapter three of his widely read Science et Méthode. It was immediately translated into English and has been reprinted as recently as 2001. Poincaré’s observations are based upon his own experiences. They carry weight because Poincaré, a mathematical genius, was responsible for some of the most important mathematical discoveries of his age. They made possible many significant recent advances in modern science. The importance of his theory about what are now known as automorphic functions is equal to that of the calculus (Ayoub, 2004; Weisstein, 1999; Birkhoff, 1920).¹

In his lecture, Poincaré took his discovery of these automorphic functions as a case study of the process of mathematical discovery. To him, it appeared to have three components. In the first, he would work at a theoretically important aspect of his problem for some days, but typically would fail to find the solution which he had sensed to be there. This work involved hard and detailed mental reasoning of a mathematical and logical kind. In the second stage, increasingly frustrated, he would give up on his work and abandon it for an entirely different pursuit— perhaps a holiday. Then suddenly after a few hours—or it might be days, weeks, or sometimes even months—the solution would come to him.

Thus he recalled, “I … began to study arithmetical questions without any great apparent result, and without suspecting that they could have the least connection with my previous researches. Disgusted at my want of success, I went away to spend a few days at the seaside and thought of entirely different things. One day, as I was walking on the cliff, the idea came to me, again with the same characteristics of conciseness, suddenness and immediate certainty, that arithmetical transformations of indefinite ternary quadratic forms are identical with those of non-Euclidian geometry.”

Although he usually experienced a sense of certainty about the correctness of his intuition, Poincaré found that there was always a third stage. In this he felt a compulsion to check that his solution was correct. Sometimes this might take just a few hours … . “I had all the elements, and had only to assemble and arrange them. Accordingly I composed my definitive treatise at a sitting and without any difficulty.” But equally it might take days or weeks of the same hard kind of mathematical deduction and analysis as had been necessary at the beginning.

Poincaré’s immediate sense of what was happening in his mind was that all three stages were necessary. He reasoned that unconscious or subliminal mental processes were as important as those that were conscious and more familiar. In the first stage, he considered that the creative mathematician was trying out all possible connections between the mathematical objects which might be involved. Although characteristically he fails to find the solution, he succeeds in loosening all the connections previously thought to exist. Graphically, Poincaré compared this to the way that the atoms which go to make up the molecules of a gas may under certain conditions become unhooked. He imagined the stage when he seemed not to be thinking about the problem at all as actually involving unconscious processes consisting of repeated attempts to recombine these free atoms. Only the combination which joins the mathematical objects together in a way that brings about order, coherence, and wholeness survives. Poincaré said that his immediate sense of the correctness of the solution was rarely misleading. It usually withstood the essential proof-testing of the third, final stage. However, he noted that when he had let himself become too absorbed by the supposed elegance of his solution, he was more likely to be wrong!

Poincaré’s observations seem to me highly relevant to the subject of this chapter, namely psychoanalytic clinical research in relation to its value in our understanding of dreams and dreaming. By psychoanalytic clinical research I mean that which relies solely on the use of the psychoanalytic method in the consulting room in order to make psychoanalytic observations. It uses no instruments or forms, yet is immensely valuable for making discoveries and for evaluating whether they are true or false. To some extent, dreaming is a special, rather difficult case. Can we show what justification there is for claiming to know anything at all about the meaning and function of dreams, since it cannot be taken for granted that dreams have meaning at all? Within dream consciousness, we have no capacity to know directly “meaning” of the kind that we ordinarily possess in waking consciousness. We then need to set out and justify the methods and principles psychoanalysis uses to interpret the meaning or significance of a given dream. We also need to have something to say in general about the possible functions of dreaming, spelling out what is involved when these sorts of questions are addressed. My hope is that I will eventually convey a certain kind of attitude to psychoanalytic clinical research: a confident questioning, possessing a balance of certainty and uncertainty, with some sense of what is not yet understood.

Poincaré’s exceptional thinking brings vividly to life that sense of wonder, which he himself clearly possessed, at the quite remarkable intelligence of the mental operations involved in the unconscious processing needed to see beyond old formulas and to produce new ones. In Poincaré’s case, the objects of his unconscious thinking were mathematical. Intriguing to us as psychoanalysts is the possibility that there may be some overlap between this and the kind of unconscious functions involved when, as I describe later, an otherwise uncurious analysand produces through the vehicle of a dream a complex scene or visual metaphor with the capacity to illuminate what is otherwise a totally confused set of elements. But, in addition, Poincaré had some very interesting things to say about science in general. I want to apply some of his thinking to the kind of clinical research that has been responsible for the central core of psychoanalytic knowledge about dreams and dreaming.

As far as I am aware, Poincaré did not refer explicitly to unconscious processing occurring in sleep or through dreaming, but it is strongly implied in his account. Again, as far as I can tell, his thinking about unconscious processing was quite independent of Freud’s. It was not until 1920 that any of Freud’s writings were translated into French (Quinodoz, 2010). The Interpretation of Dreams was published in Leipzig and Vienna in late 1899. By 1906 only 351 copies had been sold. The first French translation was not published until 1926. It was only slowly over the succeeding twenty years that The Interpretation of Dreams (IoD) was to assume its position as a defining part of the “spirit of its age”.

In The Interpretation of Dreams, we find Freud proposing that everything conscious has an unconscious preliminary stage and that, “The unconscious is the true psychical reality.” Even at that time he considered that unconscious mental functioning was vastly more extensive than waking consciousness. He wrote, “[I]n its innermost nature it is as much unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is as incompletely presented by the data of consciousness as is the external world by the communications of our sense perceptions.” This remarkable conclusion came towards the end of The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud’s italics indicate that he wanted to leave his readers in no doubt about the limitations of the view offered by our waking consciousness. He was stressing the severe limits that exist on the certainty of our knowledge of both internal and external reality. Interestingly, Poincaré also thought that reality, the thing itself, could not be directly or exactly known by us. For Poincaré, science could only approach nature through successive approximations.

However, Freud’s conception of unconscious mental operations was more elaborate than Poincaré’s and included more intentionality. Freud based his first conception of the unconscious almost entirely on what he thought he had understood about dreams. Displacement, condensation, mobility of cathexes, absence of negation, of doubt, of degrees of certitude, indifference to reality, and exclusive wishful subordination to the principles of pleasure and unpleasure were all held to be characteristic not only of dreams but of unconscious mental functioning in general. Freud used these features to distinguish a fundamental dichotomy between what he called primary and secondary forms of mental processing. Although dreams permit the gratification of infantile wishes, this is only their secondary function. Their primary purpose is to preserve sleep. The inhibition of the systems of voluntary movement in relation to thoughts or impulses, which would otherwise lead to action, means that the intense scenarios of dreams can be hallucinated without being put into external action.

What then is the current status of this conception of the processes involved in the formation of dreams, and, more generally, of the way that unconscious processing works? And if these were to be supplanted, what better account do we now have available to us? These are questions which run through this volume. Here, I consider the changes in these original views based upon the accumulating knowledge derived from the psychoanalytic session itself. Inevitably, my account has had to be compressed and selective. However, I will attempt to indicate a few of the many important points of contact with other bodies of empirical work. These bear upon the wider frame of knowledge within which psychoanalysts works. Finally, I will offer some speculative hypotheses derived from clinical work which might point to how empirical and clinical approaches to research might be able to be articulated with one another.

It seems fair to say that, almost from the very beginning, Freud and his collaborators realised that the founding theory provided an inadequate model for the range of the phenomena connected with dreams and the unconscious as these are encountered in the more ecological setting provided by the psychoanalytic session. We are familiar with the notion that in the analytic session the way that the patient uses the telling of the dream is often more important than its content. Again, almost from the beginning, it was clear that the method of free association was of limited value as an instrument of investigation in the clinical setting. But equally immediate to our theme is the non-trivial way that aggressive impulses, excessive arousal, anxiety, fear, and evidences of attempted problem solving form such large and meaningful parts of the manifest dream. Empirical research findings (see Palombo, 1978, 1984; Shredl, 2006; Kramer, 2007) are in line with these clinical observations. There are interesting issues here about the ways in which clinical thinking and empirical research develop. Do they do so interdependently or do they follow rather separate trajectories?

The status of Freud’s original theory of dreams in relation to that of modern psychoanalysis is similar to that of Newtonian mechanics in relation to modern physics and astronomy. Newton’s theory still works for aspects of celestial motion but not for the relativity of time and space, the origin of the universe, or at the quantum level generally. Freud’s original theory of the formation of dreams and, by extension, of the nature of unconscious process, continues to offer a good fit for that limited part of the spectrum of psychoanalytic phenomena concerned with self-deception, hypocrisy, and to some extent the satisfaction of libidinal wishes, but not, I think, for others including Bion’s influential idea that dreams have a role in the processing of different levels of thought and feeling.

Recently a number of authors, most notably Welsh (1994) and Blass (2001), have drawn our attention to the long period in which Freud’s methods of justifying his conclusions about dreaming were exempted from major critique from within psychoanalysis itself. In essence, Freud had argued that the meaning—the latent dream thoughts he hypothesised—could be indirectly, but nevertheless validly, reconstructed through the vehicle of free association. But these associations arise in waking consciousness. It could be counter-argued that we may be finding in dreams only what we already know or suspect. According to this view, the putative latent thought may be present in the waking consciousness of the dreamer, but may not necessarily be crucial to the formation of the dream. In general, Freud’s argumentation in support of his free association method was sometimes ad hoc or tendentious. Blass in particular demonstrates that Freud’s method does not really convincingly support his conclusions.

Perhaps it was an uneasy awareness of the existence of these problems which led to a dormancy, or at least to a partial suspension of a collective psychoanalytic critical faculty. This phenomenon might indicate the operation of some factors in common with those which possibly underlie the latency or dormant period which some of Poincaré’s mathematical discoveries seemed to require. Perhaps, much as is the case with individuals, science also needs a latency period before a deferred rethink finally becomes possible, or the full significance of existing observations can be realised.

Before moving on from The Interpretation of Dreams we should note how many crucial ideas it contained in addition to the headline theory that dreams derive from wish fulfilment. In this respect, Blass also showed how many of the theses in The Interpretation of Dreams can be justified by a method of proof which takes into account the whole set of the data which bear upon them. These include the overarching notion that dreams are meaningful, as well as the work’s observations about the distinctive contents of the mind that we specifically associate with a psychoanalytic view of the human psyche. They include Freud’s hypothesis that the infantile level continues to be a highly active motive force within the mind throughout life, operating throughout our entire thinking as well as our dreaming; and that in naked, as well as in disguised ways, we continue to desire the exclusive possession of one parent or of their substitute, and wish to kill or displace the rival, or their substitute. These theorems about our most private thoughts and motives possess characteristics which are necessary if a truth is to be a distinctively psychoanalytic truth. They must have the potential to upset the orthodoxy of the waking self. They must be able to stand outside taboos, including the incest taboo, and whatever other social or cultural norms that happen to be current at the time. This is partly why it would be mistaken to discard the classical theory of dreams and its method of free association.

To test the undiminished nature of the power of the classical theory, the reader is invited to follow for a few moments the haphazard line of any of his or her private thoughts, or to do the same with a recollected dream, and then to imagine how it would feel to be required to speak out loud these thoughts in a public gathering, even one of trusted friends. In this, as in so many things, we can still lean on Freud’s valour. He risked revealing his dreams and private associations in order to communicate what he had understood about the universality of the devices of the unconscious part of the mind. One example came from what he called a relatively simple dream. In it there was a:

… company at table or table d’hôte … spinach was being eaten … Frau E. L. was sitting beside me; she was turning her whole attention to me and laid her hand on my knee in an intimate manner”… . Freud continued, “I was struck by the contrast between my wife’s behaviour at table and that of Frau E. L. … my wife and me at the time at which I was secretly courting her … . The caress which she gave me under the table-cloth was her reply to a pressing love letter. In the dream, however, my wife was replaced by a comparative stranger—E. L. … I was aware of intense and well-founded affective impulses [as I associated] … the thoughts themselves fell at once into logical chains … I might draw closer together the threads in the material revealed by the analysis … they converge upon a single nodal point, but considerations of a personal and not of a scientific nature prevent my doing so in public. I should be obliged to betray many things which had better ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• About The Editors and Contributors
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I :Clinical Research on Dreams
• Chapter One The re-awakening of psychoanalytic theories of dreams and dreaming
• Chapter Two Dreams and play in child analysis today
• Chapter Three The manifest dream is the real dream: the changing relationship between theory and practice in the interpretation of dreams
• Chapter Four Changes in dreams—from a psychoanalysis with a traumatised, chronic depressed patient
• Part II: Extraclinical Research on Dreams
• Chapter Five Dreams as subject of psychoanalytical treatment research
• Chapter Six The work at the gate—discussion of the papers of Juan Pablo Jimenez and Horst Kächele
• Part III: Conceptual Integrations
• Chapter Seven When theories touch: an attempted integration and reformulation of dream theory
• Chapter Eight “It’s only a dream”: physiological and developmental contributions to the feeling of reality
• Chapter Nine Discussion of Steven J. Ellman’s and Lissa Weinstein’s chapters
• Part IV: Clinical and Extraclinical Research in Ongoing Projects and Dreams in Modern Literature
• Chapter Ten Changes in dreams of chronic depressed patients: the Frankfurt fMRI/EEG study (FRED)
• Chapter Eleven Traumatic dreams: symbolisation gone astray
• Chapter Twelve Communicative functions of dream telling
• Chapter Thirteen ADHD—illness or symptomatic indicator for trauma? A case study from the therapy comparison study on hyperactive children at the Sigmund Freud Institute, Frankfurt
• Chapter Fourteen No intermediate space for dreaming? Findings of the EVA study with children at risk
• Part V: Dreams in Modern Literature
• Chapter Fifteen Orders of the imaginary—Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams and the literature of classical modernity
• Index