Remerciez-le!

Remerciez @Admin pour avoir partagé cet document gratuitement, de la manière la plus simple, en partageant sur les réseaux sociaux.

©2007 Institute of Psychoanalysis On talking-as-dreaming THOMAS H. OGDEN 306 La

©2007 Institute of Psychoanalysis On talking-as-dreaming THOMAS H. OGDEN 306 Laurel Street, San Francisco, CA 94118, USA (Final version accepted 9 April 2006) Many patients are unable to engage in waking–dreaming in the analytic setting in the form of free association or in any other form. The author has found that ‘talking- as-dreaming’ has served as a form of waking–dreaming in which such patients have been able to begin to dream formerly undreamable experience. Such talking is a loosely structured form of conversation between patient and analyst that is often marked by primary process thinking and apparent non sequiturs. Talking-as-dreaming superﬁ cially appears to be ‘unanalytic’ in that it may seem to consist ‘merely’ of talking about such topics as books, ﬁ lms, etymology, baseball, the taste of chocolate, the structure of light, and so on. When an analysis is ‘a going concern,’ talking-as- dreaming moves unobtrusively into and out of talking about dreaming. The author provides two detailed clinical examples of analytic work with patients who had very little capacity to dream in the analytic setting. In the ﬁ rst clinical example, talking-as- dreaming served as a form of thinking and relating in which the patient was able for the ﬁ rst time to dream her own (and, in a sense, her father’s) formerly unthinkable, undreamable experience. The second clinical example involves the use of talking-as- dreaming as an emotional experience in which the formerly ‘invisible’ patient was able to begin to dream himself into existence. The analyst, while engaging with a patient in talking-as-dreaming, must remain keenly aware that it is critical that the difference in roles of patient and analyst be a continuously felt presence; that the therapeutic goals of analysis be ﬁ rmly held in mind; and that the patient be given the opportunity to dream himself into existence (as opposed to being dreamt up by the analyst). Keywords: talking, dreaming, reverie, waking-dreaming, undreamable experience, undreamt dreams ‘Auntie, speak to me! I’m frightened because it’s so dark.’ His aunt answered him: ‘What good would that do? You can’t see me.’ ‘That doesn’t matter,’ replied the child, ‘if anyone speaks, it gets light.’ (Freud, 1905, p. 224, fn. 1) I take as fundamental to an understanding of psychoanalysis the idea that the analyst must invent psychoanalysis anew with each patient. This is achieved in no small measure by means of an ongoing experiment, within the terms of the psychoanalytic situation, in which patient and analyst create ways of talking to one another that are unique to each analytic pair at a given moment in the analysis. In this paper, I focus primarily on forms of talking generated by patient and analyst which may at ﬁ rst seem ‘unanalytic’ because the patient and analyst are talking about such things as books, poems, ﬁ lms, rules of grammar, etymology, the speed of light, the taste of chocolate, and so on. Despite appearances, it has been my experience that such ‘unanalytic’ talk often allows a patient and analyst who have been unable to dream together to begin to be able to do so. I will refer to talking of this sort as Int J Psychoanal 2007;88:575–89 576 THOMAS H. OGDEN ‘talking-as-dreaming.’ Like free association (and unlike ordinary conversation), talking-as-dreaming tends to include considerable primary process thinking and what appear to be non sequiturs (from the perspective of secondary process thinking). When an analysis is a ‘going concern’ (Winnicott, 1964, p. 27), the patient and analyst are able to engage both individually and with one another in a process of dreaming. The area of ‘overlap’ of the patient’s dreaming and the analyst’s dreaming is the place where analysis occurs (Winnicott, 1971, p. 38). The patient’s dreaming, under such circumstances, manifests itself in the form of free associations (or, in child analysis, in the form of playing); the analyst’s waking–dreaming often takes the form of reverie experience. When a patient is unable to dream, this difﬁ culty becomes the most pressing aspect of the analysis. It is these situations that are the focus of this paper. I view dreaming as the most important psychoanalytic function of the mind: where there is unconscious ‘dream-work,’ there is also unconscious ‘understanding- work’ (Sandler, 1976, p. 40); where there is an unconscious ‘dreamer who dreams the dream’ (Grotstein, 2000, p. 5), there is also an unconscious ‘dreamer who under- stands the dream’ (p. 9). If this were not the case, only dreams that are remembered and interpreted in the analytic setting or in self-analysis would accomplish psycho- logical work. Few analysts today would support the idea that only remembered and interpreted dreams facilitate psychological growth. The analyst’s participation in the patient’s talking-as-dreaming entails a distinc- tively analytic way of being with a patient. It is at all times directed by the analytic task of helping the patient to become more fully alive to his experience, more fully human. Moreover, the experience of talking-as-dreaming is different from other conversations that bear a superﬁ cial resemblance to it (such as talk that goes nowhere or even a substantive conversation between a husband and wife, a parent and child, or a brother and sister). What makes talking-as-dreaming different is that the analyst engaged in this form of conversation is continually observing and talking with himself about two inextricably interwoven levels of this emotional experience: 1) talking-as-dreaming as an experience of the patient coming into being in the process of dreaming his lived emotional experience; and 2) the analyst and patient thinking about, and at times talking about, the experience of understanding (getting to know) something of the meanings of the emotional situation being faced in the process of dreaming. In what follows, I offer two clinical illustrations of talking-as-dreaming. The ﬁ rst involves a patient and analyst talking together in a way that represents a form of dreaming an aspect of the patient’s (and, in a sense, her father’s) experience which the patient previously had been almost entirely unable to dream. In the second clinical example, patient and analyst engage in a form of talking-as-dreaming in which the analyst participates in the patient’s early efforts to ‘dream himself up,’ to ‘dream himself into existence.’ A theoretical context The theoretical context for the present contribution is grounded in Bion’s (1962a, 1962b, 1992) radical transformation of the psychoanalytic conception of dreaming and of not being able to dream. Just as Winnicott shifted the focus of analytic theory 577 ON TALKING-AS-DREAMING and practice from play (as a symbolic representation of the child’s internal world) to the experience of playing, Bion shifted the focus from the symbolic content of thoughts to the process of thinking, and from the symbolic meaning of dreams to the process of dreaming. For Bion (1962a), ‘α-function’ (an as-yet unknown, and perhaps unknowable, set of mental functions) transforms raw ‘sense impressions related to emotional experience’ (p. 17) into alpha-elements which can be linked to form affect-laden dream-thoughts. A dream-thought presents an emotional problem with which the individual must struggle (Bion, 1962a, 1962b; Meltzer, 1983), thus supplying the impetus for the development of the capacity for dreaming (which is synonymous with unconscious thinking). ‘[Dream-]thoughts require an apparatus to cope with them … Thinking [dreaming] has to be called into existence to cope with [dream- ]thoughts’ (Bion, 1962b, p. 306). In the absence of α-function (either one’s own or that provided by another person), one cannot dream and therefore cannot make use of (do unconscious psychological work with) one’s lived emotional experience, past and present. Consequently, a person unable to dream is trapped in an endless, unchanging world of what is. Undreamable experience may have its origins in trauma—unbearably painful emotional experience such as the early death of a parent, the death of a child, military combat, rape or imprisonment in a death camp. But undreamable experience may also arise from ‘intrapsychic trauma,’ i.e. experiences of being overwhelmed by conscious and unconscious fantasy. The latter form of trauma may stem from the failure of the mother to adequately hold the infant and contain his primitive anxi- eties or from a constitutional psychic fragility that renders the individual in infancy and childhood unable to dream his emotional experience, even with the help of a good-enough mother. Undreamable experience—whether it be the consequence of predominantly external or intrapsychic forces—remains with the individual as undreamt dreams in such forms as psychosomatic illness, split-off psychosis, ‘dis-affected’ states (McDougall, 1984), pockets of autism (Tustin, 1981), severe perversions (De M’Uzan, 2003) and addictions. It is this conception of dreaming and of not being able to dream that underlies my own thinking regarding psychoanalysis as a therapeutic process. As I have previ- ously discussed (Ogden, 2004, 2005), I view psychoanalysis as an experience in which patient and analyst engage in an experiment within the analytic frame that is designed to create conditions in which the analysand (with the analyst’s participation) may be able to dream formerly undreamable emotional experience (his ‘undreamt dreams’). I view talking-as-dreaming as an improvisation in the form of loosely structured conversation (concerning virtually any uploads/Sante/ talking-as-dreaming-ogden.pdf