Social Dreaming

Philosophy, Research, Theory and Practice

Susan Long, Julian Manley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429830181
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

The idea of social dreaming argues that dreams are relevant to the wider social sphere and have a collective resonance that goes beyond the personal narrative.

In this fascinating collection, the principles of social dreaming are explored to uncover shared anxieties and prejudices, suggest likely responses, enhance cultural surveys, inform managerial policies and embody community affiliation. Including, for the first time, a coherent epistemology to support the theoretical principles of the field, the book reflects upon and extends the theory and philosophy behind the method, as well as discussing new research in the area, and how social dreaming practice is conducted in a range of localities, situations and circumstances.

The book will appeal to anyone interested in the idea that social dreaming can help us to delve deeper into the question of what it means to be human, from psychoanalysts to sociologists and beyond.

SECTION II

The nature and processes of social dreaming: Theory and research

3

The dreaming body yearning to belong to a larger social body

Richard Morgan-Jones with Angela Eden

Introduction

This chapter seeks to follow the theme of this book to “extend and deepen an understanding of the theory and practice of social dreaming” (Introduction). I begin with the overlap between neurology and psychoanalysis to affirm how it is the body that dreams, followed by an account of developments in clinical psychoanalytic work with dreams. This seeks meaning in what the body may have lived, but the mind has not experienced, so it has not become available for repression although it is unconsciously stored, unrepressed, in the somatic sensations of the body. These two developments have paralleled Gordon Lawrence’s creation of Social Dreaming Matrices and yet have been little inter-related. I next move to earlier experiments that drew upon right-brained imaginative access to dreaming in a group. One elaborates dreams through poetry, while the other encourages dream-like experiencing gazing at a cathedral window. Finally, I turn to the subject of this book in a report of my first experience of being a host for a social dreaming matrix. My fundamental hypothesis being tested is this:

That the social dreaming matrix embodies the yearning to belong to a social body bigger than one’s own body and mind, to facilitate contradictory painful and joyful truths of hitherto unlived human experience in a wider human world, which need to be dreamt to be realised.

The body that dreams

Neuro-psychoanalyst Allan Schore (2017, p. 73) argues that, “After a century of disconnection, psychoanalysis is returning to its psychological and biological sources, and this reintegration is generating a palpable surge of energy and revitalisation of the field.” Key in this development is the idea that the brain to the neurologist, like the mind for the psychoanalyst, is divided. The emphasis on left-brained cognitive and behavioural function, beloved of academic psychology and western intellectual discourse, has risked ignoring right-brained access to implicit knowledge and models of the mind, essential to both conceptual development, and daily problem solving (McGilchrist, 2009).

For centuries, it has been observed that dogs chase in their dreams. Their muted actions in sleep are as clear as those of humans. As neurologist Hobson conjectures, rather than the Cartesian “I think, therefore I am”, it might be more accurate to state: “I move, therefore I am.” This in turn reveals the idea that thinking is virtual movement (Hobson, 2015, p. 19). However, we could also reverse this perspective to describe feeling moved emotionally by internal or external experience as the other side of where body meets mind. These two sides of the brain can be linked by working with dream experience.

Psychoanalytic developments in working with dreams

Freud’s approach to what he described as the “Royal Road to the unconscious mind” was to treat dreams as disguises for painful truths which could not be faced and were repressed (Freud, 1900). He analyses four defence mechanisms, condensation, displacement, altered representability and secondary revision. Such defences repress anxiety filled emotions behind a contact barrier which is a semi-permeable membrane, like a skin (Morgan-Jones, 2017). Through this skin a dream narrative draws upon experiences, characters and contexts from daily life, and truths about motives that the conscious mind represses. This suggests a function for the contact barrier that is in one way, protecting the conscious mind from its unconscious motives.

Freud’s purpose was to draw attention to the way dreaming protected sleep so that the body and mind could recover through the skin of dreaming, while Bion (1962) took Freud’s idea of a contact barrier further. He suggests that the unconscious mind is being protected from the realities of conscious and external experience that could also be overwhelming. Pathology, the repeating cycles of suffering, self-destructive behaviour and the experience of relating, could be explored in the failure of the contact barrier to manage the spacing between what was conscious and unconscious in the mind. Waking anxiety signifies failure to protect the mind from the overwhelming demand both internal and external experience. When this overwhelm occurs before a child develops a sense of their own mind emerging from their own bodily identity, Winnicott (1965) described this as “premature impingement from a failing family environment”. Further, dreaming and waking dream-like thinking is a way of working across the contact barrier and establishing communication linkages through which the mind could grow to be able to dream up life encompassing both an imaginative and a cognitive aspect (Ogden, 2017). Developing a skin for dreaming could be one way to describe not just social dreaming but the range of methodologies described as “socioanalytic methods” (Long, 2013).

For psychoanalyst Ogden (2001), the key to dream work is to develop a capacity to dream in a way that allows for freeing the movement between conscious and unconscious experience. Madness for Ogden (2005), following Bion, is the incapacity to sleep and to dream and the incapacity to wake up and experience reality. This painful world of the unborn, unlived life is captured in the poem “Invisible Dreams” by Toi Derricote in which she describes her eyes as blind to herself in the state of being neither able to sleep, nor quite wake up (Derricotte, 2017).

Through “Dreaming Undreamt Dreams and interrupted cries” (Ogden, 2005 title page), the analyst enters into the world not of the repressed unconscious, but of the unrepressed unconscious. In other words, into the world that has never been lived because the person/child was not present in mind for lived experience, through either being undeveloped or dissociated. Such overwhelmed, un-present, unrepressed experience is communicated often through bodily presentation rather than being articulated through words. Such non-experience seeks to belong to a body and mind larger than one’s own in order to borrow a skin within which dreaming up experience becomes possible. If this is the task in clinical psychoanalytic work with early trauma and developmental loss, then it is also a task within organisations. This is particularly relevant to institutions whose emotionally containing skin is blind to the human risks it imposes upon its work force both consciously and unconsciously whose workers suffer such risks (Morgan-Jones, 2009; 2010). Here too we are on the edge of the boundary with economic, societal and political systems, whose leaders may be similarly imposing upon their citizens (Morgan-Jones, 2011a; 2011b; 2013).

This is a possible role for the social dreaming matrix. Susan Long and Maurita Harney have postulated a rich vein for exploration of the links between the psychoanalytic and socioanalytic unconscious through the idea of an “associative unconscious” (Long & Harney 2013; Long 2016 and this volume). This chapter seeks by contrast to explore how a skin for dreaming may be enhanced in order to address the dissociated unconscious experiences.

Awakening contemplative intuitive thinking, encouraged by associations in social dreaming matrices, the space between left and right brained thinking may be bridged. For Bion, it is the impression of sensory experience that is at once, confusingly, bodily and emotional, that begins experience. This “protomental” emerging experience of “becoming” he described as the transformation of beta-elements through alpha function of an internalised maternal reverie, into emotion, which then becomes available for thought (Bion, 1962).

Piecing together the narrative for such experience demands speaking about what is not yet known. Psychoanalyst Antonino Ferro (2002) proposes that along the path towards alpha function, what is produced are icons, symbol elements, shapes of experiences, even characters in dreams, that become playthings, like toys. For him this involves the investigation of the force field created not by the patient, nor by the analyst, but by the interaction between them. This is the heart of Post-Bion Field Theory, a new trans-theoretical development in psychoanalysis. Ogden describes this dimension as “the analytic third”. The development of icons and symbol elements is the attempt to arrive at exploring the unrepressed unconscious and the discovery of implicit memory that has not been repressed because there was no sufficiently developed ego to digest the experience or because the person was absent from being able to experience an event through traumatic impingement or dissociation, described by Shore and others (see Craparo & Mucci, 2017). These sensations, icons, characters and narratives, become the building blocks for what Gordon Lawrence described as the potential of social dreaming matrices to be a vehicle for “thinking new thoughts” (Lawrence, 1999).

Yet deep within both early traumatised patients as well as in better adapted people there are encapsulated pockets of unlived experience seeking recognition. Such encapsulated pockets demand dreaming, narrative and myth in order for the mind to do the work to transform inner terrors, hopes and joys. The desire to belong to a body bigger than one’s own is the precondition for such dimensions of unconscious human experience becoming available through the shared social context of words and language. The analytic pair is the social context which embodies the wider field of the analytic third that makes uses of socially constructed meanings in language to reach for transcending truths and manage the enormity of becoming real to emotionally charged experiencing.

Inspired by Bion’s thinking, Donald Meltzer describes “the task of the analyst hearing the dream is no longer to receive it for analysis, but rather to allow the patient’s dream to intuitively evoke your own, which might put you in a position to light a candle in the dark that might enlighten his dream” (Meltzer, 1984: personal communication). This is parallel to thinking that has been key in social dreaming although the two fields have not always connected.

Here we can make a further connection to British psychoanalyst Winnicott’s notion of transitional space, where imagination and reality meet as they do in dreams (Winnicott, 1971). What is significant in his work is that long before the possibility of symbolic interpretative work, the psychoanalyst’s task is to facilitate experience through a second mind. This provides both maternal attentive listening, reverie (Bion, 1962) and a playful, safe and facilitating environment (Winnicott, 1965).

This takes us towards Bion’s description of the mind’s attempts to find knowledge (K) or truth about reality from within the depths of experience. He suggests that this could only ever be provisional or limited in the face of further experience that would always transcend limited knowledge and understanding. To describe this transcendence, he deploys language drawn from spiritual traditions and inspired by philosophical and mystical experience. So “the ultimate reality”, “things as they are in themselves”, and the spiritual traditions of the yearning for a god described by John of the Cross in the “Dark Night of the Soul” and Julian of Norwich in her “Cloud of Unknowing” become the phrases he uses to describe the yearning he points towards under the sign “O” (Bion, 1977/1989). The work of the Grubb Institute the use of “yearning” to describe the longing of the person for deeper and wider transcendent meanings, including relating to the wider purpose of the social system (Long, 2016).

What the absolute facts of a (psychoanalytic) session are cannot ever be known, and these I denote by the sign O.

(Bion, 1965, pp. 16–17).

In relation to the conscious and unconscious mind, O represents that potentially overwhelming aspect of the truth or facts about emerging experience that seek expression and yet avoids it. O contains both sensation of undigested experience and bodily impact, as well deeper or higher truths that are too bright for the eyes to dare to open themselves towards. O and protomentality/beta-elements interpenetrate. This chapter attempts to make a link between these two concepts. As Grotstein puts it: “The fundamental anxieties that underlie the basic assumption group resistances were originally thought of as proto-mental phenomena (Bion, 1961, p. 101). These would be the forerunners of Bion’s later concept of beta-elements and O” (Grotstein, 2007, p.192).

Yearning

By using the word “yearning” in the title of this chapter, I have sought to represent the feeling of deep desire representing bodily need acknowledged, yet transcended. This takes us beyond the satisfaction of a wish that establishes equilibrium in the biological way that Freud conceived of the narcissism of the pleasure principle. It borders into Lacan’s version of desire. Lacan’s idea of desire is reached for when it is described as “the difference that results from the subtraction of the appetite from the demand of love” (Cléro, 2002, p. 24 author’s trans.).

For Lacan, desire appears as a reality, impossible to fully grasp. It is ineffable, unknowable and revealed only through what is unconscious and transcendent. It is characterised by what has been lacking in a life as an experience. It is here that need and want, having done their job as shapers of the experience of desire, then get left behind. They become transformed, having been “lent upon”, through the experience of what has gone missing in individual and collective lives. Such transcendence reveals that desire can be survived without the regressive pull of the wants and needs of the body, whose urges have given birth to it. Here I argue that the desire for a social context or group that will facilitate the courage to face unsatisfiable desire is an ever-present yearning. It is also worth noting the choice of the term “yearning” by staff at the Grubb Institute and Guild who, in their work with organisations and society, have sought to conceptualise the experience of the person reaching for transcendent meanings to their work engagement with others (Long, 2016).

The word yearning seeks to describe the feeling, that is at once in t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Author Biographies
• Preface
• Introduction
• SECTION I: Towards a philosophy of science in support of social dreaming
• SECTION II: The nature and processes of social dreaming: Theory and research
• SECTION III: Social dreaming practice
• Index