This Art of Psychoanalysis

Dreaming Undreamt Dreams and Interrupted Cries

Thomas H Ogden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134192250
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy Counselling
• Index: Psychology

Winner of the 2010 Haskell Norman Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Psychoanalysis!

Why is dreaming the mind's single most important psychoanalytic activity?

This Art of Psychoanalysis offers a unique perspective on psychoanalysis that features a new way of conceptualizing the role of dreaming in human psychology.

Thomas Ogden's thinking has been at the cutting edge of psychoanalysis for more than 25 years. In this volume, he builds on the work of Freud, Klein, Winnicott, and Bion and explores the idea that human psychopathology is a manifestation of a breakdown of the individual's capacity to dream his experience. The investigation into the role of the analyst in participating psychologically in the patient's dreaming is illustrated throughout with elegant and absorbing accounts of clinical work, providing a fascinating insight into the analyst's experience. Subjects covered include:

• a new reading of the origins of object relations theory
• on holding and containing, being and dreaming
• on psychoanalytic writing.

This engaging book succeeds in conveying not just a set of techniques but a way of being with patients that is humane and compassionate. It will be of great interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and other mental health professionals.

1
This art of psychoanalysis:

dreaming undreamt dreams and interrupted cries

I

It is the art of psychoanalysis in the making, a process inventing itself as it goes, that is the subject of this chapter. Psychoanalysis is a lived emotional experience. As such, it cannot be translated, transcribed, recorded, explained, understood or told in words. It is what it is. Nevertheless, I believe it is possible to say something about that lived experience that is of value in thinking about aspects of what it is that happens between analysts and their patients when they are engaged in the work of psychoanalysis.

I find it useful in my own thinking – which often occurs in the act of writing – to limit myself at first to using as few words as possible in an effort to capture essences of meaning. It is my experience that in psychoanalytic writing, as in poetry, a concentration of words and meaning draws on the power of language to suggest what it cannot say. In this chapter I begin by offering a highly condensed statement – the analytic process, as I conceive of it – and then go on to discuss more fully, that densely stated set of ideas. Since each element of my conception of psychoanalysis is inseparable from the others, there are many instances in this chapter where I double back on, or jump ahead of the initial sequential statement. (Perhaps this reflects something of the nature of the movement of the analytic experience itself.) I conclude by presenting a detailed account of an experience in which the patient and I were able to think, and speak, and dream (formerly) undreamt and interrupted dreams.

II

A person consults a psychoanalyst because he is in emotional pain, which unbeknownst to him, he is either unable to dream (i.e. unable to do unconscious psychological work) or is so disturbed by what he is dreaming that his dreaming is disrupted.To the extent that he is unable to dream his emotional experience, the individual is unable to change, or to grow, or to become anything other than who he has been.The patient and analyst engage in an experiment within the terms of the psychoanalytic situation that is designed to generate conditions in which the analysand (with the analyst’s participation) may become better able to dream his undreamt and interrupted dreams. The dreams dreamt by the patient and analyst are at the same time their own dreams (and reveries) and those of a third subject who is both and neither patient and analyst.

In the course of participating in dreaming the patient’s undreamt and interrupted dreams, the analyst gets to know the patient in a way and at a depth that may allow him to say something to the patient that is true to the conscious and unconscious emotional experience that is occurring in the analytic relationship at a given moment. What the analyst says must be utilizable by the patient for purposes of conscious and unconscious psychological work, i.e., for dreaming his own experience, thereby dreaming himself more fully into existence.¹

III

Before I attempt to “unpack” the preceding statement, two sets of introductory comments are necessary: the first addresses the theoretical context for the discussion that follows; the second addresses a pair of metaphors for the psychic states in which patients come to analysis and with which they struggle during analysis.

An essential part of the theoretical background for the way I conceptualize the practice of psychoanalysis derives from (my interpretation of) Bion’s theory of dreaming and of not being able to dream. (I have previously discussed this aspect of Bion’s work [Ogden, 2003a] and will only very briefly summarize the relevant aspects of that discussion here.)

Bion (1962a) introduced the term “alpha-function” to refer to the as yet unknown set of mental functions which together transform raw “sense-impressions related to an emotional experience” (p.17), which he terms “beta-elements,” into “alpha-elements.” Beta-elements – unprocessed sense impressions – are unlinkable with one another and consequently cannot be utilized for thinking, dreaming or storage as memory. In contrast, alpha-elements are elements of experience that can be linked with one another in the process of conscious and unconscious thinking and dreaming (both while we are awake and asleep). For Bion,

Failure of alpha-function means the patient cannot dream and therefore cannot sleep. [Inasmuch as] alpha-function makes the sense impressions of the emotional experience available for conscious [thought] and dream-thought, the patient who cannot dream cannot go to sleep and cannot wake up. Hence the peculiar condition seen clinically when the psychotic patient behaves as if he were in precisely this state.

(1962a, pp. 6–7)

There are a number of thoughts here that are essential to the conception of psychoanalysis that I am presenting. Dreaming is an ongoing process occurring in both sleep and in unconscious waking life. If a person is incapable of transforming raw sense impressions into unconscious elements of experience that can be linked, he cannot generate unconscious dream-thoughts and consequently cannot dream (either in sleep or in unconscious waking life). The experience of raw sense impressions (beta-elements) in sleep is no different from the experience of beta-elements in waking life. Hence, the individual “cannot go to sleep and cannot wake up” (Bion, 1962a, p. 7), i.e. he cannot differentiate being asleep and being awake, perceiving and hallucinating, external reality and internal reality.

Conversely, not all psychic events occurring in sleep (even visual imagistic events) warrant the name dream. Psychological events occurring in sleep that resemble dreaming, but are not dreams, include “dreams” for which neither patient nor analyst is able to generate any associations, hallucinations in sleep, dreams consisting of a single imageless feeling state, the unchanging dreams of post-traumatic patients and (as will be discussed) night terrors.These “dreams” that are not dreams, involve no unconscious psychological work, nothing of the work of dreaming.

IV

The second of the two sets of comments that are required prior to considering my conception of doing psychoanalysis concerns the phenomena of nightmares and night terrors. I find that these two disturbances of sleep serve both as examples of, and metaphors for, two very broad categories of psychological functioning.Taken together, night terrors and nightmares, as I understand them, are emblematic of the stuff that the full range of human psychopathology is made of.

Nightmares are “bad dreams”; night terrors are “dreams” that are not dreams. Night terrors differ from nightmares not only in terms of phenomenology and psychological function, but also in terms of their neurophysiology and the brain wave activity associated with them.²

The child³ having a night terror “awakens” in great fear, but does not recognize the parent who has been awakened by his cries and has come to comfort him.The child eventually calms and without discernible fear “returns to sleep.” On “awakening” the next morning, the child has little or no recollection of the night terror or of having been comforted by his parent. In the rare event that a child is able to remember anything at all of the night terror, it is a single image such as being chased or of “something sitting on me” (Hartmann, 1984, p. 18). The child does not evidence any fear in going to sleep the subsequent night. There is seemingly no conscious or unconscious memory of the experience. Both from a psychoanalytic point of view and from the point of view of brain wave activity, the person having a night terror does not wake up from the experience nor does he fall back to sleep after being calmed (Daws, 1989). A person having night terrors is unable to view them from the perspective of waking life. In Bion’s terms, night terrors are constituted of raw sense impressions related to emotional experience (beta-elements), which cannot be linked in the process of dreaming, thinking or storage as memory. The child having night terrors can only genuinely wake up when he is able to dream his undreamt dream.

In contrast, a nightmare is an actual dream (which occurs in REM sleep) that “awakens the person with a scared feeling” (Hartmann, 1984, p. 10, emphasis added). On awakening, the dreamer is able immediately, or within a relatively short period of time, to differentiate between being awake and being asleep, perceiving and dreaming, internal reality and external reality. Consequently, the individual is often able to remember the manifest content of the nightmare on waking and able to think and talk about it.The child who has been awoken by a nightmare is able to recognize the person who is comforting him, and, because he can remember having had a nightmare, is afraid to go back to sleep that night, and commonly for weeks or months afterwards.

In sum, a nightmare is quite different from a night terror. The former is a dream in which the individual’s emotional pain is subjected (to a significant degree) to unconscious psychological work that issues in psychological growth. However, that dreaming is disrupted at a point where the individual’s capacity for generating dream-thoughts and dreaming them is overwhelmed by the disturbing effects of the emotional experience being dreamt. A night terror is not a dream; no dream-thoughts are generated; no psychological work is done; nothing changes as a consequence of the psychic event.

V

With Bion’s conception of dreaming as a theoretical context and the phenomena of nightmares and night terrors as metaphors for two broad categories of psychological functioning, it is now possible to begin systematically to scrutinize the elements of the compact statement I made earlier regarding my conception of psychoanalysis.

To begin at the beginning: A person consults a psychoanalyst because he is in emotional pain, which unbeknownst to him, he is either unable to dream (i.e., unable to do unconscious psychological work) or is so disturbed by what he is dreaming that his dreaming is disrupted.To the extent that he is unable to dream his emotional experience, the individual is unable to change, or to grow, or to become anything other than who he has been.

Some patients who consult an analyst might be thought of as suffering from (metaphorical) night terrors.Without being aware of it, they are seeking help in dreaming their undreamt and undreamable experience. The undreamt dreams of such patients persist unchanged as split-off pockets (or broad sectors) of psychosis (Bion, 1962a) or as aspects of the personality in which experience is foreclosed from psychological elaboration. Among the disorders characterized by such foreclosure are the psychosomatic disorders and severe perversions (de M’Uzan, 1984); autistic encapsulation in bodily sensation (Tustin, 1981); “dis-affected” states (McDougall, 1984) in which patients are unable to “read” their emotions and bodily sensations; and the schizophrenic state of “non-experience” (Ogden, 1982) where the chronic schizophrenic patient attacks his own capacity for attributing meaning to experience thus rendering emotional experiences interchangeable with one another. In disorders involving psychic foreclosure, the patient’s thinking is, to a very large degree, of an operational sort (de M’Uzan, 1984).

Other patients who consult an analyst might be thought of as individuals suffering from (metaphorical) nightmares, that is, from dreams that are so frightening that they interrupt the psychological work entailed in dreaming both while asleep and in unconscious waking dreaming. (Frost’s [1928] phrase “interrupted cry” from his poem, “Acquainted with the night,” seems particularly apt in describing a nightmare.⁴) The patient awaking from a nightmare has reached the limits of his capacity for dreaming on his own. He needs the mind of another person – “one acquainted with the night” – to help him dream the yet to be dreamt aspect of his nightmare. (A “yet to be dreamt dream” is a neurotic or other type of non-psychotic phenomenon; an undreamable dream is a psychotic phenomenon or one associated with psychic foreclosure.) The neurotic symptoms manifested by patients with interrupted dreaming represent static stand-ins for the emotional experience that the patient is unable to dream.

The analyst to whom either of these broad categories of people goes for help in dreaming their metaphorical night terrors and nightmares must possess the capacity for reverie, i.e., the capacity to sustain over long periods of time a psychological state of receptivity to the patient’s undreamt and interrupted dreams as they are lived out in the transference–countertransference. The analyst’s reveries are central to the analytic process in that they constitute a critical avenue through which the analyst participates in dreaming the dreams that the patient is unable to dream on his own.⁵

VI

The patient and analyst engage in an experiment within the terms of the psychoanalytic situation that is designed to generate conditions in which the analysand (with the analyst’s participation) may become better able to dream his undreamt and interrupted dreams.The dreams dreamt by the patient and analyst are at the same time their own dreams (and reveries) and those of a third subject who is both and neither patient and analyst.

The experiment that is psychoanalysis is founded upon a paradox. Psychoanalysis is an evolving set of ideas and principles of technique – more a bundle of sticks than a seamless whole – which have been developed over the course of the past century; and yet, at the same time, it is the analyst’s responsibility to reinvent psychoanalysis for each patient and continue to reinvent it throughout the course of the analysis. Any mother or father who has had more than one child has learned (with a combination of shock and delight) that each new infant seems to be only a distant relative of his or her older sibling(s). A mother and father must reinvent what it is to be a mother and father with each child and must continue to do so in each phase of the life of the child and the family. Similarly, the analyst must learn anew how to be an analyst with each new patient and in each new session.

While I view psychoanalysis as an experiment, I am not suggesting that patient and analyst are free to do anything they like; rather, they are free to do psychoanalytic work in a way that reflects who they are individually and together qua analyst and analysand.That is, they are not inventing a love relationship or a friendship or a religious experience; they are inventing an analytic relationship which has its own psychotherapeutic aims, role definitions, responsibilities, value system, and so on.

Though we cannot predict the nature of the emotional experience that will be generated in the work with a person who consults...