Waking Dreams

Abstract

Although they have been infrequently reported in the literature, spontaneous visual images in therapy sessions have a long history in psychoanalysis. In this paper, I present three clinical examples in which patients experienced such visual images. These images were spontaneous in that they felt like they emerged “out of the blue,” from another self-state. The person experienced the images while knowing they were images; for this reason, they might be called “waking lucid-dreams.” These waking dreams provided a channel for the expression and communication of emotional states otherwise excluded from our relationship, from the “me–you” patterns that had prevailed at the time of the images. These images, and their potential role in personal growth, have something to “say” not only about relatedness, meaning-making, and referential activity, but also about affect regulation and mentalization.

Notes

I would like to thank Dr. Rachel Kabasakalian McKay for her helpful reading of an earlier draft of this paper.

¹Freud opens his case study of Emmy as follows: “I took on the case of a lady of about forty years of age, whose symptoms and personality interested me so greatly that I devoted a large part of my time to her and determined to do all I could for her recovery” (p. 48).

²Freud's editor noted that the case of Emmy provided “perhaps the earliest appearance of what later became the method of free association” (p. 56).

³As Laplanche and Pontalis (1973) described the fundamental rule, “the subject … gradually submits to it [i.e., the fundamental rule], he becomes committed to saying everything and only to saying it: his emotions, bodily impressions, ideas, memories—all are channeled into language” (p. 179).

⁴Listen to Bromberg's (1996/1998b) description of the “intersubjective space” between patient and analyst as the patient moves from a dissociative state of mind to a more reflective one: “A space for thinking between and about the patient and the analyst—a space uniquely relational and still uniquely individual; a space belonging to neither person alone, and yet, belonging to both and to each; a twilight space in which ‘the impossible’ becomes possible; a space in which incompatible selves, each away to its own ‘truth,’ can ‘dream’ the reality of the other without risk to its own integrity” (p. 278).

⁵ Bass (2001), who has “explore[d] the sometimes uncanny quality of unconscious experience and unconscious communication that often characterizes life in psychoanalytic relationships” (p. 683), drew my attention to the following quote from Ferenczi's clinical diary: “19 January, 1932: RN's dream. Former patient Dr. Gx forces her withered breast into RN's mouth. ‘It isn't what I need; so big, empty—no milk.’ The patient feels that this dream fragment is a combination of the unconscious contents of the psyches of the analysand and the analyst. She demands that the analyst should ‘let himself be submerged,’ even perhaps fall asleep. The analyst's associations in fact move in the direction of an episode in his infancy (at the age of one year); meanwhile the patient repeats in dream scenes horrifying events at the ages of one and a half, three, five and eleven and a half, and their interpretation. The analyst is able, for the first time, to link emotions with the above primal event and thus endow that event with the feeling of a real experience. Simultaneously, the patient succeeds in gaining insight, far more penetrating than before, into the reality of these events that have been repeated so often on an intellectual level …. It is as though two halves had combined to form a whole soul. The emotions of the analyst combine with the ideas of the analysand, and the ideas of the analyst (representational images) with the emotions of the analysand; in this way the otherwise lifeless images become events and the empty emotional tumult acquires an intellectual content” (Dupont, 1988, pp. 13–14).

⁶Freud (Breuer & Freud, 1893–1895) goes on to say, “On other occasions, however, a picture of this kind will remain obstinately before the patient's inward eye, in spite of his having described it: and this is an indication to me that he still has something important to tell me about the topic of the picture. As soon as this has been done the picture vanishes, like a ghost that has been laid” (pp. 280–281).

⁷Also, see Stern (1997, especially pp. 16–20) for the incommensurability of verbal language and “practice” (an aspect of subsymbolic experience in Bucci's theory).