The Dream Discourse Today

Sara Flanders

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9781138178021
• eBook ISBN: 9781134870837
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The Dream Discourse Today offers an unrivalled synoptic view of key American, British and French papers on dream analysis in clinical practice. The purpose of the book is to show the reader different, well articulated perspectives, place them in historical context, and invite comparative reading. The cumulative effect of both papers and introductions is to leave the reader with an informed sense of the range of perspectives and a confidence in the continued relevance of dream analysis to practice, as some striking convergences in the implications of thinking drawn from very different approaches becomes clear.

The Dream Discourse Today is the first historical and theoretical survey of its subject and the classic nature of the papers it includes will make it a first-class work of reference for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists of all schools, whether in practice or still training. It should be of especial interest to those who teach courses on the theory of technique, since the place of dream analysis is almost certain to be one of the central topics in such courses.

PART ONE

The psychoanalytic dream: the psychoanalytic process

Masud Khan’s paper of 1962, Chapter 1, the earliest in this collection, describes the conceptual relationship between Freud’s dream psychology and the psychoanalytical situation. He develops Bertram Lewin’s analogy of analysand and dreamer, the regression implicit in sleep and in the submission to analytic endeavour, and the opposing correspondence between the awakening process contained by the dream and the arousal caused by the stirring of the transference. Drawing on Kris’s concept of the ‘good analytic hour’, he enumerates the ego’s complex achievement in producing a ‘good’ dream, a dream which facilitates intrapsychic communication and, in treatment, analytic work. At the end of the chapter, he touches on a theme which surfaces in many of the chapters which follow, a much more primitive use of dream, both intraphysically and within the psychoanalytic process.

1

Dream psychology and the evolution of the psychoanalytic situation

M. MASUD R. KHAN

Freud’s self-analysis and the discovery of the analytic situation

Jones (1953) in his biography of Freud tells us: ‘Two important parts of Freud’s researches are intimately connected with his self-analysis: the interpretation of dreams, and his growing appreciation of infantile sexuality’ (p. 320). Kris also stressed this in his introduction to the Fliess Letters (p. 33). What has not been sufficiently pointed out is that the unique gain to the science of psychoanalysis from Freud’s self-analysis, which he undertook in the summer of 1897 and kept up for a lifetime, was the invention of the analytic situation as the therapeutic and research instrument towards the understanding and resolution of another person’s intrapsychic unconscious conflicts, which are symbolized and epitomized in his symptoms and illness. Freud’s self-analysis was conducted on two parallel lines: (a) through interpretation of his dreams; and (b) through empathy and insight into his clinical experience with patients. This latter was an old bias of Freud’s temperament. As early as 29 October 1882 he had written to his fiancée: ‘I always find it uncanny when I can’t understand someone in terms of myself (Jones 1953: 320).

Freud’s self-analysis not only gave us his monumental work on dreams and the theories of infantile sexuality as well as hypotheses on the aetiology of neuroses in infantile psychic life, but it essentially and irreversibly changed the aim of therapeutic endeavours. The invention of the analytic situation changed the goal of analytic process. As Szasz (1957) pertinently states: ‘The goal of helping the patient became subsidiary to the goal of scientific understanding.’ It was this shift in the direction and intention of Freud’s therapeutic procedure that was in time going to earn him as much hostility and criticism from his own disciples as earlier on his theories of dream-mechanisms and infantile sexuality had laid him open to from society at large. Most, if not all, of the later defections amongst his disciples (Jung, Adler, Rank, Reich, Reik, and so on) in one way or another centred round the therapist’s eagerness to help the patient at the cost of sponsoring insight and understanding. Freud himself was most acutely aware of this resistance among his followers, and with this in view, in his address to the 5th International Psycho-Analytic Congress at Budapest in 1919, he explicitly formulated the basic task of the analytic situation as being

to bring to the patient’s knowledge the unconscious, repressed impulses existing in him, and for that purpose to uncover the resistances that oppose this extension of his knowledge about himself … our hope is to achieve this by exploiting the patient’s transference to the person of the physician, so as to induce him to adopt our conviction of the inexpediency of the repressive process established in childhood and of the impossibility of conducting life on the pleasure principle. … Analytic process should be carried through, as far as is possible, under privation – in a state of abstinence. … As far as his relations with the physicians are concerned, the patient must be left with unfulfilled wishes in abundance. It is expedient to deny him precisely those satisfactions which he desires most intensely and expresses most importunately.

(Freud 1919)

For a comparison of the therapeutic aims one has only to glance at the concluding paragraph of Studies on Hysteria (Freud and Breuer 1893–5), where Freud promises the patient ‘help or improvement’ by means of a cathartic treatment’ towards transforming ‘hysterical misery into common unhappiness’ (p. 305).

If it is true that it was Freud’s self-analysis that led him to the invention of the analytic situation, then we should look more carefully for clues in that direction for a clearer understanding of the analytic situation. I hasten to add that I am not proposing a re-analysis of Freud’s subjective data. That would be not only impertinent but utterly futile. Freud has done that for us, and in Jones’s apt phrase, ‘once it is done forever’.

How hard Freud had to struggle to maintain the determination to understand the mysterious workings of his own psyche has been most vividly described by Eissler (1951):

Freud was able to lift his own repressions solely by his own efforts. … It is therefore true of Freud’s self-analysis that as a type of psychologilcal and historical event it can never be duplicated; it is a type of event which is represented only by a single occurrence unique in its kind, and incapable of being repeated by any other person. … The process of self-analysis, at the point of human history when Freud conducted it, was, so to speak, against human nature.

What enabled Freud to transform this heroic subjective experience of self-analysis (‘this analysis is harder than any other’ (Freud 1954)) into a therapeutic procedure was his genius for abstraction, which led him to recreate all the vital elements of the dreamer’s situation in the analytic setting, so that in a wakeful conscious state the person in analysis can psychically re-experience through transference-neurosis the unconscious psychic disturbances and states of arrest that are distorting his ego-functioning and affective freedom.

Furthermore, it was Freud’s most fateful discovery from his own experience of self-analysis, and from his insight into the use he had made of his relation with Fliess during this period, that this re-experience through transference-neurosis is only possible if there is another person available who, by lending himself as an object and his ego-support, can help the patient to express and work through personal conflicts to a therapeutic point of self-integration. One could almost put it that Freud’s self-analysis revealed to him the impossibility of such a self-analysis for most human beings and compelled him to create a setting and the means of a relationship where this could be achieved.

The hypothesis that I am offering towards the genetic sources of the analytic setting in terms of Freud’s self-analysis is that through the analysis of his own dreams and empathy with the clinical experiences of his patients in the hypnotic and cathartic situations of treatment, Freud intuitively recreated a physical and psychic ambience in the analytic setting which corresponds significantly to that intrapsychic state in the dreamer which is conducive to a ‘good dream’. I shall later detail the ego-aspects of this intrapsychic state.

Hypnotic situation, dream psychology and the analytic situation

The regressive incentive of the analytic situation and its relation to the hypnotic situation and sleep states has been discussed often (cf. Lewin, Fisher, Gill and Brenman, Macalpine, Fliess, and so on). Lewin, in particular, in a series of stimulating and provocative papers has discussed the bearing of the derivation of the analytic situation for the hypnotic one. He has attempted (1955) ‘to project upon the couch and the analytic situation the idea that the patient is as if somewhat asleep’ and elaborated:

genetically, the analytic situation is an altered hypnotic situation … sleep, excluded by agreement from the analytic situation, gained access to it in another form – the method of free associations … the wish to be put to sleep, which the patient brought to the hypnotic situation, has been supplanted by the wish to associate freely in the analytic situation. The patient lies down, not to sleep, but to associate. … The narcissism of sleep … coincides with narcissism on the couch. The manifest dream text coincides with the manifest analytic material. … Dream-formation is to be compared with ‘analytic-situation’ formation.

Lewin, following Rank (but judiciously) sees in this regressive repetition ‘the direct experience of the baby in the nursing situation’. Lewin pointed out, however (as had Kris), that ‘attention to the interpretation of contents and the dream world has distracted us, here too, from the problem of sleep and from a consideration of the analytic subject as a fractional dreamer or sleeper. … The patient on the couch was prima facie a neurotic person and only incidentally a dreamer.’

In psychoanalytic literature three aspects of sleep have been often discussed:

1 Sleep as a biological need (Freud (1900–1917) and the dream’s function of maintaining sleep.

2 Sleep as a regressive defence reaction in the analytic situation against aggressive, masochistic and passive impulses which threaten the ego’s equilibrium of defences (cf. Bird (1954); Ferenczi (1914); Stone (1947), etc.).

3 Regression in sleep as recapturing the ontological phases of infancy development and the infant’s primary relation to the breast (Isakower (1938); Lewin (1955), Spitz (1955), etc.).

The relation of the sleep-wish and its regressive defence derivatives to the wish for cure and ego’s cathexis of consciousness (self-awareness) have been relatively neglected. Lewin (1955), discussing the evolution of the analytic situation from the hypnotic treatment, pertinently states:

It was during the transition from hypnotic treatment to catharsis and analysis that the neurotic patient changed from being a hypnotic subject to being a confider, and the therapist pari passu became a psycho-analyst. … The magical sleep-maker became a confidant, and the analytic situation arrived in history. … The inference is that the analyst is a waker.

It is my impression that we have not, as yet, done full justice to the implications of this most significant change in the therapist’s rôle, from hynotizer to ‘the arouser’ (Lewin 1955). When Freud respected the patient’s resistances, rather than magically getting them out of the way through hypnotic sleep, he was starting a new process in the development of human consciousness, a process which bridged the split between the conscious and the unconscious. By crediting that in the patient’s ego there was more co-operativeness available for cure besides the wish to be hypnotized, and guided by his observations in self-analysis, he created the analytic situation where the patient through the analyst’s help could become just as receptive as in his sleep to dreams or as in the hypnotic state to the repressed content. To express it cryptically, whereas the rationale of the hypnotic therapy had been to induce ‘dream-states’ which the patient could then be confronted with – namely, where the patient was put to sleep in order to ‘dream’ and in the final stages to be woken up and be enabled to recall and remember ‘the dream’ of the hypnotic state – in the altered and new analytic situation the analyst helped the patient’s conscious ego in its task of reclaiming the repressed and the unconscious. Once Freud had changed the basic tool of the therapeutic process from hypnotic sleep to conscious recall, with all the attendant resistances in the ego against relaxing its repressions, the very nature of the therapeutic situation and the analyst’s rôle changed. New areas of psychic activity became available to the therapeutic process. For example, what had so far been seen only as the restricting influence of the censor in dream formation (Freud 1900) now became clinically accessible as the resistances in the patient to the analytic process. In due course this was to yield us profound insight into the pathogenic functions of the archaic and sadistic superego in severely disturbed character-neuroses.

Wakefulness, sleep and the analytic situation

Dream psychology, which has taught us so much about the unconscious processes and primitive id contents of the human psyche, has, however, left us relatively in the dark about the nature of sleep itself and its psychological meaning for the human being. The wish to go to sleep and the wish to wake up have been somewhat taken for granted as man’s natural necessities, both by the psychoanalysts and by the biologists. Here I can only briefly refer to the valuable researches of a few analysts who have given this complex and mysterious problem their attention; namely, those of Jekels (1945), Federn (1934), Grotjahn (1942) and Scott (1956). For us what is significant to point out here is the clinical fact that observations of the oscillations of sleep and wakefulness in the analytic situation have thrown some valuable light on the wish for cure and the willingness to keep awake and free-associate in the analytic situation. Clifford Scott’s contributions (1952, 1960) towards the understanding of this problem are particularly valuable, since he has extended the hypotheses of Jekels, Isakower and Federn to the direct examination of rhythms of sleep and wakefulness in the analytic situation. Scott’s hyp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One: The psychoanalytic dream: the psychoanalytic process
• Part Two: The dream controversy: is it the royal road today?
• Part Three: The dream-space
• Part Four: The adaptive ego and the dream
• Name index
• Subject index