Imagination and Reality

Psychoanalytical Essays 1951-1961

Charles Rycroft

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367099534
• eBook ISBN: 9780429914768
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

A collection of essays, introduced by Masud Khan and J.D. Sutherland, on a variety of subjects including: observations on a case of vertigo; on idealization, illusion, and catastrophic disillusion; the nature and function of the analyst's communication to the patient; beyond the reality principle; and, the analysis of a detective story.

1
A Contribution to the Study of the Dream Screen¹

Introduction

In this paper I wish to report an example of a dream without visual content of the type described by Lewin in his paper, 'Sleep, the Mouth and the Dream Screen' (1946), and to make some suggestions as to the clinical and theoretical significance of such dreams.

In his second paper on the dream screen Lewin (1940) writes:

The dream screen is defined as the blank background upon which the dream picture appears to be projected. The term was suggested by the motion picture, because, like its analogue in the cinema, the dream screen is either not noted by the dreaming spectator, or it is ignored due to the interest in the pictures and action that appear on it. However in certain circumstances the screen plays a rôle of its own and becomes perceptible. . . .

Like other formal elements in dreams the screen has a meaning in itself. It

represents the idea of 'sleep'; it is the element of the dream that betokens the fulfilment of the cardinal wish to sleep, which Freud considered responsible for all dreaming. Also it represents the maternal breast, usually flattened out, as the infant might perceive it while falling asleep. It appears to be the equivalent or the continuation in sleep, of the breast hallucinated in certain predor mescent states, occasionally observed in adults (Isakower, 1938).

Dreams occur which have as their visual element the dream screen alone, without any superimposed dream picture. Such dreams represent 'complete fulfilments of the wish to sleep at the maternal breast after nursing'.

Lewin's papers are primarily concerned with demonstrating the existence of the dream screen, and with discussing its theoretical significance in relation to the general theory of dreams and the psychology of sleep. I intend in this paper to approach the subject from a rather different angle, by giving a fuller analysis of an individual dream of this kind than has been attempted by Lewin. I intend, also, to suggest possible answers to two closely connected clinical questions which arise from the recognition of such dreams. First, at what stage in an analysis are dreams in which the dream screen is visible likely to occur? Secondly, what dynamic process in the patient does their occurrence represent? The answer to the more general question as to the type of patient in which these dreams are likely to be observed is explicit in Lewin's formulation. It is in those with deep oral fixations, whose paramount wish is for union with the breast.

Clinical Material

My patient's dream was as follows: 'It felt as though you [the analyst] had taken me under your wing. There was nothing to see in the dream at all. It was like a white sheet.' After telling me the dream he pointed out explicitly that the feeling he had had that I was taking him under my wing was a metaphorical description of the affect colouring the dream and not part of its visual content. He also remarked that he was not happy in describing the dream as a white sheet, but that it was the best he could do to convey the peculiar impression that the dream had made. He gave three immediate associations. First, he had had the same experience, including the awareness of a white sheet of light, during the previous analytical session, but had thought it too silly to mention. Secondly, the night of the dream had been the best night's sleep he could ever remember having had. Thirdly, the dream had recurred three or four times during the night.

In order to understand this dream it is necessary to know something of, first, the patient's history and symptoms, and, secondly, the analytical work preceding and following the dream.

The patient was a married man of 45. He was several years younger than any of his brothers and sisters, two of whom committed suicide following depressive illnesses. His mother was a dominating character, whom he alternately feared and idealized. I have the impression that she was a woman who resented her children growing up and who could love them only so long as they were totally dependent on her. There is no direct evidence about breast-feeding and weaning, though I am inclined to believe that my patient was correct in his belief that he was weaned rather late. His father was a kindly, meek, unassuming man, who was often away from home.

He had, when he came to analysis, next to no belief in his own masculinity. He was virtually impotent, had a deep sense of guilt about masturbation, suffered from headaches, attacks of giddiness with vomiting closely resembling Meniere's Disease, psychogenic deafness and short sight, and complained of feelings of unreality in his arms and legs, which on occasion felt as though they had swollen to two or three times their real size. From early on in the analysis it was clear that his sense of guilt centred on his unconscious hostility to his mother. His masturbation, which was without conscious fantasy, represented an attack on her, both in terms of defiance of her prohibitions and of urinary attack. (As a child he had been enuretic.) It also represented a rejection of her and of women in general. His visual and auditory symptoms constituted defences against scopophilic and listening interests, which had the unconscious significance of oral-sadistic incorporation. The feelings of unreality in his limbs represented defences against wishes to hit and kick.

His giddiness differed from his other symptoms in the fact that the sadism was uppermost, whereas in his other symptoms the defence against sadism was most apparent. Fundamentally it represented the wish that his internalized mother should disintegrate. He once said jokingly: 'Everything was going round so fast that I wonder the house didn't fall down.' The previous night he had dreamt that an engineer had told him that almost the whole house would have to be pulled down before electricity could be installed. Here the house clearly symbolized not only his ego, which he felt to be in need of almost complete reconstruction before he could achieve potency, but also, or, rather, more specifically, that part of his ego which had been formed by introjection of his mother (Schilder, 1930).

In addition to their oral-sadistic significance these symptoms had also a genital, sexual meaning. For instance, the swelling of his limbs symbolized erection and was related to a feeling that his penis was abnormally small. The giddiness represented orgasm as well as a wish to destroy his mtrojected mother. The worst attack he ever had, with frequent vomiting during the analytical hour, was precipitated by the expectation of an outstanding professional success. The symptom began after he had achieved promotion out of an occupation which his father had practised for many years without any advancement. However, during the part of the analysis with which we are concerned here, the important, dynamic interpretations were undoubtedly those given at the oral level.

His relation to his wife was profoundly disturbed by projection of the maternal imago on to her. Consciously he idealized her and thought her perfect, but he suffered from compulsive wishes to be catty and sarcastic to her, while his symptoms served the purpose of preventing her enjoying herself and compelling her to look after him. Attempts at sexual intercourse were disturbed by visual images of his mother intruding themselves on his image of his wife.

In general, the analysis of his symptoms led to three conclusions. First, the symptoms were a defence against guilt and depression about his hostility to his mother. Secondly, he was orally dependent on her. In this connexion it is significant that he had sucked his thumb all his life. This dependence expressed itself during the analysis as a dependence on his wife and on me. Thirdly, he had attempted to resolve his difficulties with his mother by identification with her. His relationships both with his wife and with me were based on a narcissistic identification. His attitude to me was that he defended himself against having any feelings about me. He took my interpretations and worked on them himself, without allowing them to become part of an object-relationship existing between us. In other words, he tried to be his own analyst.

As regards the relation of his symptoms to depression, it was very striking how circumstances, which prior to the analysis would have made him deaf or giddy, came later to make him depressed. He once made the interesting comment that depression with insight into its causes is more tolerable than symptoms. The operative phrase there was, I think, 'with insight'.

As a result of the identification with his mother passive homosexual feelings were important. Yearnings for the breast and mother were displaced on to the penis and father-figures. Wishes to look at the male genital were particularly strong, and he could remember thinking as a child that his father's penis was a sort of breast. His dominant infantile theory of sexual intercourse was undoubtedly fellatio. This displacement from breast to penis is important in the material leading up to the dream screen dream.

By a fortnight before the dream, which occurred in the tenth month of analysis, he had acquired a large measure of genuine insight into his problems and was clearly conscious of the mixture of hostility, dependence and identification that characterized his relationship with his wife. In relation to me, however, he had no conscious feelings and was clearly defending himself against the possibility of feeling dependent on me. The relatively superficial reasons for this were, first, that he feared my impending holidays, and, secondly, the homosexual implications of being dependent on a male analyst. From a deeper point of view it was due to a fear of hostility, both his own and mine. It so happened that at this time he had to go out of London for two days in the middle of the week, and, for the first time since the beginning of the analysis, he was separated from both his wife and me at the same time. His giddiness and deafness returned while he was away, and on his first night back in London he had the following dream: 'You gave me a bottle of Schnapps. The bottle was of a curious shape and had two different fluids in it. One of them was milk. I was too embarrassed by the gift to thank you.' I interpreted this dream as showing his unconscious oral dependence on me, a dependence he had been denying while he was away. This interpretation was accepted only intellectually, and the analysis turned to the question of why he had been too embarrassed to thank me.

He told me his behaviour in the dream was characteristic of him. He found it difficult to accept gifts, or, indeed, offered pleasures of any kind. This was due not so much to a sense of guilt as to a feeling that acceptance put him in the power of the donor. He was particularly frightened of being tantalized. He had the feeling that if he admitted to wanting anything it would immediately be taken away from him. In other words, he was unable to accept a 'good' external object for fear that it would turn out to be 'bad' and hostile. Experiences of being teased contributed to this fear, but fundamentally it was related to a projection of his own wishes to frustrate, as was shown by the habit, which he had at this time, of tantalizing me by telling me at the beginning of each hour that he had dreamt the previous night but could not remember the dream. In doing this he was using dreams as such to represent breasts and frustrating me In the same way as he felt his mother had frustrated him.

The unconscious oral longings for the analyst as a 'good' external object were also shown by an hallucination which he had at this time. He was in church, and while listening to the lesson he distinctly saw the reader's penis with urine flowing from it. The connexion here between urinary flow and speech— means by which the analyst gives himself to the patient—left no doubt that this experience represented an attempt at hallucinatory fulfilment of oral longings for the analyst. This interpretation was confirmed by the facility he displayed at this time in seeing resemblances to the penis in various cracks and shadows on the consulting-room wall. This hallucination, as well as others which occurred during the early part of the analysis, should really be described as a pseudo-hallucination, since it was immediately dismissed as absurd, even though it had all the vividness of a true perception.

The dream screen dream occurred at this juncture. In the light of the preceding material its meaning was fairly clear. It represented the successful fulfilment in sleep of the wish for oral union with the analyst, who was taking the role of the mother's breast (and the father's penis conceived of as a breast). This oral union was an external object-relationship, and the real importance of the dream was that it marked the shift from a narcissistic attitude of identification with an internal object to one of turning towards an external object, even though the external object still bore the projected imago of the fantasied breast. The analyst was accepted as a helping, protecting figure—'it felt as though you had taken me under your wing'—instead of his being someone who had to be kept at a distance for fear of his turning out to be threatening and dangerous.

Although from this dream we may assume an advance, the underlying fantasy of union with the mother had also an important defensive function. As described later, the establishment of an object-relationship with the analyst necessitated his using various manic mechanisms, which enabled him to deny the existence of guilt about hostility to his mother. The dream was not simply a wish-fulfilment of his oral longings; it represented in addition a defensive merging of the ego and super-ego, a process which, according to Rado (1928), 'is the faithful intrapsychic repetition of that fusing with the mother that takes place during drinking at her breast.'

The fact that the night of the dream was the best night's sleep he could ever remember having had was the result of the relinquishment of his narcissistic attitude. There was considerable material to show that sleep, of which he had an unusually great need, represented for him a defensive regression to a state of narcissism rather than a normal psycho-physiological satisfaction. He slept more the worse his symptoms were and could, indeed, fall asleep while feeling giddy. He always slept in the intrauterine posture, and when upset sucked his thumb while falling asleep. One night, when he might well have been disturbed by his wife's restlessness, he dreamt that a cat was purring—a very apt symbol for a state of narcissistic withdrawal. In just the same way as sexual intercourse is more satisfying than masturbation and feeding at the breast is more nourishing than sucking a thumb, so the change from a narcissistic orientation to an object-seeking one led to a change in the quality of his sleep and an increase in the satisfaction he derived from it. (Cf. Stone's (1947) distinction between narcissistic sleep based on 'refusal or inability to nurse at the breast' and normal sleep resulting from oral gratification.)

The experience of seeing a white sheet identical with the dream screen during the previous analytical session was not especially noted at the time, except as confirmation of the view that the screen in the dream referred to the analyst. Its theoretical significance, to which I shall return later, would seem to lie in the fact that it was a 'blank' hallucination which occurred after an hallucination with visual content and before a dream without visual content.

The fact that the dream was dreamt three or four times during the night is interesting in view of Lewin's (1948) conclusion that the repetition of dreams may refer to multiple or interrupted feeds. Another determinant was, probably, that the dream occured on a Sunday night, that is, three nights after his last session with the analyst.

The interpretation of this dream as representing the abandonment of an attitude of narcissistic identification with his mother was confirmed by the further progress of the analysis. In the same hour as he told me the dream he described a change in his feeling towards me, a change which he expressed in terms of'thinking of you as a human being for the first time'. A week later I took a fortnight's holiday, and on my return he reported that he had felt very well during my absence. This he attributed, quite correctly, to his having been able to admit missing me. He also reported two dreams which he had had during the holiday. The first was that he was his father and yet was himself too. He, or his father, had an erect penis, of which he was frightened. This clearly meant that he was sufficiently free of his maternal identification to wish to take up a masculine position, but that his fear of his mother still made such a position untenable.

In the second dream the dream screen was again visible, though this time visual elements were superimposed upon it. It consisted of 'a canvas, or perhaps a cinema screen, which was somehow also one of the walls of the consulting-room. On it were depicted all the things that I wanted to tell you when you came back from your holidays. But the only detail I can remember clearly was a submarine in dock. The water was running out of the dock and by the end of the dream the submarine was high and dry.' There were several associations. He had in fact visited a submarine a few days before, and, although it was in harbour, had feared that it might submerge while he was in it. As a child he had lived near the sea and a recurrent anxiety of his had been that he might be drowned by a tidal wave coming in from the sea. The fear he had then as a child he recognized as similar to moments of panic he had experienced in adult life when surrounded by a surging crowd. His last and most revealing association was that while attempting sexual intercourse the previous evening he had felt his mother's power over him receding like an ebbing tide. The dream was therefore a pictorial representation of liberation from his internal mother, a liberation which was not entirely welcome, for the phrase 'high and dry' referred to a feeling which another patient of mine, rather similarly placed, called 'the limbo of being neither male nor female.'

The form of this dream supports Lewm's view that the dream screen represents the breast during sleep while 'the visual elements . . . represent the psychic elements disturbing the wish for sleep'. The things that he wanted to tell me about were the things that were disturbing him during my absence, and which, if he had had the opportunity of telling to me, would have enabled his relationship to me to be maintained without frustration.

As was to be expected, the establishment of the analyst as a 'good' external object necessitated the use of the mechanism of idealization. The threat of an impending account led him to dream of me as Sir Stafford Cripps. His associations failed to establish any connexion between the Chancellor of the Exchequer and demands for money. They were concerned entirely with his indifference to worldly things and the frugality of his personal life. The analyst had to be above worldly things, like the angel that at some periods of his childhood he had imagined in his mother. Without this idealization he would have had to contend with an analyst as avaricious and demanding as, at other periods, he had felt his mother to be.

The further progress of the analysis had no direct bearing on the problem of the dream screen, though in retrospect it was clear that the period of the screen dream had been a turning point in his development. After the dream several of his symptoms ceased entirely, e.g. his attacks of giddiness and his tendency to hallucination. He lost his capacity for defensive sleep, and there was no recurrence of narcissistic defences against the transference. As foreshadowed in his dream of being his father, the analysis became increasingly concerned with genital problems. It was found that considerable genital development had, in fact, occurred, and that the early part of the analysis had been dealing with a partial regression to the oral level following traumata at the genital.

Theoretical Discussion

The material presented in the previous section can be summarized as follows: A visually blank dream of the kind described by Lewin occurred during the analysis of a patient with oral fixations. Its occurrence marked the renunciation of a state of narcissistic identification with his mother and cathexis of the analyst as an external object. This re-orientation ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 A contribution to the study of the dream screen
• 2 Some observations on a case of vertigo
• 3 On idealization, illusion, and catastrophic disillusion
• 4 Symbolism and its relationship to the primary and secondary processes
• 5 The nature and function of the analyst's communication to the patient
• 6 An enquiry into the function of words in the psychoanalytical situation
• 7 On the defensive function of schizophrenic thinking and delusion-formation
• 8 Beyond the reality principle
• 9 The analysis of a detective story
• 10 The effect of the psychoneurotic patient on his environment
• References
• Index