Interpreting Dreams and Interpreting the Dream Process

A Personal Experience:

This personal experience is not a lesson that others could benefit from. It just explains my divergence from what is commonly agreed upon in the psychoanalytic circles: interpreting psychical issues, pathological formations, unconscious material, matters related to transference, etc. I followed that model for the first three decades of my involvement in psychoanalysis (1957\58- 1989\1990). In my learning and training, practicing and teaching & supervising, and in my writings in psychoanalysis my main orientation was about dealing with psychical things. However, I did everything possible to adhere to the classical conception of clinical practice: deducing the unconscious from the conscious, interpreting the unconscious, and reconstructing the past in light of the new interpretations. With time, I became increasingly frustrated and disappointed in my specialty of psychoanalysis because it did not correspond to what the patients wanted to be done in treating them. The candidates, indirectly (sometimes directly), wanted to learn about the psychical formations they were dealing with more than being guided in the process of practice by putting the emphasis on understanding the terminology used in their list of readings. In teaching, the candidates were learning the same thing for four years from six or seven TAs. My frustration tempted me many times to go back full time to clinical psychology and psychodiagnostics.

Two remarks set me free to learn and do analysis the way I am advocating now. I met Izsak Ramzi in Helsinki and spent an afternoon with him (he comes from Egypt and I just heard of him). He suggested that I move my membership to the “American”. When I expressed some reservations because of its heavy Ego Psychology leanings he asked me few questions about my objections to ego psychology (despite my admiration of a few of the giants of ego psychology then) and he replied: ‘it is good that you know what you do not like in Ego Psychology. It is better than accepting it without knowing why. You will get what suits you from this significant advancement over meagre psychodynamics that stifled psychoanalysis till now’. More or less, he assured me that I will benefit from being anti-ego- psychology if I eventually knew what I wanted from psychoanalysis. In this way he brought to my attention that there is a difference between psychoanalysis as knowledge and as practice.

The second remark came from Dr. C. Scott, a Kleinian as Kleinians should be. He said: “If you understand what the patient said or trying to say then be sure that you are not doing all what he expected you to do: ‘know and understand what he did not say yet’. I realised from those two remarks that I could look for and find the psychoanalysis that makes knowledge of the human subject an open and evolving exchange of discoveries with related fields. Psychoanalysis is not a practice, it is the skill, the art, the ethos of observing and working on freeing psychical phenomena from stagnation whether it is in an individual or in other psychological form. Nothing more stagnant in psychoanalysis than the formalities of practice (putting the patients’ speech in the pigeon halls of empty vocabulary and concepts).    

Those two moments and comments [with a few more from others] made me slowly but continually realize that psychoanalysis is not working with dreams (or similar things) but with dreaming (you should have noticed that the word dreaming means more than what happens when we are sleeping). In a more specific way: there is more to the addict than his addiction. Unfortunately, analysts, instead of improving and expanding their knowledge of the subject they kept changing the aspects of practice by coming up with new vocabulary and schools. Improving psychoanalysis (or even just avoiding its deterioration), has to come from a better understanding of its subject matter and not from varying its psychotherapy.

Freud’s Irma Dream: SE. Vol.4, Chapter II.

The Irma dream is the first dream Freud interpreted. He said: “‘interpreting’ a dream implies assigning a ‘meaning’ to it-. . . replacing it by something which fits into the chain of our mental acts” (p. 96). The dream was a scene that puts one of Freud’s problematic patient in the midst of a gathering that included some known physicians. The theme of the dream was Freud’s effort to exonerate himself of making a medical mistake with that patient and putting the blame on her and the physician who gave him the bad news about her. Freud reached a conclusive decision about his dream and stated: “The dream represented a particular state of affairs as I should have wished it to be. Thus, its content was fulfilment of a wish and its motive was a wish (ibid. 118-119. I believe that analysts, and none analysts too accept Freud’s idea that a dream is a whish fulfilled, because the dream as a scene is a scene -in the present tense- of a fulfilled wish: [Irma proved to be the cause of her misery and Otto is part of the problem. Moreover, those respectable people are not respectable at all].

If Freud was a patient reporting that dream to his analyst the analyst might have also shown him that his dream expresses a latent sense of insecurity regarding his belief in his superiority. It also shows aggressivity if faced with disappointment. Maybe the analyst would have tended to integrate this feature of Freud’s personality in a wider range of his life experiences. Great….. but what about the process that generated ‘such’ dream! What about his unreasonable hostile reaction to criticism, his tendency to do away with the limits of reality in turning everything in the scene into a theatre for his grandiosity! What about the irrationality of proving his point (the infiltrated skin on the left shoulder ibid, p.113)? Better, the fulfilled wish in the dream exposed Freud’s manner of wishing. Interpreting a dream is only useful if it reveals the ‘internal structure of the person’s psychical structure. This applies to the work of psychoanalysis as a whole.

We listen, understand, interpret, so the patient knows more about his dealings with his intrapsychical life. Knowing more about the unconscious intrapsychical life that is derived from dreams, acting outs, transference conflicts, etc. is the main-if not the only- initiative for change. Interpreting dreams, uncomfortable relationships, certain decision and the likes, have be to means to reveal to the patient the nature of his intrapsychical life. We interpret psychical ‘things’ to get from that better view of the intrapsychical.

 

C. Part Three

Psychical Issues and Psychical Processes

An Important Distinction to Make:

The first forty years of the history of psychoanalysis, and a few more years after the publication of The Ego and the Id, were spent by Freud and the pioneer analysts in discovering new aspects of psychopathology. They generated and formulated a vocabulary for their findings.  They chose words that described or explained the dynamics of the observed processes behind psychopathologies, even the untreatable ones. They gradually became ambitious and tried to turn their theory of psychopathology into a comprehensive theory of the human subject. Freud’s book of the Ego and the Id (1923) was the first identifiable attempt at transforming the discoveries of psychopathology into a psychoanalytic theory of the subject. The ‘title’ of the book, when translated into English, created a subtle but a lasting distortion in the sought-after theory of psychoanalysis of the subject.

The theory remained up till now an illusive prospect because of the kind of distortion created by translating Ich (German) into Ego instead of I (the pronoun of the first person subjective). Ego (Greek for I), turns the subject into an object (I can say I am happy but cannot not say ego or my ego is happy, although a Greek could say Egho happy). The inclination to turning whatever is subjective into a psychical object or entity was and stayed the dominant trend in the translation of the ‘Standard Edition’. This trend-in my opinion- was expressing the translator’s ‘wish’ to turn psychoanalysis into a theory of human entities and psychical things instead of a theory of the subject himself[i], thus giving the impression that psychoanalysis-like physical sciences- deals with issues. There is a basic and fundamental difference between an analyst saying I interpret my patient’s dreams and another saying that he interprets the patient’s dreaming as one of the psychical processes that he deals with in analysis. The first makes the dream a psychical entity, and the second uses dreaming as a process that turns something subjective (wish) into a psychical signifier of the subject’s ways of fulfilling his wishes. The wish is not material for psychoanalysis, wishing and its nature in a state of dreaming, fantasies, enactments, etc. is material for psychoanalysis.

Freud and the early practitioners initiated a genuine and powerful movement of discovering new aspects of the subject that were unnoticeable before psychoanalysis.  They used the common vocabulary of everyday life to define their novel findings. There was nothing particular about their findings that could have engendered new vocabulary. There was nothing unusual in what they identified that required ‘inventing’ new meanings for the used vocabulary. However, what was unusual about the psychoanalytic discoveries is the richness and details of the meanings implicit in the spoken language. For instance, repression as an analytic term meant the usual disappearance of an unacceptable issue from consciousness. But it also signified that the ‘repressed’ is predisposed to taking disguised forms of itself to still remain out of consciousness but still could be deduced from its repressed form. 

Psychoanalysis did not create a new vocabulary for its discoveries, like the theories of the physical world usually do; it created theory regarding certain new aspects of the human subject, used the common vocabulary in more meticulous and particular ways, revealing its hidden connotations. The necessity to use regular vocabulary to express psychoanalytic discoveries was basically the outcome of something that we do not pay attention to: the vocabulary of the current psychoanalytic literature is not of entities or things psychological. It is a vocabulary that denotes processes that pertain to the person as a human subject. Repression would mean nothing or very little if we do not know the psychodynamics of the process of repressing. Repression is removing a psychical issue from the field of attention but transforming it into another that could just hints to its original meaning. Another way of putting it: the vocabulary of psychoanalysis is not about psychical issues, events, entities, things: it is the vocabulary of psychical processes, i.e., the vocabulary of psychodynamics. If and when this quality is neglected or ignored psychoanalysis will become a practice of correcting faults in a person or psychotherapy (a ‘lower’ level of practice).

      Anxiety and Narcissism:

The trend to translate the S.E. in the way Strachey did was a simplistic and crude attempt at making psychoanalysis sound as if it is a theory of ‘things- human’ (thus could eventually qualify to be a science of psychopathology). The things- human could be turned into a subject-matter for theories[1].  The pervasive tendency to do that (see: Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety (1926) has distorted psychoanalysis and flawed the meaning of its vocabulary. That distortion gave the impression that a theory of psychoanalysis is a theory of psychodynamics (A theory of faith is not a theory of religion). Anxiety, which was considered before caused by ‘frustrated’ libido, became a cause symptom formation. A new issue emerged: castration and its anxiety. Castrations was one of the central notions in understanding the Oedipus Complex[ii] It is now (after more than two decades) the instigator of anxiety. The details of hose concepts (vocabulary), confusing as they happened to become in the S.D., put the main issue of anxiety within the duality of the I and the ME. It clear that the vocabulary of psychoanalysis without a theory could if not is confusing one has to be well versed in their source before using them as theoretical concepts.

What is even more distorting of the theoretical situation in psychoanalysis was not making the distinction between language and vocabulary: vocabulary does not make a language but a language gives vocabulary its communicative functions. Thus, the vocabulary of psychoanalysis has no meaning or expressive connotation outside a clear comprehensive theory of psychoanalysis itself. For instance: does identification denotes a psychodynamic process which renders the subject and the object become alike, or the case where both subject and object are alike should just call it identification. This simple and subtle distorted beginning of psychoanalysis invited the new generation of psychoanalyst to complicate matters further.

The third generation of analysts, leaned to understanding the psychodynamics of the discoveries based on what the vocabulary linguistically suggests. By doing that they the shifted the emphasis from looking for the subject matter of psychoanalysis and gave the causal relationships between the pathological symptom and its psychodynamic a central place in the concept of psychoanalysis. Analysts used the terminology of describing psychical findings as explanations (causations) of the psychopathological phenomena (the patient introjected the mother’s passive aggressive trends). This way, psychoanalysis became a verbal medium of common terminology use with a different meaning.  

A preliminary step toward a subject-matter of a theory of psychoanalysis is looking closely at the subject that psychoanalysis tries to study and define, and ultimately be useful to. I will mention just two attributes of the human subject (not his manifestations) that qualifies him as the subject-matter of psychoanalysis. This banal distinction between the subject and his attributes is the key to defining the subject-matter of psychoanalysis and the essential step in knowing why psychoanalysis is the theory of the human subject, not the reverse.    The human subject’s is the only life-entity that has a psychological life. Some animals display effective reactions similar to those human display. We are able to bestow on them some verbal connotations. However, the are reactions but do not qualify as messages.  ( the only living organism that does not respond the internal or external stimuli without turning them first into a subjective issue, and responds only to the subjective issue he created. The human subject does not feel hunger and eats; he feels a desire for certain foods and tries to get what he specifically desires. Moreover, the human subject could feel hunger for other things that have nothing to do with eating like love, fame, wealth, etc.

 The human subject is not just a higher-ranking mammal; he is the only mammal who developed language which translated his vital needs into psychological demands. The psychological demands become his real source of stimulation. The psychology of the human subject is caught in the process of turning a need into a psychological demand. The subject matter of psychoanalysis is that particularly human attribute. 

 

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1.In a meeting in Los Angeles 2019, Mark Solms, who is supervising the new edition of the Standard Edition, confirmed that those kinds of distortions will be corrected in the new edition, and the translation will adhere to the intended content and   style of the original German text.

. 2.. At the beginning, Freud and the pioneers of psychoanalysis considered anxiety the result of transforming the frustrating libido into anxiety. Then, came the notion of castration in the dynamics of the Oedipus complex and anxiety was associate with castration. We know now that castration anxiety relates more to that concept of narcissism which a better concept to explain anxiety as the result of concerns about the person’s identity. But we still have to find our way to know if the anxiety relates to affecting the I the Me.