The Necessary Dream

New Theories and Techniques of Interpretation in Psychoanalysis

Giuseppe Civitarese

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367102326
• eBook ISBN: 9780429921544
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

After a hundred years of psychoanalysis, what has the psychoanalytic interpretation of dreams now become? Are what Simic calls "the films of our lives" still the royal road to the unconscious or do we now have a different concept both of dreams and of the unconscious? What is the meaning of dreams in the analytic dialogue? Do they still have a key role to play in clinical practice or not? These are just some of the questions that this book seeks to answer. Nowadays psychoanalysts and psychotherapists do not work so much on dreams as with dreams, preferring to emphasise their function of transformation and symbolic creation, rather than decipher their obscure messages. Dreaming is the way in which we give personal meaning to experience and expand our unconscious. As such, it is a necessary activity which, as Bion says, takes place both in sleep and in waking.

Chapter One
Dark contemplation^*

Traumfabrik

The world, on the contrary, has once more become “infinite” to us: in so far we cannot dismiss the possibility that it contains infinite interpretations. Once more the great horror seizes us—but who would desire forthwith to deify once more this monster of an unknown world in the old fashion?

—Friedrich W. Nietzsche, The Gay Science

The space of dreams is a private and inaccessible sanctuary. When dealing with dreams we always and only have to do with stories—that is, with words, and never with images. One way of remedying this lacuna is to borrow images from the cinema. One traditional interpretation of the cinema is the idea that it is a “dream factory” (Traumfabrik) (Ehrenburg, 1931), or vice versa, that dreams are a cinema of the mind.¹ Film images are different from dream images in that we can contemplate them together. For that matter, curiously, while in novels I find almost all dreams annoying—perhaps because I feel them to be artificial—I cannot say the same about dreams in films. This is because when we watch a movie we are already dreaming, we are already inside the screen. The images are more evocative and unsaturated than words, they are less abstract. They seem to be endowed with a power words do not possess. They are closer to the deep, bodily bedrock of our sense of ourselves, and maybe that is why they excite us more.

This is why it is always rather frustrating to talk about dreams since from the very first retelling of a dream its vibrant hallucinatory quality is reduced to a matter of words and one loses sight of the thing itself. And this is not even the first transformation of the dreamed dream because recollection organises the memory of the dream experience even before it is verbalised. Without falling into the trap of some naive identification between dream visions and film visions, which are obviously artistic products, we expect films to render something of this experience. Like dream images, the images of films are “appearance, a distant image of the truth. They are all connected to the idea of pretending something that is not there, and do not enjoy […] any transference from the reality of things to their reproduction” (Bertetto, 2007, p. 16). In this pretence, film and dream are both “subject to Freud’s ‘considerations of representability’” (Albano, 2004, p. 11). As Lou Andreas-Salomé already observed in 1913, cinematic technique is “the only one which permits the rapid succession of pictures which approximates our own imaginative faculty; it may even be said to imitate its erratic ways” (1987, p. 101). This view is echoed today by, among others, Damasio:

Movies are the closest external representation of the prevailing storytelling that goes on in our minds. What goes on within each shot, the different framing of a subject that the movement of the camera can accomplish, what goes on in the transition of shots achieved by editing, and what goes on in the narrative constructed by a particular juxtaposition of shots is comparable in some respects to what is going on in the mind, thanks to the machinery in charge of making visual and auditory images, and to devices such as the many levels of attention and working memory. (1999, p. 188)

It is no accident that in Italian when we want to express the idea of fantasising or daydreaming we use the expression “farsi un film” (“making a film inside your own head”), and not “fare teatro”. Films are more immersive and mesmerising than plays. The term “fare teatro” (being melodramatic) is used instead to refer to histrionic behaviour. To a much greater extent than theatre, movies regularly enter the narratives and associations of patients and analysts. They shape our imagination and undoubtedly enrich our modern mythologies.

The infinite world

Films and dreams are works of darkness. In the images we see projected on to the movie screen we have the systematic alternation of lit frames of exposed film and black frames. Moving pictures are fake, contrived, already divided at their origin, discontinuous, constructed, not at all natural. Darkness is intrinsic to watching the film. Blackness is rooted at the very heart of the visible, the element that makes it possible. The manufacturing process of a film is a concrete metaphor of the way in which we falsify or perceptually construct the real. All the tricks and special effects—the lights, lenses, different camera distances, and so on—suggest the “manufacture” of reality by the mind. Editing a film is equivalent to dream-work and then also to α dream-work, Bion’s first name for the α function, which for him is also active while we are awake.

Films and dreams are born from the darkness of sleep and both are simulacra of reality. Dreamer and spectator both experience a state of immobility, passivity, of relative closure to other sensory channels, and live through an experience where the focus is on images. They create the meaning of the dream and the film only at that moment of waking up, which is repeated ad infinitum, when they again move from a form of primary consciousness to full self-consciousness, and thus realise the fiction of the frame, of the margins of experience. Letting themselves go in a dizzying back-and-forth movement between multiple levels of reality, they play the highly serious game of participation and distance on which self-consciousness is founded. We are reflected on the cinema screen as on the dream screen. Both cinema and dream confront the subject with the crisis of naive realism. Descartes knew all about this—the idea that the experience of the dream as a subversion of the status of the subject can only be opposed by faith in the infinite goodness of a transcendent entity.

Films have a strong illusionistic quality; dreams are indeed even hallucinatory. While on the one hand, they both produce intense involvement, on the other, they demystify reality: they show its illusory face, leading straight to the as if of perception in wakefulness. Indeed, what films and dreams have in common is artifice, pretence, arbitrariness. This is why they are able to go beyond the “realistic” illustration of reality, to get closer to reality.

Activity and passivity are two differing but equally present aspects of both dream and film experience. The dream is active, because there is an ego who is both director and producer, who sets up a scene; but it is also passive, because there is a self that suffers the vicissitudes of a plot that is constantly new and surprising (Bollas, 1987).

As at the cinema, we can regard the dream as an aesthetic object. The wonder we experience during the dream as an aesthetic experience adds to what we gain from its value as a revelation, from its traditional receptive divinatory side—or, to put it in Vitale’s terms (2005), from its apocalyptic character.¹

Dreams are the most intimate revelations by which we come to know about ourselves, but, also, the images we receive passively at the cinema (and perceptions in general) are the object of identifications and transferences, which we use to construct them actively and make them “personal” or significant.

Not only film and dream, but also the “dream of the session” is a work of darkness. The declaredly artificial setting of analysis borrows the fictionality of the dream to decentre the subject, to show the subject that the ego is not master in its own house, that there is an unbridgeable gap between words and things, and that reality is only an effect of reality (Barthes, 1984). Just as when you see a film at the cinema the lights are turned off, within the perimeter of this space, so as to see better in a dream, analysts invite their patients to close their eyes.

We can only see if we blind ourselves artificially. For Saint John of the Cross, in a sort of “dark contemplation”, the closer the soul comes to God (an approach which could be translated in Bion’s terms as “becoming O”, or philosophically as thinking Being, the real), the more it sees the darkness surrounding it. The more it is sheltered in the dark, the better it can proceed safely. By analogy, dreams and films, in short, can be seen as forms of contemplation of the divine understood as the real. They can live alone in the darkness, but precisely for this reason they reveal the darkness that is in the light, the black frames that alternate with the exposed frames, making for a vision of the world that is not overexposed.

Dreams are dark, and hence they need to be interpreted, just as the sleep that encloses them is dark; but, in fact, they are also contemplation. Etymologically the word comes from cum and templum, where tem-plum stands for the space in the sky within which the augur observed the flight of birds. It was later extended to mean fixing one’s gaze or thinking about something that arouses wonder or reverence. This is why the expression “dark contemplation” gives the idea of the state of enchanted receptivity in which we find ourselves when we dream, or when we dream at the movies because we are fully absorbed. After all, from where else if not from the mother’s body as real, from our “first home”, must we extricate ourselves in order to become human, while at the same time always yearning to rejoin it?

You are requested to close the eyes (or an eye)

Dreams partake of a non-logic, they are outside of any economy of usefulness. They are mysterious, shadowy, enigmatic. They appear fragmented, impalpable, elusive. They are like the theatre of the absurd, a one-man show for only one spectator. They unfold in the digressive and purposeless manner of conversation and with the disinterestedness of contemplation, wonder, and sensual aura. The dream is solitary, but it is still a dialogue with someone because at birth the self develops in a social dimension, before the unconscious becomes a linguistic unconscious and there is a glimmer of self-awareness.

The dream is made up of figures, images that do not tell the truth as such but show it, approximating to it, making it obliquely visible. Dream images are indefinable, they belong more to the order of sense rather than meaning. This is why they resist the grip of language. In terms of visionary quality, syncretic functioning, and constitutive ambiguity, perhaps only film and poetry are able to render the dream in some way.

The dream ferries us between worlds. It is the metaleptic device of choice for crossing borders, potentially also the most feared. It is an ongoing conversation with the shadows of this radically different world, each time a nocturnal nekyia, as Borges emphasises in poems and stories dedicated to the dream, and Foucault too in his introduction to Binswanger’s Dream and Existence: “In the depth of his dream what man encounters is his death” (1994, p. 54). Dreaming is not acting, but contemplating an afterlife of consciousness, transcending the waking self, overcoming the basic splitting of the ego. You discover a duality, a separate and illusory reality. You sense the existence of a distant extraneous world where you can get in touch with reality, “O” (Bion), the thing (das Ding), and return to a sort of “aquatic communion” with the cosmos (ibid., p. 36). In the modern age, psychoanalysis gives back to rationality the space of this transcendence, the unconscious, as the possibility for consciousness that has become unhappy, as well as infinite, to be reconciled in a secular sense with one’s own gods, thus making it possible for the subject to acquire a true self.

Freud considers the death of one’s father to be the most important event in a person’s life. In his case, it gave him the impetus to self-analysis and the writing of The Interpretation of Dreams. The night before his father’s funeral, or, according to the letter to Fliess dated 2 November 1896 (Masson, 1985, p. 202), the day after, he dreams of entering into a barber’s shop and reading a printed notice, similar to those found in railway station waiting rooms, with the words “‘You are requested to close the eyes’ or, ‘You are requested to close an eye’” (Freud, 1900, p. 317). There is a precise context for this dream. His family is unhappy. They accuse him of not having organised the funeral properly. He had decided on a service that was too simple. What’s more, he arrives late at the ceremony because he has been to the barber’s.

Freud presents this dream—John Huston has provided a fascinating film version in his Freud: The Secret Passion (1962)—as a failed dream. The dream-work had failed to create either a unitary text of the dream thoughts or an ambiguous text. To us this “failure” appears instead as the glowing core of the dream, as the expression of Freud’s painful emotional ambivalence towards his father. The dream alludes to the custom of the son closing the eyes of the deceased, but it is as if Freud were asking him, since he has survived him and senses the arrival of an unconscious feeling of guilt, to forgive him, to be lenient, in short, to turn a blind eye; but also, to close his eyes and not come back to haunt him as a ghost.

Now, “You are requested to close the eyes (or an eye)”, from being the inaugural moment of Freud’s self-analysis and of psychoanalysis, becomes the moment that marks the start of each analysis. We ask patients to free associate, to dream, to set aside external reality and to focus on psychic reality. The analyst too turns a blind eye because he forgoes any judgemental attitude. And he closes his eyes. Analysis consists in an exchange of states of reverie, in the creation of a shared dream space in which the communication between one unconscious and another takes place in ideal conditions.

Through the intuition of the unconscious movements of the relationship, the analyst builds new symbolic forms to help the analysand express hitherto unthinkable emotions, to make the superego less ruthless, and thus to be more fully human. The assumption behind this approach is that when a patient enters analysis, he loses his mind (Ogden, 2009) or, in other words, enters an intermediate psychological area, or one shared with the analyst. The way in which each generates the meanings of his or her own experience is affected by the presence of the other. What is created is an unconscious emotional field that the couple share. In short, for a mind to develop, when it is born, or to resume psychic growth that in some areas may have been arrested, there have to be at least two people.

The very device of analysis (an unprecedented form of relationship, a new way of being human that was invented by Freud) is therefore an example of voluntary blindness, like turning off the lights to focus on the theatre of the inner life or the phantasmagoria of the cinema of dreams. In one of his sonnets Shakespeare speaks of “darkly bright” eyes, “bright in the dark directed”, that contemplate dream images, and it seems to me the best definition possible that metonymically can be given of the visions of the dream and of the dream itself. Similarly, in a famous passage in a letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé, who was also a friend of Nietzsche and Rilke, Freud (Freud, E. L., 1961) writes that when he wants to solve a problem in his work, he needs to project a beam of darkness on to the problem. And luminous mist (“neblina luminosa”) is the oxymoronic expression that Borges uses (2010, p. 275) in a poem when speaking of his blindness, which reduces “all things to a single thing/with neither form nor colour. An idea, almost”.

Bion also expressed this very same need in a new formulation that is both fascinating and scandalous: the analyst must listen “without memory or desire”. What he really means is that the analyst must allow memory our desire to visit him as in a dream, in his reveries, and only after having passed through the unconscious. This is nothing other than a radical version of Freud’s idea of maintaining “evenly suspended attention”. Bion links this suggestion not only to the hyperbolic recourse to the practice of systematic doubt as theorised by Descartes, but also to the thinking of Saint John of the Cross (who wrote: “As I rose to higher reaches/Dazzled, blinded was my vision,/And in an utter darkness won/The hardest of my victories”; Brenan, 1975, p. 175). We proceed with safety, in short, only under the cover of darkness (“In the midst of this darkness, the soul is illuminated and the light shines forth upon the darkness”; St. John of the Cross, 2005, p. 103).

The basic juxtaposition, which is modelled on the traditional opposition between reason and passion, is between knowing (K/knowledge) the real and becoming the real (“O” as origin or zero), between using arid abstractions and achieving a form of disciplined intuition; between assuming oneself and the other as given human beings and focusing instead on a dialectical view of self-with-other. In the consulting room this means between understanding things about the other, in a kind of translation that often becomes mechanical, detached, and lifeless, and becoming “the other” and participating in dreaming his undreamed dreams. This is what Ogden (2009) metaphorically called night terrors (in the sphere of psychotic pathology) or, if things are working better, interrupted dreams, nightmares (in the non-psychotic sphere). Whatever happens, analyst and patient will share an emotional experience which will inevitably transform both.

In psychoanalysis, darkness also corresponds to the systematic exercise of doubt, a scepticism which, however, with Roland Barthes I would call “sweet.” In his seminar on Le neutre, he quotes an old Pyrrhonian definition according to which sweetness is the ultimate iteration of scepticism (“la douceur est le dernier mot du scepticisme”; 2002, p. 66), which I like to interpret as not imposing oneself on the other in a dogmatic way and as the expression of an ethic of hospitality. But why do we need scepticism? Because as analysts, from Freud onwards, we are painfully aware of the fact that we have no direct or privileged access to the truth and that all we ca...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER ONE Dark contemplation
• CHAPTER TWO Dream fictions
• CHAPTER THREE The Cell and the cruel/painful world of Carl Stargher
• CHAPTER FOUR The inability to dream in They and Dark City
• CHAPTER FIVE The dream as an aesthetic object
• CHAPTER SIX Losing your mind, finding your mind
• CHAPTER SEVEN Reverie, or how to capture a killer (-content)
• CHAPTER EIGHT Dreams of dreams
• CHAPTER NINE Are dreams still the guardians of sleep?
• FILMOGRAPHY
• REFERENCES
• INDEX