The Sociological Interpretation of Dreams

Bernard Lahire, Helen Morrison

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781509537945
• eBook ISBN: 9781509537952
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

For Freud, dreams were the royal road to the unconscious: through the process of interpretation, the manifest and sometimes bewildering content of dreams can be traced back to the unconscious representations underlying it. But can we understand dreams in another way by considering how the unconscious is structured by our social experiences? This is hypothesis that underlies this highly original book by Bernard Lahire, who argues that dreams can be interpreted sociologically by seeing the dream as a nocturnal form of self-to-self communication. Lahire rejects Freud's view that the manifest dream content is the result of a process of censorship: as a form of self-to-self communication, the dream is the symbolic arena most completely freed from all forms of censorship. In Lahire's view, the dream is a message which can be understood only by relating it to the social world of the dreamer, and in particular to the problems that concern him or her during waking life. As a form of self-to-self communication, the dream is an intimate private diary, providing us with the elements of a profound and subtle understanding of who and what we are. Studying dreams enables us to discover our most deep-seated and hidden preoccupations, and to understand the thought processes that operate within us, beyond the reach of our volition. The study of dreams and dreaming has largely been the preserve of psychoanalysis, psychology and neuroscience. By showing how dreams are connected to the lived experience of individuals in the social world, this highly original book puts dreams and dreaming at the heart of the social sciences. It will be of great value to students and scholars in sociology, psychology and psychoanalysis and to anyone interested in the nature and meaning of dreams.

1
Advances in the Science of Dreams

Reading is a terrible infliction, imposed upon all who write. In the process everything of one’s own drains away. I often cannot manage to remember what I have that is new, and yet it is all new. The reading stretches ahead interminably, so far as I can see at present.

(Sigmund Freud, letter to Wilhelm Fliess, 5 December 1898, in The Origins of Psychoanalysis, p. 270).

The poet and mathematician Jacques Roubaud emphasised the importance, in both the arts and the sciences, of turning to tradition in order to enable genuine innovation to emerge:

The new things we are to do, he declared, have their roots far back in the past. This is a phenomenon which extends far beyond the realm of poetry and can be observed in mathematics, in science. At any given time, the mathematical community becomes fascinated by certain problems, ignoring a whole range of others, which must be returned to at a much later stage. We must therefore see the past as a future, too.… When we try to innovate, can we really be sure that we are genuinely doing so? There is no way of knowing. But when I turn my attention to the poetry of the past, it is with a view to producing something that is different from what I have written previously. As a result, I am nevertheless looking to the future.¹

Caught up in the current mode of thinking, with its emphasis on rivalries and the latest ‘wonder’ and its tendency to assume that the most recently published findings are invariably the correct ones, researchers can easily end up losing sight of the fact that significant scientific advances involve both absorbing the lessons from the past and setting their own search for knowledge within the context of a long history during the course of which many generations of scholars have learned, little by little, to differentiate between the certain, the probable, the imaginable and the impossible.

By focusing their attention on key issues and by enthusiastically embracing a wide range of existing knowledge, scholars as diverse as Marx, Durkheim, Weber or Freud have thus succeeded in making genuine progress. Yet, as Erich Fromm pointed out with a certain irony: ‘Of course if the social scientist has only trivial questions and does not turn his attention to fundamental problems, his “scientific method” achieves results sufficient for the endless papers which he needs to write in order to promote his academic career.’²

The history of scientific progress is composed of periods of specialisation, during which researchers work on specific issues but in a diffuse and uncoordinated manner (in different disciplines and in different sectors within each of those disciplines), and of periods of synthesis, where researchers join forces and discuss ideas which had hitherto been fragmented, translating into a shared language a body of significant results written in a wide range of disciplinary dialects and formulating integrative theories or synthetic models. It is within the context of this second phase that the thinking expressed in this work belongs.

And since any such synthesis requires a shared language, an emphasis on clarity is fundamental. The ability to get to the very core of problems, with the fewest detours possible, is a significant scientific challenge for the social sciences, which sometimes struggle to cast off the affectations of literary rhetoric. In a country such as France, there is all too often a tendency to confuse depth with obscurity or, in another genre, intelligence with lightness of style and verve. The penchant for theoretical mystery or for a quasi-literary style, encouraged by the leading universities, can only be explained by the aristocratic pleasure it brings to readers who feel themselves part of a chosen world in which everybody thinks they understand each other implicitly. We may, however, prefer those writers who eschew fine words and who instead favour an approach which advocates ‘of two possible words, always choose the lesser’ (Paul Valéry).

When the resolution of problems is favoured over the use of a seductive style, when the priority is to shed light on questions or to ask them more pertinently rather than to showcase writing skills or originality, then it is possible to get straight to the point. Nor does such an approach preclude writing well, but simply, ‘Elegance is not what we are trying for’ (Wittgenstein).

Armed with a knowledge of the history of scientific research, the ambition to solve a wide range of fundamental problems, a multidisciplinary curiosity, a willingness to see very different types of research brought together rather than set in opposition to each other, a scientific belief in the possibility of real progress in knowledge, and a policy of clarity in terms both of reasoning and of writing, every researcher is in a position to make genuine progress.

The dream before Freud

Dreams have long fascinated scholarly circles in the Western world, sometimes with unreasonable expectations. Scholars have sought to penetrate the mystery of dreams, starting with those of important figures (kings, chiefs, heroes, etc.), in an attempt to decipher their divine or demonic messages, or else to predict the future either of dreamers or of the world in which they live.³ From the eleventh century in the West, the dream begins to lose ‘its sacred character’ and become increasingly ‘democratised’, according to the words of the historian Jacques Le Goff,⁴ with the gradual emergence of an interest in the dreams of more lowly people which begin to be credited with meaning.⁵ Then, in the twelfth century, ‘dreams, it might be said, begin to acquire a more tangible form and are increasingly linked to the particular nature of the dreamer, to his or her physical existence and personal emotions, to the notion of sleep as a physical reality, just as much as to the influence of angels and of demons.’⁶ At the very heart of Christianity, the possibility of a psychological science of dreams begins to emerge, for not only did writers view dreams as psychological phenomena,⁷ they also enabled them to be perceived as autobiographical realities.⁸ It was not until the seventeenth century, however, and notably with the arrival of Descartes, that dreams began to be associated with the dreaming individual, and in particular with the brain and nervous system, rather than with any supernatural forces. It is this ‘physiological and individualistic paradigm’,⁹ even when it comes under criticism, which will give rise to a considerable body of scholarly research on the dream over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century.

But as early as the second half of the eighteenth century, one writer, Abbé Jérôme Richard, canon of Vézelay, a learned man and member of the Institut de France, to which he was elected in 1795 in the field of zoology, produced the first major scientific study on dreams, following in the footsteps of Descartes’ Treatise of Man (1633). If he concedes to oneirocriticism¹⁰ that a handful of rare prophets or saints might have had premonitory dreams, his argument is that, in general, dreams have no connection with the future. Often cited as a precursor by the nineteenth-century writers who were seeking to establish a science of dreams and sleep, Abbé Richard was deeply convinced that scientific knowledge could bring men happiness: ‘Would it not be contributing to their happiness to teach them the true cause of dreams and how little these concern the future?’¹¹ Moreover, in his Théorie des songes, published in 1766, he launches a scathing attack on the ‘prejudices’, ‘ineptitudes’, ‘superstitions’, ‘deceptions’ and ‘lies’ which, since time immemorial, have continued to dominate thinking on the dream. In particular, Artemidorus of Daldis is cited as being someone who has learned from ‘fortune-tellers’ the ‘art of fooling the mob’.¹²

Abbé Richard wondered in particular why God would give us access to our future in dreams which the majority of people are incapable of understanding. His intention was therefore to rid the dream of the ‘marvellous’ and the ‘supernatural’ by referring in highly Cartesian terms to the ‘fibres of the brain’ and the action of ‘animal spirits’. By distancing himself in relation to oneirocriticism, Jérôme Richard sought to secularise dreams, relocating them in the human realm. But, most importantly, his ideas pave the way towards an explanation of dreams through the mind of the dreamer who is not always attentive to what he or she produces and who does not constantly control the flow of his or her mental images:

The chaotic way in which the imagination presented all these images during sleep, and which left such a marked impression on the spirit, becomes the sole focus of attention on waking; astonishment and surprise overwhelm us; while the habit of reflecting on what has happened is enough to convince us that we have shaped these dreams ourselves without realising it, as in the case of the thousands of other natural and essential actions to which we need pay no attention, even though they are no less significant, but which are perceived, moreover, as so entirely natural that nobody would dream of seeking for the marvellous or the divine in them.¹³

Throughout the nineteenth century, gripped by the same feverish quest for scientific knowledge, many scholars undertook to note down either their own dreams, or those of people close to them, in the hope of reaching a better understanding of this essentially nocturnal symbolic production.¹⁴ More systematic and accurate¹⁵ research was conducted by French, Belgian or German writers such as Moreau de la Sarthe, Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert, Théodore Jouffroy, Antoine Ch...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Introduction: A Dream for the Social Sciences
• 1 Advances in the Science of Dreams
• 2 The Dream: An Intrinsically Social Individual Reality
• 3 Psychoanalysis and the Social Sciences
• 4 The Incorporated Past and the Unconscious
• 5 Unconscious and Involuntary Consciousness
• 6 Formal Censorship, Moral Censorship: The Double Relaxation
• 7 The Existential Situation and Dreams
• 8 Triggering Events
• 9 The Context of Sleep
• 10 The Fundamental Forms of Psychic Life
• 11 The Oneiric Processes
• 12 Variations in Forms of Expression
• 13 Elements of Methodology for a Sociology of Dreams
• Conclusion 1: A Dream without any Function
• Conclusion 2: Dreams, Will and Freedom
• Coda: The Formula for Interpreting Practices – Implications and Challenges
• References and Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement