From Freud’s dream-work to Bion’s work of dreaming: The changing conception of dreaming in psychoanalytic theory

Bion moved psychoanalytic theory from Freud's theory of dream-work to a concept of dreaming in which dreaming is the central aspect of all emotional functioning. In this paper, I first review historical, theoretical, and clinical aspects of dreaming as seen by Freud and Bion. I then propose two interconnected ideas that I believe reflect Bion’s split from Freud regarding the understanding of dreaming. Bion believed that all dreams are psychological works in progress and at one point suggested that all dreams contain elements that are akin to visual hallucinations. I explore and elaborate Bion’s ideas that all dreams contain aspects of emotional experience that are too disturbing to be dreamt, and that, in analysis, the patient brings a dream with the hope of receiving the analyst’s help in completing the unconscious work that was entirely or partially too disturbing for the patient to dream on his own. Freud views dreams as mental phenomena with which to understand how the mind functions, but believes that dreams are solely the ‘guardians of sleep,’ and not, in themselves, vehicles for unconscious psychological work and growth until they are interpreted by the analyst. Bion extends Freud's ideas, but also departs from Freud and re-conceives of dreaming as synonymous with unconscious emotional thinking – a process that continues both while we are awake and while we are asleep. From another somewhat puzzling perspective, he views dreams solely as manifestations of what the dreamer is unable to think.     

The interpretation of dreams a classic revisited

In this centenary of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams it is important to revisit this classic, to discuss why it is a classic, to consider what has been learned since its publication, and to discuss what changes in our understanding of dreams and dreaming are called for. To this end, we briefly discuss some of the main themes of the book. Then we review both changes in psychoanalytic thinking and theory and the results of many studies made possible by the discovery of the electro‐encephalographic changes that occur during sleep and their relevance for understanding dreams and their function. We suspect that Freud would have been delighted to know about this explosion of information about the physiology of dreaming. With this in mind, we consider the need for modification of some of Freud's theories while noting that his basic contribution, that dreams are meaningful and understandable, has been amply confirmed. We then discuss these observations in relation to how we approach working with dreams.     

Bion's Notes on memory and desire – its initial clinical reception in the United States: A note on archival material

While Bion's 1967 memory and desire paper reflected a crucial episode in his clinical thinking during his epistemological period, it was also central to his evolution as a Kleinian psychoanalyst who worked with seriously disturbed adult patients. The author explicates and contextualizes these claims with a new archival document, the Los Angeles Seminars delivered by Bion in April 1967, and the full‐length version of Notes on memory and desire. Bion here instigated a radical departure from years of theory‐laden work when he made his clinical work and ideas accessible to a new audience of American Freudian analysts. While this new group was keenly interested to hear about Bion's clinical technique with both borderline and psychotic patients, there were varied reactions to Bion's ideas on the technical implications of the analyst's abandonment of memory and desire. Both the Los Angeles Seminars and Notes elicited responses ranging from bewilderment, admiration to skepticism amongst his audience of listeners and readers. These materials also however allow for a more complete and systematic presentation of important ideas about analytic technique – and while his ideas in this domain have been long valued and known by many psychoanalysts, this contribution stresses the crucial aspect of the reception of his ideas about technique in a particular American context. American analysts gained a much more explicit idea of how Bion worked analytically, how he listened, formulated interpretations and factored in the analyst's listening receptivity in the here‐and‐now. The author concludes with a consideration of the importance of Bion's American reception in 1967.     

A Meaningful Intercourse: Some Thoughts about Thinking

This article traces the development of ideas about consciousness, symbolisation, thinking and affects in the works of Freud, Bion, Meltzer and Stern. Consciousness is viewed as a special quality of psychic functions and therefore related to the complexity of the world of experience, to its different dimensions as Meltzer describes them. Freud's initial idea about direct and reproductive thinking and a compulsion to associate returns in Bions development of an epistemological instinct and are referred to by Stern as an ongoing, omnipresent milieu of thoughts in which instinctual life takes place. Bion develops Freud's thinking of unpleasure, primary and secondary processes, when he formulates the difference between pain and suffering, which also makes it possible for him to develop Freud's views on symbol formation. Bion's grid describes the relation between different forms of symbols and makes it possible to understand the importance of the reverie of the mother and how a feeling of meaning unfolds, when symbol formation takes place in a process in which the individual is in contact with the underlying structure. These ideas are in its turn developed in another direction by Stern in his theories of a pre-narrative envelope. Freud's ideas about perceptual identity and thought identity as a criteria for the release of motor activity are looked upon as a criteria for truth, which returns in Bion's ideas about the relation between truth and the development of the capacity to think. Meltzer takes up this thread when he claims that truth is beauty and beauty truth.     

DREAMING THE ANALYTIC SESSION: A CLINICAL ESSAY

This is a clinical paper in which the author describes analytic work in which he dreams the analytic session with three of his patients. He begins with a brief discussion of aspects of analytic theory that make up a good deal of the context for his clinical work. Central among these concepts are (1) the idea that the role of the analyst is to help the patient dream his previously “undreamt” and “interrupted” dreams; and (2) dreaming the analytic session involves engaging in the experience of dreaming the session with the patient and, at the same time, unconsciously (and at times consciously) understanding the dream. The author offers no “technique” for dreaming the analytic session. Each analyst must find his or her own way of dreaming each session with each patient. Dreaming the session is not something one works at; rather, one tries not to get in its way.     

Freud,Bion and Kant: Epistemology and anthropology in The Interpretation of Dreams

This interdisciplinary article takes a philosophical approach to The Interpretation of Dreams, connecting Freud to one of the few philosophers with whom he sometimes identified – Immanuel Kant. It aims to show that Freud's theory of dreams has more in common with Bion's later thoughts on dreaming than is usually recognized. Distinguishing, via a discussion of Kant, between the conflicting ‘epistemological’ and ‘anthropological’ aspects of The Interpretation of Dreams, it shows that one specific contradiction in the book – concerning the relation between dream‐work and waking thought – can be understood in terms of the tension between these conflicting aspects. Freud reaches the explicit conclusion that the dream‐work and waking thought differ from each other absolutely; but the implicit conclusion of The Interpretation of Dreams is quite the opposite. This article argues that the explicit conclusion is the result of the epistemological aspects of the book; the implicit conclusion, which brings Freud much closer to Bion, the result of the anthropological approach. Bringing philosophy and psychoanalysis together this paper thus argues for an interpretation of The Interpretation of Dreams that is in some ways at odds with the standard view of the book, while also suggesting that aspects of Kant's ‘anthropological’ works might legitimately be seen as a precursor of psychoanalysis.     

Jung's psychoid concept and Bion's proto‐mental concept: a comparison

Jung and Bion both developed theoretical concepts propounding a deeply unknowable area of the psyche in which body and mind are undifferentiated and the individual has no distinct identity, from which a differentiated consciousness arises. In Jung's case, this is enshrined in his psychoid concept and the associated notion of synchronicity and, in Bion's case, in his proto‐mental concept and his ideas on group dynamics. It is by means of these two concepts that Jung and Bion approach and locate a combined body‐mind, a monism, in which body and mind are seen as different aspects of the same thing. This paper reviews the claim that although the two concepts are associated clinically with very different situations, their commonality may arise from a similar intellectual basis: both men appear to have been influenced by the same source of vitalist ideas in philosophy including Henri Bergson, and Jung's ideas also exerted a direct influence on Bion.     

Freud's atonement

The authors explore Freud's preoccupations with death and dying. In particular, they focus on the day of Freud's death, which was the Jewish Day of Atonement and the Jewish Sabbath. The significance of this event, which the authors think was “planned,” was not just in order to obliterate years of pain and suffering from cancer, but also to overcome a lifelong burden of conflict and guilt about his relations with his family and colleagues as well as his Jewish cultural/religious upbringing. The authors consider whether the timing of Freud's death represented a premeditated return to his cultural and religious roots.     

Genesis and profanation of the other world: The interpretation of dreams

This paper addresses Nietzsche's reflections on the phenomenon of dreams as a crucial precedent of Freud's Die Traumdeutung. The works of Nietzsche and Freud are scrutinized to establish and compare the most relevant aspects of their understanding of dreams. The philosophical impact of both accounts is assessed in terms of the transvaluation of religious and metaphysical values, which reveals three epistemological shifts: the replacement of Metaphysics by History/Genealogy (Nietzsche) and by Metapsychology (Freud), and the expansion of rationality beyond the limits of consciousness (Nietzsche and Freud). Both authors are shown to consider dreams as figurative expressions of a postponed desire – or, more specifically, as the imaginary fulfillment (compensation) and the evocation/awakening of desire. As captured by the phrase “Memento libidines”, dreams are portrayed in both accounts as the guardians of sleep and desire. Finally, and in contrast with Assoun, a new interpretation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra is proposed, as an interpretation of the prophet's dreams reveals the presence of individual desire within the Nietzschean understanding of the phenomenon.     

The countertransference dream1

Can the analyst's night‐dream about his patient be considered as a manifestation of countertransference‐and, if so, under what conditions? In what way can such a dream represent more than just the disguised fulfillment of a repressed wish of the analyst? Is there not a risk of the analyst unconsciously taking up and ‘using’ the content of a session or other elements coming from the analytic situation for his own psychic reasons? The author, closely following Freud's dream theory, shows the mechanisms which can allow us to use the dream content in the analytical situation: preserved from the secondary processes of conscious thinking, other fantasies and affects than in the waking state can emerge in dream thought, following an ‘unconscious perception’. After examining the countertransference elements of Freud's dream, ‘Irma's injection’, which leads off The interpretation of dreams, the author presents a dream of her own about a patient and its value for understanding affects and representations which had hitherto remained unrepresented.     

The Oedipus complex: A confrontation at the central cross‐roads of psychoanalysis

The theory of the Oedipus complex as Freud formulated it rests on the following pillars: the child's characteristic sexual and aggressive impulses concerning the parents, phallic monism, and the castration complex. This paper reviews the context in which Freud discovered the Oedipus complex, as well as Freud's theory. It then examines the proposals of later authors whose general Oedipal theories differ from Freud's in an attempt to point out both their possible correlations and confrontations with Freud. It includes Klein's pre‐genital Oedipal theory, Lacan's structuralist reinterpretation, Bion's reconception of the complex under the knowledge vertex, Green's generalized triangulation theory, Meltzer's notions of the aesthetic object and sexual mental states, and Chasseguet‐Smirgel's archaic Oedipal matrix     

NEUTRALITY IN THE FIELD: ALPHA‐FUNCTION AND THE DREAMING DYAD IN PSYCHOANALYTIC PROCESS

Analysts have interpreted the concept of neutrality in a variety of ways, beginning with Strachey's use of that word to translate Freud's (1915) term, Indifferenz. In this paper, neutrality is linked to Freud's notions of free association and evenly suspended attention. A history of psychoanalytic attempts to clarify the concept are presented, with special attention to issues of ambiguity and the patient's role in the determination of neutrality. Neutrality is further elaborated in relation to the bipersonal field as described by the Barangers and contemporary field theorists. Understood in terms of the field, neutrality becomes a transpersonal concept, here conceived in terms of alpha‐function and a dreaming dyad. Two clinical examples cast in the light of a Bionian perspective are discussed to suggest an alternative understanding of analytic impasses and their relation to alpha‐function and neutrality.     

FROM EXTENSION TO REVOLUTIONARY CHANGE IN CLINICAL PSYCHOANALYSIS: THE RADICAL INFLUENCE OF BION AND WINNICOTT

This paper addresses the radical departure of late Bion's and Winnicott's clinical ideas and practices from traditional psychoanalytic work, introducing a revolutionary change in clinical psychoanalysis. The profound significance and implications of their thinking are explored, and in particular Bion's conception of transformation in O and Winnicott's clinical‐technical revision of analytic work, with its emphasis on regression in the treatment of more disturbed patients. The author specifically connects the unknown and unknowable emotional reality‐O with unthinkable breakdown (Winnicott) and catastrophe (Bion). The author suggests that the revolutionary approach introduced by the clinical thinking of late Bion and Winnicott be termed quantum psychoanalysis. She thinks that this approach can coexist with classical psychoanalysis in the same way that classical physics coexists with quantum physics.     

The capacity to tell a joke: Reflections from work with Asperger children

The capacity to tell a joke is a highly complex interpersonal event that depends upon the maturation of certain developmental achievements which are absent or stunted in children with Asperger's Syndrome. These include the ability to know another's mind, a sense of interpersonal timing and, most notably, a capacity for abstract thinking. The author discusses Freud's ( 1905 ) notion of joke‐work, which is akin to dream‐work, both of which are pathways to forming mental representations. Freud considered joke‐work as a mental activity that operated on the verbal level and the author examines the preverbal dimensions that are rooted in the earliest mother/infant interactions. An extended case discussion of the psychoanalytic treatment of an Asperger boy is offered to illustrate these points and to demonstrate the activity of joke‐work as a means of building mental representations.     

Discussion - Evidence Based Psychoanalysis: An Imperative and an Opportunity

Freud published his ''On Narcissism: An Introduction'' in 1914. The writing has many levels, including, among other things, Freud's criticism of his former colleagues, Adler and Jung. Psychoanalysts received the essay with reservations. Ernest Jones, among others, expressed his concerns in his history of psychoanalysis. The aim of this study is to place Heinz Kohut's ideas about narcissism into the context of the history of ideas. Especially, the paper explores, at a theoretical level, the status of the castration complex both in self psychology and Freud's essay as well as seeks reasons why the discussion on narcissism should be continued.     

“The Light Militia of the Lower Sky”: The Deeper Nature of Dreaming and Phantasying

It is the author's belief that psychoanalytic interpretations of unconscious phantasies, rather than discrediting them vis-à-vis reality, actually reinforce and substantiate their functioning. Following Bion, it is his belief that all psychopathology can be considered to be id pathology, that is, pathology that results from an inadequate transformation of “O,” Bion's term for the Absolute Truth about Ultimate Reality (infinity, chaos). Normally, dreaming/phantasying acts as a containing contact-barrier between consciousness and the unconscious. Psychopathology is a testimony to a failure in the containment-dreaming-phantasying-contact-barrier continuum. Rather than defending against the libidinal and aggressive or destructive drives, an individual defends against the “truth instinct,” which emanates from evolving “O.” Dreaming and phantasying are first conducted for the infant by its mother, who, in a state of reverie, “dreams” him and “becomes” him in a non-Cartesian mode of knowing him and his pain. This process is repeated by the psychoanalyst.     

Freud with Charcot: Freud's discovery and the question of diagnosis

Although Charcot's seminal role in influencing Freud is widely stated, although Freud's trip to Paris to study with Charcot is well recognized as pivotal in his shift from neurological to psychopathological work, a key fact of the Freudian heuristic remains largely underestimated: namely, that Freud's psychopathological breakthrough, which gave birth to psychoanalysis, cannot be separated from his ‘diagnostic preoccupation’, which is a crucial and at times the first organizing principle of his earliest writings. The purpose of this article is therefore to reopen the question of diagnosis by following its development along the path leading from Charcot to Freud. The authors demonstrate that Freud's careful attention to diagnostic distinctions follows strictly in the direction of Charcot's ‘nosological method’. More importantly, the article intends to identify the precise way in which his ideas operate in Freud's own work, in order to understand how Freud reinvests them to forge his own nosological system. If the authors trace the destiny of Charcot's lessons as they reach Freud's hands, it is the importance granted to mixed neuroses in Freud's psychopathology that allows them to pinpoint the role played by the diagnostic process in the rationality of psychoanalysis.     

Commentary on Paper by Lawrence J. Brown

Brown's historical overview of post-Kleinian psychoanalysis traces key steps in the evolving and diverse practice of working in the psychoanalytic situation while regarding it as a two-person field. The Barangers' “The Analytic Situation as a Dynamic Field” is central to his narrative. I develop my understanding of the originality of their contribution in theorizing a situational unconscious, and of their continuing relevance for thinking about analytic listening and intersubjective collaboration. Brown presents a countertransference dream of his own along with the dream of a patient as an example of the Barangers' concept of the “shared unconscious fantasy” of the analytic couple. A detailed alternative reading of Brown's clinical vignette reveals an absence of fit with the Barangers' views on collaboration in the analytic situation. Some uses of Bion's “dreaming” and “becoming” are implicitly questioned as they risk encouraging the idealization of special states over process.