The Irma Dream, the Unconscious, and a New Psychoanalysis  

 

Freud and early psychoanalysts worked on discovering the psychological nature of the human subject. Now we reached the point where we should be curious about that ‘psychological subject that was discovered’: he always says more about himself than what he intended to say. He also understands more than the speaker intended to say with no help from any speaker. Not everything about that happen consciously. We should also deepen our understanding of what could constitute an aspect in a new and contemporary psychoanalysis “the unconscious”. It is one of those aspects that still intrigue psychoanalytic thinkers.

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The unconscious is a term that is foundational and fundamental in the concept of psychoanalysis. It goes without saying that psychoanalysts are expected to know well what ‘unconscious’ means. Yet, this idea is not supported by the literature of psychoanalysis, even in the Freudian text itself. Freud specified three types of unconsciousness (topographic, dynamic and the systemic) suggesting that the term is a denotation not a connotation of a specific something. Analysts and none-analysts mean by unconscious either not conscious or something that has been conscious and got repressed, thus it is not anymore conscious. Linguistically, ‘unconscious’ is the not conscious. The prevailing sense, whether in psychanalysis or elsewhere, is that consciousness is the basic state of affairs or the natural source of phenomena in its positive or negative state. There is something to mention about that. This state of uncertainty about a basic concept in psychoanalysis requires a dedicated new study of the human subject or studying the human subject differently than the usual concept the double and adapt to the concept of duality.

A point of view:

Over years of being active and in the midst of the psychoanalytic movement I came to realize a simple and a straightforward fact; psychoanalysts do not delineate ‘well’ the difference between causes and effects in psychical life. The notion of the unconscious gave us the privilege of assuming that the existence of unconsciousness is enough to confuse the link between causes and effects. Thus, we would not find and answer to this question in our literature including Freud’s own: is the unconscious the cause of certain psychical phenomena (parapraxes for example) or does the parapraxes and similar events cause something conscious become unconscious or are they cause by something unconscious. There is nothing in language itself or in the function of speaking that could explain parapraxes in terms of causes and effects. Therefore, in order to answer the question of the unconscious without inviting many exclamations marks I am resorting to a dream (well-known one) to make the necessary distinction within the duality of Cs\Ucs, and the meaning of unconscious, analytically speaking.

The Irma Dream (the first analytically interpreted dream) was about a patient of Freud (Irma) who was not doing well in therapy. A friend of his mentioned that to him the night before the dream; something that frequently worried him early in his new career as therapist. He worried about his critics in the medical community using those chances to belittle his claims to a new discovery in the field of the neuroses. He was uncertain about his self-worth and worried about humiliation. He had a high degree of tension in that regard the night before the dream.

His dream that night was a scene of a gathering of the physicians whom he has some tension with. In the dream he depicted them the way he would have liked them to be in reality (mostly idiotic). The same with the patient whom he depicts as uncooperative and resisting his work. His interpretation of the dream was a functional interpretation (the dream was a function or the result of a wish).  He concluded (in his own words) that “the dream represented a particular state of affairs …its content was the fulfillment of a wish, and its motive was a wish” (p.118-119. His interpretation of the dream as a function or the result of a wish makes no sense that could explain of the complex process that created his complex ‘dream scene’. However, there is question about Freud’s interpretation of that dream.

The wishful content of the dream was ‘vaguely’ conscious in his mind before sleeping. Yet, the complex scene of the dream itself and all the meaningful details that could be derived from those details happened were formed only during his sleep. There is no mention of thinking consciously or preconsciously of anything similar before sleeping. This implies that the meaning of the dream happened ‘not consciously’ because the dreamer did not have the vaguest idea about his dream before dreaming it. The most remarkable and interesting is how Freud structured such a complex scene- in which he made fools of the medical gathering and accused the patient of resistance to his suggestions- and fulfilling his wishes to maintain his self-worth, all happened and was done while he was sleeping. Freud created a complicated solution to his anxiety, unconsciously, while he was sleeping, and most of all it was all in the language of consciousness. Did Freud think about his dream before dreaming it? Were there any signs of how he intended to exonerate himself from harming his patient before going to sleep?

The answer to those questions is no. The Irma Dream attests to the fact that the Unconscious is not a psychical entity (negative ideas…), content (censored intentions), a process that turns psychological entities into different entities). The unconscious is a state of mind that has a clear linguistic structure, or an explicit structure in the mind that could be talked about as an absence.

The Irma dream shows in a clear way that it is in the nature of the human subject to establish his relations with his world according to his intrapsychic structures, needs and potentials, not according to the nature of the external world itself and its demands. This point is of major importance: the human subject has a spontaneous tendency to create the world around him according to is internal psychical organizations, and in that case the external world would be of a functional usage or value and structured to serve the subject intrapsychical demands. Therefore, psychoanalysis that is built on the notions of drives, resistance to certain drives, psychodynamics of conflicts, need for ‘hiding and revealing’ the defended against internal pressures, correcting, and redressing and restoring defects ignores (avoids) the main issue of the duality of consciousness and unconsciousness that decides the reaction. In our contemporary psychoanalysis, those elements mentioned above are separated from other things by ‘defenses’ and exist in the subject as his unconscious. Despite the obvious ownership of what a mind could generate, the human subject has the audacity to still ‘negate’ that ownership.

The point to underline here is that consciousness and unconsciousness are of the same fabric (linguistically) and when the ‘unconscious’ becomes conscious we find nothing intrinsically different in it from what was split or separated from, i.e., consciousness, even in sleeping. The most interesting about the duality of Cs\Ucs. is their inseparability and the ease by which they could exchange places rhetorically. The conscious subject is only one ‘aspect’ of the subject that he truly is, because what is unconscious proves to be the other aspect which is of the same cloth. The two aspects complement each other and together make a psychical self.

This where the distinction between the intrapsychical the interpersonal happen or be examined

At this point I have to get myself in trouble in order to explain this point better. Consciousness is merely negation of unconsciousness. The intrapsychic-even in the simple meaning of the term- is unconscious or preconscious in the eyes and ears of the experienced psychoanalyst. No confirmation of a conscious issue, or just a conscious notion, can stand by itself as a separate issue: it has to implicitly negate its opposite, i.e., we consciously negate the unconscious [ I am doing good work with Irma…she is resisting me, and you could see that in her preset resistance to be examined by you]. This might sound strange to analysts who do not question the nature of the verbal human who is us, or the nature of the symbolic order we live in which necessitates the coexistence of the antithesis of the duos that constitute our lives. Yet there is and adage that I do not remember who came up with, which goes like this: The Ego is Negation.

The Psychoanalysis of the Discovered Subject:

Anything we think of or speak about has its negation present in the same sentence. This is something that permeates every aspect of our mental, cognitive, psychological and social life [when Freud depicted the gathered physicians in his dream as idiots he indirectly (unconsciously!) said ‘I am not one of them and am not an idiot like them”. There is another characteristic of human language that allows other matters to happen equally unconsciously. Human language has the grammatical and the vocabulary that could make the affirmative confirms the nature of the opposite at the same time. If I say I would never try to mislead anyone makes misleading a conscious issue, without which it was not there consciously but unconsciously. The speaker could unconsciously use the potentials of human language and say something he did not intend to say: parapraxes, negation of negation, omission, etc. The same could happen to the listener who could hear something said in the speech of another which was not intended to be heard. Human language is structured that way: Animals’ quasi languages affirms but have no place for the negation of the affirmed.  

My point is that Freud revealed an aspect of the human subject that characterizes his most intimate and personal nature… his intrapsychical makeup and formations. He also revealed the existence of unconscious psychical entities that reside only in a linguistic structure in the mind. Those two discoveries explain how a psychical issue is expressed outside the verbal limitation of consciousness (intrapsychic sense of inferiority!). Awell verbalized conscious interpersonal issue could be totally irrelevant conscious issue. The intrapsychic structures are more likely to be unconscious and their interpersonal equivalent be the material for consciousness.

  If this distinction makes sense to analysts the next step is to rethink practice and training. Resistance to rethinking our psychoanalysis is not pervasive.