Dreams Within Dreams; Books Within Books: Embedded Frames of Illusion in Psychoanalysis

Abstract

Embedded levels of illusion, common in the arts, are also frequently encountered in psychoanalytic work. Classical psychoanalysts, comparing nested frames of illusion to Prince Hamlet's play within a play, concluded that the function of the inner frame is to protect and disguise deeper truths. In this paper, I contrast this classical paradigm with more modern approaches, especially those drawing on the Winnicottian school. Through two case examples, I illustrate how a patient's opening an embedded frame of illusion (in one case a dream within a dream, in the other a book within a book) may represent a spontaneous gesture, which when adequately met by the analyst may facilitate working through a treatment impasse. In each of my case examples, the opening of the inner frame could be understood not only as protecting a deeper truth but also as the creation of a transitional, potential space in which paradox could be tolerated and play begin. After reviewing classical and Winnicottian approaches, I turn to a third interpretation of the use of the inner frame: when it functions as a mirror, a paradoxical situation is created in which inner and outer frames are blurred, so that what is experienced as most illusionary may simultaneously be experienced as most real. In this way the most private aspects of the self may be brought into the therapeutic field. In addition to my case examples, brief examples from the art of painting help to clarify these ideas.

Notes

¹In Hamlet's case, Freud considered this to have been his Oedipal striving to kill his father and marry his mother.

² Winnicott (1965) used the term spontaneous gesture to refer to the infant's creative expression, that if optimally met by the holding environment, will allow the unfolding and development of the infant's True Self.

³In other dreams, her image of me as having a porcelain face had lead to her associations that I was fragile, like her mother, or that I was delicate, which she also saw as a type of beauty.

⁴The blurring between hallucinations and dreams characteristic of psychotic patients was discussed earlier by Bion (1958), who noted that psychotic patients might lack the capacity to reflect on their dreams. Such patients, he thought, experience dreams as a type of evacuation of unwanted material; these “dreams” may be difficult to distinguish from hallucinations. Later, Bion (1962) developed a theory that true dreams require the presence of the alpha function, which converts undigested beta elements of experience into symbolic forms that can be reflected on. For a fuller discussion and development of Bion's ideas, see Odgen's (2003) paper, in which he pointed out that hallucinations represent the opposite of true dreaming.

⁵ Damasio (1999) pointed out that the brain holds within itself a model of the entire organism, including itself (p. 22). Consciousness, he believed, involves a re-representation of first-order maps onto several higher orders of metamaps, which represent, in increasing levels of abstraction, how the organism and object interact nonlinearly. Similarly, I believe that memory is a type of embedded illusion, as we frame it as “less real” than our current experience.

⁶Unfortunately, this painting was stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and has not yet been located.

⁷A small replica of Barbura's The Procuress.

⁸As Ogden (1985) suggested, the space is now expanded to include not just the symbol and the symbolized but also the interpreting subject (p. 133).

⁹As O'Flaherty indicated, such nested levels of reality twisting back on each other form what Hofstadter (1979) called a “strange loop,” a “dreamer dreaming of a dreamer who is dreaming of him”—similar to Escher's depiction of two hands drawing each other. It is only by going outside the frame of the picture that the paradox may be resolved (pp. 253–254).

¹⁰Mathematicians have studied paradoxes through set theory. One well-known mathematical paradox (known as Cantor's paradox) involves the notion of the set of all sets. This set must contain all its subsets as members; yet because the number of subsets of a set is always greater than the number of members of a set, it cannot contain all its subsets. Such paradoxes, including more complicated ones such as Russell's paradox, rocked the foundation of 19th- and early 20th-century mathematics sufficiently that mathematicians revamped the fundamental rules of mathematics to rule out discussing such entities as the set of all sets (or a set that is a member of itself). Unfortunately, this eliminated talking about some interesting types of sets (Bunch, 1982). To the extent that the set of sets is analogous to the notion of the self, 20th-century psychoanalysis followed mathematics by eliminating from its language some of the most interesting concepts due to their paradoxical nature. Kohut, when he reintroduced the notion of the self, was careful not to define it.

¹¹I use the term resistance here to represent a state of frozenness shared by both Maria and myself, rather than the traditional definition of a defense located solely in the patient.