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.