Conversations at the Frontier of Dreaming

Thomas Ogden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429912269
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Psychology

This book explores the interface of dreams, reverie, poetry, and play. It explores set of metaphors introduced by Freud to provide a fresh language and imagery with which to think and speak about the reverie experience of analysts.

1
Conversations at the Frontier of Dreaming

This is a book of conversations: spoken, unspoken, and yet-to-be-spoken conversations between (and within) analysts and their patients; imaginary and real conversations (the imaginary ones, such as dreaming and reverie, being often the most real); wordless conversations between poets and the poems they make, and between poems and the readers they make; conversations between feelings and thoughts, and between thoughts and words; conversations between the inexpressible and the expressible, a distance mediated by metaphor, by the sounds and cadences of words and sentences, and by images and gestures (verbal and otherwise); and, of course, the conversation between us, reader and writer, a conversation that derives life from all of the other conversations, and imparts life to them.

And, as if by accident (but it is certainly not a matter of chance), the very word conversation is in conversation with itself, spawning metaphors as it goes. The word conversation is "fossil poetry" (Emerson 1844, p. 231), derived from the conjunction of the Latin words cum, meaning with or together, and versus, meaning a row or furrow of earth; the movement of a plough turning back on itself as it ends one row and begins the next; and a line of poetry or other writing. Conversation is a word that has preserved in itself a chorus of accumulated meanings that speak both from the experience of opening the earth for purposes of impregnating/planting and from the experience of entering into language for purposes of communicating with ourselves and others. Thus, conversation is an act of engaging with another person in the work of creating man-made lines, lines of furrowed soil reflecting mankind's timeless effort to survive by taming and freeing the earth and Nature. At the same time, conversation is an act that reflects man's equally timeless effort to tame and to free himself (his own human nature) by transforming raw experience into words and gestures to communicate with others and with himself. There is nothing more fundamentally, more distinctively human than the need to converse. As innumerable observational studies of infants have demonstrated, we depend for our lives upon conversation (both in terms of our physical survival and in terms of our coming humanly to life).

In the history of psychoanalysis both as a theory and as a therapeutic process, few conversations have played a more central role than the one entailed in the experience of dreaming. The internal conversation known as dreaming is no more an event limited to the hours of sleep than the existence of stars is limited to the hours of darkness. Stars become visible at night when their luminosity is no longer concealed by the glare of the sun. Similarly, the conversation with ourselves that in sleep we experience as dreaming continues unabated and undiluted in our waking life.

The unconscious conversation that in sleep we experience as dreaming, in the analytic setting we experience as reverie. The analyst's reveries are his waking dreams. Reverie may take almost any form, but most often, in my experience, it presents itself obliquely to awareness in the most unobtrusive, quotidian of forms: as ruminations, daydreams, sexual fantasies, snippets of films, "audible" musical phrases or lines of poetry, bodily sensations, and so on.

The psychoanalytic frame (for instance, the use of the couch) and psychoanalytic technique (for instance, the free associational method used by both analysand and analyst) are designed to enhance the capacity of each participant to achieve a state of mind in which he might gain access to the continuous unconscious conversation with himself that takes the form of dreaming in sleep and of reverie in waking life. The analyst's reverie state involves a withdrawal from the logic, demands, and distractions of external reality that is analogous to the "darkness" of sleep (the insulation of the mind from the glare of consciousness)—a darkness in which dreaming, a continuous psychic event, becomes perceptible. As Freud (1916) put it, "I have to blind myself artificially in order to focus ... on one dark spot" (p. 45). The analyst's reverie state is his waking sleep or sleeping wakefulness, a state in which he looks darkly into the productions of the unconscious. As one matures as an analyst, one's eyes more readily become "adapted ... to the dark" (Freud 1916, p. 45).

In recent years, to my surprise, I have found that a set of metaphors introduced by Freud more than a century ago provides a fresh language and imagery with which to think and speak about the reverie experience of analysts, and the techniques we as analysts use to facilitate our awareness of that experience. (All metaphors break down at some point, and, as we shall see, this "newly discovered" set of metaphors is no exception.) I am referring to Freud's topographic model (adumbrated as early as 1896, but not fully developed until 1915), in which he conceived of the mind as having three "parts": the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious minds. (I picture the preconscious mind in this model as an oval lying between two large open-ended parabolic shapes opening outward. The conscious mind is represented by the parabola in the upper right corner of the imaginary page, and the unconscious mind by the parabola in the lower left.)

By the terms of this topographic model, there are two "frontiers" (Freud 1915, p. 193), one between the preconscious and the conscious mind, and the other between the preconscious and the unconscious mind. The "business" conducted across the preconscious-conscious frontier is largely a matter of the intentional shifting of the individual's attention from one point of interest to another. Consciousness requires an uncluttered "perceptual surface"—the metaphor is beginning to creak—with which to register current, ever-changing external reality; it also requires access to memory (memory acceptable to consciousness) so that present experience may be contextualized and informed by past experience. Past experience conserved in the preconscious "storehouse" of memory is segregated from conscious awareness so as not to overcrowd the conscious mind, and yet is fully accessible to conscious thought. For instance, we do not keep our telephone numbers continuously in conscious awareness, but we can "bring them to mind" if we direct our attention to them.

My principal interest, though, is in that other metaphorical frontier, the one between the unconscious and the preconscious minds. I believe that it is not hyperbole to say that the psychological work that occurs at the frontier between the preconscious and unconscious minds is at the very core of what it means to be alive as a human being. That frontier is the "place" where dreaming and reverie experience occur; where playing and creativity of every sort are born; where wit and charm germinate before they find their way (as if out of nowhere) into a conversation, a poem, a gesture, or a facial expression; where symptomatic compromise formations are generated and timelessly go on haunting us and sapping vitality from us as they provide order and the illusion of safety at the cost of freedom.

That frontier between the unconscious and preconscious—the frontier of dreaming—is the metaphorical place of that distinctively human conversation with ourselves in which raw experience that simply is-what-it-is (Bion's [1962] "beta elements" and Freud's [1933] "das Es,^" or "the it") is transformed into experience that has accrued to itself a modicum of the quality of "I-ness": that is, of self-reflective awareness mediated at least in part by verbal symbolization. This transformation is, I believe, what Freud had in mind in his famous dictum, "Wo Es war, soll Ich werden," "Where it was, there I shall be becoming" (poorly translated by Strachey as "Where id was, there ego shall be" [Freud 1933, p. 80]).

A caveat is necessary here, lest the psychological work done at the frontier of dreaming be thought of as a linear "forward" progression from unconscious to preconscious, from it-ness to I-ness, from thing-in-itself experience to higher-order symbolization and reflective self-awareness. Such a linear conception badly misrepresents the psychological work to which I am referring, which is most fundamentally dialectical in nature. (The term dialectical seems apt given its derivation from the Greek word dialektos, meaning discourse.) Unconscious experience and preconscious experience, "it-ness" and "I-ness," raw sensory experience and verbally mediated experience, are all without meaning except in relation to one another; and, once differentiated from one another, they continue throughout life to stand in conversation with one another, each creating, negating, preserving, and vitalizing the other.

The frontier of dreaming, as I am conceiving it, is a psychological field of force over-brimming with freeing, taming, ordering, turning-back-on-itself, impregnating, "versifying" impulses. The versifying impulse is the impulse toward symbolic expression generated not only by the unceasing striving of the unconscious for conscious expression, but also by the phenomenon of "consciousness run[ning] to meet it [the unconscious] on all occasions" (Andreas-Salomé 1916, p. 42). For instance, we feel somehow cut off from ourselves when for a period of time we are unable to remember our dreams, or find ourselves unmoved by music, poetry, painting, humor, lively conversation, or any of the other sorts of creative expression that once held the power to touch us deeply. But I am less concerned at this point with the product of the creative act that emanates from conversation at the frontier of dreaming (e.g., the dream, the poem, the drawing) than with the experience of the impulse toward symbolic expression. The moment prior to speaking or drawing or dreaming is not a moment of affectless waiting; it is a moment alive with the desire, the impulse, the need to give voice to the inarticulate. It is a form of aliveness not found in speech itself, for once the words have been spoken (the dream dreamt, the line drawn), the impulse toward symbolic expression has been spent and, in a sense, killed. The frontier of dreaming is crackling with the impulse toward symbolic expression. It is a space "utterly empty, utterly a source" (Heaney 1987, p. 290), a place where the moment of creativity is sustained as "an imminence ... never fulfilled" (Borges 1981, p. 39), a place where "all nominative cases must be replaced by the case indicating direction, the dative" (Mandelstam 1933, p. 284).

Paradoxically, the uniquely human experience of symbolically mediated self-consciousness that is generated at the frontier of dreaming is powerfully shaped and colored by what lies outside of conscious awareness. Self-consciousness is brimming over with bodily urges, impulses, cravings, and sensations lurching toward satiation, and at the same time driven by the need to know and to think and to enter into life experience mediated by language. The metaphor of the frontier of dreaming, in this light, refers to a dialectical field of force generated by the collision of desire, the need to know one's desires, the drive to give personal expression to them, and the need to have those expressions of desire recognized and responded to (by oneself and by others). Human desire is created qua desire by the need to know one's desire and to name it and to give expression to it; conversely, the need to know, to speak oneself, and to be known by others and met with "original response" by them (Frost 1942a, p. 307) is created in direct response to the pressure of one's desires.

At the frontier of dreaming, the dreamer who dreams the dream is in conversation with the dreamer who understands the dream (Grotstein 2000). Freud's dream-work, the individual's desire seeking symbolic expression in the act of making a dream, is in conversation with the "understanding-work" (Sandler 1976, p. 40), the individual's unconscious need to understand (that is, to recognize and creatively engage with his own expression of his needs, fears, and desires). The psychological events at the unconscious-preconscious frontier are to a large extent, though not entirely, unconscious (that is, under repression). That we are able to remember some of our dreams upon waking, and are able to hold onto a portion of our reverie experience before it slips from awareness, reflects the fact that these conversations with ourselves at the frontier of dreaming manage, as a consequence of the psychological work being done (which includes the creation of adequate disguise), to free themselves from the grip of repression. And yet, these remembered dreams and reveries live always in dialogue with what remains repressed: "the entire ... gesticulating disquiet of those reduced to silence" (Andreas-Salomé 1916, p. 42).

From the perspective from which I have been speaking thus far, psychoanalysis might be thought of as a form of human relatedness specifically designed to create conditions in which the conversations with oneself that take place at the unconscious-preconscious frontier might be rendered increasingly "audible" to analyst and analysand. While I believe this to be true, I also believe that this depiction of the psychoanalytic enterprise is incomplete until we add the idea that the dreams and reveries being generated by analyst and patient at the frontier of dreaming draw not only on the unconscious experience of analyst and analysand as individuals, but also involve a set of unconscious experiences jointly, but asymmetrically, constructed by the analytic pair. This unconscious intersubjective construction (which I have termed "the analytic third" [Ogden 1994a]) is "the subject of analysis": a third subject with a life of its own, generated by the analytic pair and standing in dialectical tension with patient and analyst as separate individuals. It is disconcerting, to say the least, to recognize that our experiences of dreaming and reverie, which constitute a good deal of what is most personal to and self-defining for us, can no longer be viewed exclusively as our own individual creations. Our dreams can no longer be viewed as entirely our own. Instead (or, more accurately, in addition), the analyst's (and the patient's) dreaming and reverie are dreams of the jointly but asymmetrically constructed analytic third. An important implication for technique that follows from this understanding of dreaming is the notion that the analyst's associations to the patient's dream are no less important than the patient's associations to "his" dream. Conversations at the frontier of dreaming are not always private.

The analyst's use of his reverie experience, his waking dream-life, is indispensable to the analysis of the intersubjective analytic third. Since the jointly but asymmetrically constructed (and individually experienced) analytic third is dynamically unconscious, it cannot be invaded by sheer force of will. Instead, the analyst must adopt indirect associational methods in working with derivatives of what is happening unconsciously between himself and the patient (just as Freud [1900] developed his own undirected free association technique to "catch the drift" [Freud 1923, p. 239] of the unconscious in his own, and later in his patients', dream experience). For the analyst, an indispensable source of experiential data concerning the leading unconscious transferencecountertransference anxiety at any given moment in an analytic session is available in the form of his reverie experience. Part of what makes the analyst's reverie experience so difficult to work with is the fact that it is not "framed," as dreams are framed, by waking states. Reverie experience seamlessly melts into other more focused psychic states. The analyst's reveries usually feel to him like an intrusion of his own current fatigue, narcissistic self-absorption, preoccupations, unresolved emotional conflicts, and so on. Despite these difficulties, I find that my reverie experience serves as an emotional compass that I rely on heavily (but cannot clearly read) in my effort to gain my bearings about what is going on unconsciously in the analytic relationship.

Treating my reveries as a waking dream-life that draws not only on my own unconscious experience, but also on the unconscious experience co-created with the analysand, is fundamental to my conception of the psychoanalytic process. As an analyst, I am

not so much looking for the shape
as being available
to any shape that may be
summoning itself
through me
from the self not mine but ours.

(Ammons 1986, p. 61)

Poetry and fiction have become increasingly important to me over the years, not only as sources of pleasure, but also as sources of disturbance. These experiences with poems and fictions are an integral part of who I am in every sector of my life, including my ongoing effort to become a psychoanalyst. In this volume, I will attempt to convey a sense of how living (being alive) at the frontier of dreaming is not only an art, but the lifeblood of art itself. Although we all dream (both in sleep and in waking), not all dreams and reveries are equally artful. The success of art reflects the success of the individual in bringing his artistic medium to life and his life to his medium, whether that medium be lines of charcoal or lines of tilled soil or lines of poetry. In terms of the present discussion, the life—the vitality—of our dream life (and every other aspect of being alive) can be thought to reflect the fullness of the conversation with ourselves at the frontier of dreaming. I sometimes think of the outcome of an analysis, in terms of the degree to which analysand (and analyst) come to be able to carry on richer, more interesting, livelier conversations with themselves (both in sleep and in waking life), and consequently with each other. Or is it the other way around? Is it the enhanced richness of the conversation between analyst and analysand at the frontier of dreaming that enriches the conversation that each has with himself? Of course, we need not choose between the two.

2
Reverie and Metaphor

Some Throughts on How I Work as a Psychoanalyst

T. S. Eliot said of good writing, "We cannot say at what point technique begins or where it ends" (Pritchard 1994, p. 11). I think something similar could be said of psychoanalysis when it is going well. It is not staged, pre-scribed, or formulaic. But it is far easier to say what it is not than what it is. To explain to oneself how one works as a psychoanalyst, how one conceives of what one is doing in the consulting room, and what one aspires to in one's work is a lifelong task. What follows is part of that ongoing, always tentative, always incomplete dialogue with myself. The loosely knit "excerpts" from that dialogue that I will present here address specific aspects of psychoanalytic work, and in no sense comprise a comprehensive, balanced statement of a theory of technique. Rather, the thoughts presented are heavily weighted in the direction of aspects of analytic technique and practice that are currently of most interest to me (perhaps because I understand the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1 Conversations at the Frontier of Dreaming
• 2 Reverie and Metaphor: Some Thoughts on How I Work as a Psychoanalyst
• 3 A Question of Voice
• 4 "The Music of What Happens" in Poetry and Psychoanalysis
• 5 Borges and the Art of Mourning
• 6 Re-Minding the Body
• 7 An Elegy, a Love Song and a Lullaby
• 8 Reading Winnicott
• References
• Index