Dream, Phantasy and Art

Hanna Segal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9781138169944
• eBook ISBN: 9781134978632
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Hanna Segal's work, especially on symbolism, aesthetics, dreams, and the exploration of psychotic thinking, has established her as an outstanding figure in psychoanalysis, particularly in psychoanalysis of the Kleinian tradition.

In Dream, Phantasy and Art she reworks her ideas on these topics and brings them vividly alive in a new integration which links them afresh to the work of Freud, Klein, and Bion. Throughout the book, the clinical illustrations the author has selected brilliantly spotlight the theory, touching the imagination, and fixing even the most difficult ideas permanently in the reader's mind. In a mutually enhancing relationship, theory and clinical example are combined, and then applied, to create the author's new and original theories of art and aesthetics.

As Betty Joseph notes in her foreword, Segal's writing, and in particular this book, does much to enrich psychoanalysis not only because of the clarity and intelligence but also because of the depth and breadth of her interests and her clinical imagination.

1
The royal road

In the New Introductory Lectures Freud says of his theory of dreams:

It occupies a special place in the history of psycho-analysis and marks the turning point; it was with it that analysis took the step from being a psychotherapeutic procedure to being a depth-psychology.

(Freud, 1933:7)

This is not surprising. Freud’s studies of neuroses revealed to him the significance and psychic meaning of symptoms. It is the study of dreams—a universal phenomenon— which opened up the understanding of the universal domain of dream thought and dream language which goes far beyond the understanding of the actual night dream. Freud came to see the analysis of dreams as the royal road to the unconscious.

Unlike many of his other theories, Freud altered but little his theory of dreams, first fully formulated in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), the book which, according to Jones, he considered his most important work.

Freud regards dreams as guardians of sleep. As we know, sleep can be disturbed by external stimuli such as a loud noise. To protect sleep, the sleeper can produce a dream in which the noise is taken up by the dream and, as it were, explained away. These are rare occasions. More regularly our sleep is disturbed by internal stimuli. Unfulfilled desires and wishes, unresolved conflicts, give rise to inner tensions which could trouble our sleep. In sleep our relation to reality is temporarily suspended. Repression is partly relaxed and regression occurs so that archaic unconscious wishes strive for expression. Motility and action are suspended and repressed desires seek expression ‘in a harmless hallucinatory experience’ (Freud 1933:16). Common speech recognizes the wishfulfilling aspect of dreams by using the same term ‘dream’ both for the day-dream (a wish-fulfilment fantasy) and the dream we have whilst asleep. But there is a fundamental difference between the two. The day-dream expresses conscious wishes— organized, rationalized, acceptable to our waking consciousness. In the night dream, on the contrary, it is precisely those wishes which have been repressed and which trouble our psychic life that seek fulfilment. Freud thought at that time that dreams are predominately (though contrary to the common belief never exclusively) of a sexual nature. St Augustine, in his confessions, complains bitterly that God should permit that he be troubled by sexual dreams. He says that it would be so easy for God to arrange it differently. Had St Augustine been familiar with psychoanalysis, he would know that the task is not so simple. One cannot overestimate the importance of repressed sexuality in dreams, though originally Freud may have underestimated the equal importance of repressed aggression. Wishes which are powerful enough and dynamic enough and yet repressed enough to call for an expression in the dream rather than in reality invariably have their roots in infantile conflicts repressed in childhood but continually active in the unconscious. ‘Dreaming is a piece of infantile mental life that has been superseded’ (Freud 1900). Only infantile wishes have the power to mobilize forces which produce the dream:

These wishes in our unconscious, ever on the alert and so to say immortal, remain one of the legendary Titans, weighed down since primeval ages by the massive bulk of the mountains which were once hurled upon them by the victorious gods and which are still shaken from time to time by the convulsion of their limbs.

(Freud 1900:553)

The dream is usually linked with some event which happened in daytime. Freud called this event a ‘day residue’. Such an event may be important enough to make it understandable that it should influence the dream. But whether important or trivial, the day residue is an event which in some way is in the patient’s mind connected with and represents some deeper unconscious conflict. In some way the day residue which triggers off the dream is similar to an event which could have triggered off the onset of a neurosis or of a particular neurotic symptom. Non-fulfilment of deep-seated wishes gives rise to inner tensions. Their fulfilment, however, would give rise to anxiety and guilt. It is not for nothing that these wishes were repressed in the first place. Freud’s basic work on dreams precedes his concept of the superego. He calls the repressing agency that forbids the fulfilment of wishes unacceptable to consciousness, the censor, or the censorship, and he describes the conflict as between the unconscious wishes striving for expression and wish-fulfilment in the dream and the censorship which forbids such fulfilment. The ego does not disappear in sleep. It must protect itself both from the tension arising out of unfulfilled desires and the anxiety and guilt that would accompany their fulfilment. Freud sees dreams as the result of a compromise between the repressed and the repressing forces—a way of bypassing the dream censorship.

A dream is produced by what Freud calls dream-work. The dreamwork converts the latent dream thoughts unacceptable to the ego even in the state of sleep into the apparently innocuous manifest dream content. The dream-work is Freud’s first description of a wider concept which is, I think, fundamental to the understanding of psycho-analysis, that is, psychic work.

Psychic dream-work aims at fulfilling the unacceptable and conflicting wishes by disguising them, and it evolves a particular mode of expression—the dream language. This is constructed by such mechanisms as condensation, displacement, indirect representation of various kinds, and symbolism. Those mechanisms Freud calls sometimes ‘agents’, sometimes ‘Werkmeisters’ (foremen, or masters), again conveying the psychic powers that create a dream.

Displacement can be of two kinds. One is the displacement of psychic values. The manifest dream may put emphasis on a dramatic and apparently important situation, but it is some insignificant detail that contains the most important latent dream thought. For instance, a patient, through a concatenation of circumstances, had a glimpse into a room in my house and he saw a print which he thought was of Venice. That night he had a long dream in which he was walking with a girl in a place which reminded him of Venice. That part of the dream led to a lot of associations, coming without much resistance, having to do with his past flirtations with girls, with fantasies about me and my holiday, and a fantasy of meeting me on holiday. But there was a detail in the dream to which he offered no spontaneous associations and which, in the dream, had no apparent emotional significance, compared with the richly evocative scene with the girl. There was somewhere in the background of his walk in the dream a concrete structure at the seaside. I asked him what this detail made him think of. Here the associations were much less pleasant. He said that he once saw at the Venice Lido remnants of German military installations. This in turn led him to associations about the German concentration camps and the extermination of Jews. That took him back to the glimpse he had of the room in which he saw the print and some books and he said that he had the thought that he ‘was trapped in a Jewish household’. He connects Jewishness with intellectual and artistic interests; and his feelings about Jewishness are ambivalent. There was a great deal in him of unconscious anti-Semitism, which consciously is rather repugnant to him. It is the insignificant detail in the dream which contained all his repressed hostility and cruel unconscious wishes, his, unacceptable to him, anti-Semitism, stimulated by the thought of my family life and the holiday he imagined me having. But in the dream it is displaced and condensed in a little detail and is ignored in associations; and there is a displacement of the importance to the more innocuous parts of the dream. He unconsciously wished that my husband and I would perish in a German concentration camp.

Another kind of displacement is the displacement of feelings or phantasies belonging to one situation on to another. A patient dreamed of an angry quarrel with a man towards whom he had no antagonism, but in the background there was the figure of another man loosely connected by a similarity of name with the first one. Towards that man he had many hostile thoughts, the expression of which would give rise to guilt, as he was much beholden to that man. An incomplete displacement of that kind is shown in the following dream.

A man dreamed that he saw a little chicken being quartered, and he heard the desperate crying of a baby or a small child. After a while he realized that the sound was coming not from the chicken but from a small child who was nearby. In this dream, the phantasied attack he had wished to make on his baby brother is displaced on to the chicken, but the displacement is not quite successful. It is a little boy who cries and the dreamer woke up in anguish.

This kind of displacement can also be seen as indirect representation: one man represents the other; the chicken represents a brother.

Condensation is an invariable feature of dreams. However short the dream, the latent thoughts that it contains range widely, and many thoughts and wishes, often contradictory ones, are contained in the dream as a whole and in the various elements of the dream. That is one of the reasons why it is difficult to report fully on the analysis of a dream, and indeed a dream can never be analysed fully in one session. In the next session the patient brings new associations and new dreams long before the analysis of the first one can be exhausted—if indeed it can ever be.

An interesting example of condensation has been shown to me in a repetition dream dreamed by Patient O, who suffered from a gastric ulcer. He has had this dream, close to a nightmare, on and off ever since he can remember. As a very small child he remembers waking up from his dream in a panic. In the dream he is completely tied to a chair in a half-lying position. From all sides he is threatened by some elongated animals with crocodile mouths.

In the course of his analysis the dream first occurred in the context of castration fears of having his penis bitten off or chopped off as a punishment for masturbating. He is being tied to a chair to immobilize his hands. It appeared again in the context of a phantasy of myself being pregnant, and anxiety about attacking the inside of my body and the babies therein. The unformed elongated shapes with crocodile mouths represented the dangerous babies inside mother. The dream kept recurring in various contexts. One day I was struck by his description of himself in the chair as being in a way bandaged to it, and that he himself was the elongated shape. I asked if he had ever been swaddled, and he told me that he was completely swaddled up to the age of three or four months. He also told me that he apparently suffered severely from abdominal colic (as it was diagnosed) at that time. It seemed to me then that the animals attacking him, the huge, angry, hungry mouths, were a projection of his own bodily perception of himself immobilized, hungry, and with a perception of his hungry mouth as enormous. Probably swaddling intensified the process of a violent projective identification of his perception of himself, as he was deprived of any kind of motor discharge by his musculature.

From the time of our work on that level, the dream stopped recurring. As the dream was formed it seems to have condensed his experiences at many different levels. In this condensation it also shows how the earliest primitive phantasies coloured, and found expression in, later phantasies and anxieties. My understanding of this dream derives, of course, not only from Freud’s concept of condensation and displacement, but also from my own experience and from later theoretical developments. For instance, I used the concept of projective identification to understand the way unconscious phantasies were expressed in the dream, and I saw the condensation in this dream as an evolution from very primitive oral and concretely psychosomatic phantasy to a later, more symbolic level.

A more complex condensation is illustrated by a tiny fragment of a much longer dream. In the fragment the patient saw the analyst accompanied by a little hairy boy or man who looked rather ridiculous and jumped around the analyst in a very subservient way. His associations were to another analysand of mine who has a nice crop of dark hair and is not very tall. The patient had some reason to feel jealous of that man, who was professionally ahead of him. He had met the man the previous day and on that occasion felt rather contemptuous of him. This is the day residue. He remembered that he thought that my husband looked rather like a gorilla and his own father had a very hairy chest. He often meets in my street a long-haired adolescent whom he describes as ‘rather a hood’ and whom he thinks is my son. He met that boy also in the vicinity of the Tavistock Clinic and wondered if he was treated there. He thought I must be a very bad mother, neglecting my children so that they needed treatment. The subservient attitude he linked with himself, always coming punctually to the sessions and feeling abjectly dependent, which is a feeling he hates.

But the litde man in the dream did not look quite human. The patient had recently seen a film about a werewolf. The figure in the dream could well be a werewolf.

So up to that point one could say that the figure in the dream represents a rival—my other analysand, my husband, and my son. They are all condensed into one figure. Past and present are equally condensed. My husband and son and his father and brother are all represented by one figure. But there are many other ideas represented in that fragment of a dream. The father and my husband, standing for him, are derided by being made small and ridiculous. There is also the fear of the rival, thus attacked—werewolves and gorillas are dangerous—but the fear is counteracted by his being made small and ridiculous. There is also the idea of my cruelty and badness, as accounting for the bad psychological state, not only of my supposed son, but of himself as my son. They both suffer from my neglect and I am blamed for their neuroses. Towards the end of the session there was a further association which revealed an even more painful repressed thought.

Whilst speaking of werewolves, he said, ‘According to the legend, you become a werewolf if you are bitten by one. I suppose the wolf is at the door now.’ He was referring to an impending holiday. So there is another layer to the dream. When the analyst, the feeding mother, goes away, he dreads hunger, felt like a biting wolf- the wolf is at the door. This bite of the wolf makes him into a werewolf. It mobilizes his oral greed and aggression, to which is added an extreme jealousy of those he thinks will stay with me—husband and son. In the dream he deals with his werewolf-like feelings by projecting them into his rivals, thus achieving the double aim of getting rid of pain and guilty feelings in himself and of attacking his rivals and making them bad. The resulting persecutory fear of his rivals now turned into werewolves is dealt with in a manic fashion by making the werewolf small and ridiculous. (He also projected into them his own smallness and the hated feeling of dependence, seen as subservient.) So one can see how one fragment of a whole long dream can condense and express a most complex psychical process.

What is the essence of what Freud so beautifully, I think, calls ‘the dream thought’? I think Freud originally had in mind simply the repressed wish, disguised in the dream. But wishes are contradictory and complex, and I think the dream thought is more than a simple wish. It is itself a complex organization of wishes and defences. The dream thought of my patient’s dream could be verbalized thus: ‘When she goes away I am bitten by hunger. She is a bad biting figure inside my tummy. I feel full of greedy and biting feelings. This is intolerable. I shall put it into the rival who is with her. But that makes me frightened of the rival. I shall try to diminish and ridicule him’, and so on. Condensation itself is not accidental. The dream thought, as I see it, is an expression of unconscious phantasy and our dream world is always with us.

In my understanding of condensation I may possibly differ from Freud. I do not think he sees condensation necessarily as a connected ‘story’. He sees it more as various strands arising possibly from different impulses and trends of thought, converging together and being expressed in one condensed element.

Apart from condensation and displacement, there are other methods of transforming the latent dream thoughts; for instance, by indirect representation. There are many ways of achieving it: by similarity, the possession of a common attribute, using a part for a whole, by opposite, by verbal connection, and many, many others. Those representations, when understood, are sometimes very amusing—wit and humour, as Freud has shown, having similar features to the dream-work. As part of a long dream a patient dreamed of a column of soldiers marching eight abreast. Rather perplexed by that part of the dream, I asked her what she thought. She answered immediately: ‘Ate a breast, of course. What else could it mean?’

A more complex example of representation by the opposite, or reversal, is shown in the dream of Patient B, with a manic character structure. The patient’s mother died in his early adolescence and he avoided the mourning by schizoid and manic defences which deeply affected his character structure. The day preceding the dream, we were talking about a quite serious car accident he had had over the break and his preference for big and powerful cars over small cars, which his wife prefers, and in which he feels too vulnerable. He would really prefer to travel in armoured cars or tanks, he feels so vulnerable.

The next day I accidentally collected him from the waiting room a couple of minutes early. He said he was very pleased and felt warmly welcomed. After a time he reluctantly admitted that his first thought was very anxious: he thought I might have left the session with the previous patient early because I was ill, and it immediately reminded him of an operation I had had several years previously, and of his mother’s unsuccessful breastcancer operation.

He then told me a dream. He was in a kind of lab. There were some chemical benches. Near him was a younger man, Bob. He slipped a little box into Bob’s locker. Then a beautiful young woman brings the prize of £500, probably a winning in a raffle—‘when your number comes up you win’. She approaches him and Bob, and up to the last minute they do not know which of them is the winner and they both feel teased. Then she gives the prize to Bob. He does not feel jealous; he feels generous, very much aware of how rich he is and how poor Bob is. Bob is not only poor; he is also unworldly and naïve. He would like, with the prize money, to buy a bottle of whisky for his wife, and he turns to the patient to ask him if he can do that, and how one proceeds to do it. The patient helpfully instructs him.

The patient’s first batch of associations started with telling me that Bob in the dream reminded him both of his brother and his eldest son (his attitude to Bob reflects very much his attitude to his younger brother) both as a child and as a young man, since his brother was idealistic and became a poor parson, while the patient made mints of money. The dream reminded him of all the ways in which he looked after his brother as a small child, particularly after his mother’s death, but also later in life, when the patient administered the family estate. The willingness with which he gave the prize made him think of his elder son giving a family party now and he, the patient, in such a situation feeling that he is giving way as paterfamilias.

The sum of £500 he did not link with anything. I made the comment that everybody in the dream was younger than himself, but he reminded me that a young woman could well stand for his mother since his mother died young. And this led him to another batch of associations. He remembered that his daughter, about whom he is always troubled, is now approaching the age at which his mother died, and it is also the time of the year close to the time his mother died. This immediately drew my attention to the importance of reversal in the dream. What he was concerned with was not his lucky number but his unlucky number. His mother’s number was up prematurely, it was unlucky for him, and he has been recently preoccupied with his vulnerability and his fear of death, stimulated by the car accident. Also his son’s growing up could be felt by him as his number coming up.

Once alerted to the importance of the reversal, we could see that every element in the dream is reversed. The woman who gives the prize is older than he (his mother), not younger; he feels not rich but poverty-stricken, and this refers to two situations: first that his brother, of whom he is acutely jealous, was born and got the prize from mother (the little box) and later, when his mother died, he became an object of special care and attention from his father. In the dream the patient also feels generous and benevolent to his brother, which he would wish to be, but in psychic reality he resented bitterly both the early care his brother got from mother and the extra attention he got from father and the family after mother’s death, whilst my patient’s needs were completely ignored and he was expected to look after his brother. He also at the time blamed his brother for her death, since some people attributed her breast cancer to his little brother having bitten the breast when a baby.

After some bringing together of the underlying experience of the dream, represented in such a reversed fashion, he remembered that he did in fact inherit a little box from his mother but he did not give it to his brother. We then got an association to the £500. He had a bill for £500 for the urgent repairs to his car that had been smashed in the accident. He also remembered that for more than a week he forgot to pay my bill. So the dream has to do with urgent anxieties and needs of repair, and in contrast to the apparent generosity of the dream, a remaining reluctance to pay my...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Royal Road
• 2 Phantasy
• 3 Symbolism
• 4 Mental Space and Elements of Symbolism
• 5 The Dream and the Ego
• 6 Freud and Art
• 7 Art and the Depressive Position
• 8 Imagination, Play and Art
• Bibliography