The use of dreams in the clinical context: Convergencies and divergencies: An Interdisciplinary proposal

Abstract

This paper aims to define some unexpected convergences and foreseeable divergences regarding the conceptualization of dreams and their use as a research tool, specifically in clinical practice with non‐neurotic patients. It includes a concise review of different lines of thought on the vicissitudes of dreams throughout the history of psychoanalysis: from their initial conception up to their use to examine transference and relational aspects in the context of a psychoanalytic process. The idea of the merely evacuative function of dreams from patients in certain diagnostic categories is discussed and compared with that of their potential communicative value. Lastly, the essay sets forth an interdisciplinary semiotic–pragmatic approach to the function of dreams and their clinical and technical use in the context of the intersubjective dynamic field. Based on the hypothesis that dreams related in the session are communicative signs, this proposal argues their significance as a symbolic matrix that generates processes of psychic semiosis. To do so, it combines certain lines of psychoanalytic thought with ideas coming from C. S. Peirce’s analytic semiotics. Clinical material is included to illustrate this viewpoint.

Key words:

• communication
• dream
• dreaming
• dynamic field
• psychic semiosis
• sign

Notes

1. Winner of the Ticho Foundation Lectureship Award, 46th IPA Congress, Chicago, 2009.

2. The limits set to the length of this paper have prevented the discussion of some current neuroscientific data obtained by non‐clinical, non‐psychoanalytic methods. Data from cognitive studies and other (metapsychological) aspects of dream activity not directly related to the themes dealt with in this paper have also been omitted.

3. Following A. Green (1990, p. 107), we may consider as patients with non‐neurotic pathology those who display a deficit in symbolization and psychic processing. Non‐neurotic structures are placed in a position that allows us to better integrate and understand neurosis and psychosis as well as other personality disorders. Such categorization also presupposes a greater stability and a lower probability of psychotic compensation than the so‐called borderline pathology. In addition, since these patients are not so far from neurosis, it is possible to “grasp the nature of the problem, as they lend themselves to deep psychoanalytic inquiry.”

4. Intersubjective positions have flourished in psychoanalytic literature in the last decades. However, for the purpose of this paper I have only focused on this pioneering vision owing to reasons offered both in this text and in a previous essay, where I explain the field theory in greater detail (Vinocur Fischbein, 2005a).

5. Freud states at the beginning of Chapter II: “[&] for ‘interpreting a dream’ means assigning a ‘meaning’ to it – that is replacing it by something which into the chain of our mental acts as a link having a validity and importance equal to the rest. As we have seen, the scientific theories leave no room for any problem of interpreting them, since in their view a dream is not a mental act at all, but a somatic process signalizing its occurrence by indications registered in the mental apparatus” (Freud, 1900, p. 96).

6. “Dreaming has taken on the task of bringing back under control of the preconscious the excitation in the Ucs. Which has been left free; in so doing, it discharges the Ucs. Excitation serves it as a safety valve and at the same time preserves the sleep of the preconscious in return for a small expenditure of waking activity” (Freud, 1900, p. 579).

7. It should be recalled here that most of Freud’s patients belonged to a certain social, cultural, and historical milieu whose discursive habits represented a very specific range of verbalization skills. These patients were the basis for quasi‐universal statements on psychoneurotic symbolized conflicts and their respective modes of signification. Such statements referred both to linguistic aspects of the expression of symptoms (memories, dreams, fantasies, jokes, word play, slips of the tongue, delusions) and to behavioral manifestations of their pathology (parapraxes, enactment of defensive organizations, repetitions in the transference) (Vinocur Fischbein, 2003).

8. M. Khan (1962) states that the dream space constitutes a specific intrapsychic structure in which certain types of experiences different from dreaming are actualized as symbolic mental creations.

9. Operational thinking is a type of thinking that duplicates things and/or actions.

10. “This description was unintelligible even to myself; but I have followed the fundamental rule of reporting a dream in the words which occurred to me as I was writing it down. The wording chosen is itself part of what is represented by the dream” (Freud, 1900, p. 455, n. 4; emphasis added).

11. A full discussion of both models (also known as analytical semiotics and structural semiotics) goes beyond the scope of this paper.

12. It is worth adding that de Saussure’s interest in signs, which arose from his language studies and his concern for the vicissitudes of linguistic signifiers, separated language from other sign systems, thus paving the way for linguistic reductionism. Even if his conceptualization of ‘language’ is considered a crucial discovery and his manuscripts reveal that he favored the distinction between linguistics of language and linguistics of speech, he did not elaborate on the latter. If Peirce’s system has been taken as a frame of reference for this paper, it is because its triadic features acknowledge slight nuances in sign analysis. Even though de Saussure was familiar with these nuances, the dyadic system of his method did not enable him to express them.

13. The Speech Act Theory has been a pragmatic development with considerable influence on psychoanalytic views on the use of language (see Forrester, 1990). I have introduced this theory because it can be fruitfully brought into relation with the Peircean process of semiosis (to be explained in the next section), insofar as illocutionary and perlocutionary acts entail an effect on their interpretants. Let us also bear in mind that Peirce defines all semiosis as an action.

14. This section and the following ones rework and expand ideas that were put forward elsewhere (Vinocur Fischbein, 2005a, 2007, 2009), shedding light on them from a linguistic pragmatics perspective. This essay specifically delves into the process of psychic semiosis and exemplifies it with a series of dreams.

15. It is implicit that the subject with whom we work in the therapy is essentially a speaking subject, and that the dream dealt with in everyday life, the one offered by the neurophysiological device, and the one recreated in the analytic session only share a relationship of homonymy.

16. This perspective has been recently reappraised by post‐structuralist thinkers (Parret, 1983).

17. According to Peirce, “A sign, or representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object. It stands for that object, not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea, which I have sometimes called the ground of the representamen” (Hartshorne and Weiss, 1931–35a, p. 228).

18. “By the phaneron I mean the collective total of all that is in any way or in any sense present to the mind, quite regardless of whether it corresponds to any real thing or not” (CP 1.284). The aim of phaneroscopy, the study of the phaneron, is to describe the features that are present in every phenomenon based on careful scrutiny of particular phenomena. It should also be noted that when selecting the word phaneroscopy (from the Greek scopeein [to view]) instead of phenomenology, Peirce gave prominence to the visual elements of experience at the expense of logos [in Greek, speech, reason].

19. “Signs are divisible by three trichotomies; first, according as the sign itself is a mere quality, is an actual existent, or is a general law; secondly, according as the relation of the sign to its object consists in the sign’s having some character in itself, or in some existential relation to that object, or in its relation to an interpretant; thirdly, according as its Interpretant represents it as a sign of possibility or as a sign of fact or a sign of reason” (CP 2.243; my italics).

20. Peirce defined semiosis as “an action, or influence, which is, or involves, a cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant, this tri‐relative influence not being in any way resolvable into actions between pairs” (CP 5.584, p. 484).

21. The immediate interpretant is the unanalyzed total effect that the sign intentionally produces or may naturally produce. It may also be understood as the process that makes it possible to interpret a sign as interpretable. The dynamic interpretant is the direct or current effect produced by a sign in an interpretive action: “It is any interpretation of a sign produced by any mind [&] The final interpretant is the effect of any rule or law that a sign has on the interpretive action” (Marafioti, 2005, p. 82).

22. For Peirce habit is a rule of action.

23. Some scholars claim that the interpretant should be clearly differentiated from the interpreter. Nevertheless, it has also been mentioned that Peirce’s writings are not free from obscurity and contradiction when he states that “the relationship of a representamen to an object is not semiotic unless this relation is conceived (the interpreter as a quality), is said/ uttered (the interpreter as existence), and is inferred (the interpreter as an idea, a thought” (Parret, 1983, p. 31).

24. Both Peirce and Freud were readers of associationistic psychologist J. Herbart, experimental psychologist G. Fechner, and idealist philosophers Schelling and Schopenhauer.

25. Among these elements were stairs, bars, bodies falling into space, savage attacks by animals, and the exclusive presence of parents and siblings (as opposed to a notable absence of other people from her external reality). P. Fonagy (2000) points out that bizarre elements in borderline patients’ dreams explain the absence of mental elaboration. They contain residues of a very early mode of self‐reflection responding to the stage of development where mental states cannot be represented yet – when a more concrete than symbolic quality predominates.

26. In Almodóvar’s film one of the main characters, a woman attorney, dates strangers, has sex with them, and stabs them with her ornamental comb during sexual climax. The final scenes show her encounter with her last lover, a wrecked bullfighter who has also murdered some female lovers – students from his tauromachy school. The lovers stage a meticulous theatrical scene for their first and last sexual intercourse. They make love and then kill each other.

27. The notion of ‘bastion’ as described by M. Baranger (2005) refers to all unyielding resistances that may endanger or cause a stoppage in the analytic process. In fact, a bastion includes elements of both participants and remains outside verbalization and working‐through.

28. From a particular psychoanalytic stance much in vogue today, this intervention may be considered as a sort of enactment on the part of the analyst. Yet, I did not communicate my association to the patient for some time. Retrospectively, I tend to think that the allusion to the movie was closer to S. and C. Botella’s notion of “working as a double,” that is, between two psychic apparatuses. This type of intervention tends to be visual, more creative (or suggestive, I would add) than interpretive, insofar as it does not point at a specific latent meaning but attempts to create signification (Botella and Botella, 1997, Chapters 3 and 5).

29. Dreaming of falling, especially in women, describes the fear of surrendering to an erotic temptation (Freud, 1900, pp. 355, 395).

30. The present triads rework earlier formulations (Vinocur Fischbein, 2005a, 2009)

31. In contrast to other occasions when she conveyed her anxiety by crying, covering her eyes, biting her lips, or wringing her hands.

32. Contrary to pleasure, which obeys the law of homeostasis evoked by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920, SE 18), jouissance transgresses this law and, in this respect, is beyond that principle (Lacan, 1973).

33. Or, performing incest and then murdering their parents.