The Psychoanalytic Study of Dreams

Adult Psychoanalytic Training (APT)
2019-20, 2nd Trimester — Fridays, 1:45-3:15pm
Ronald Furedy, MD
Julie Wood, MA

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Introduction

In this course, we will explore dreaming from the perspective of different psychoanalytic models of the mind.  To keep our discussions connected to your analytic work, please bring dreams from your clinical work, which you believe illustrate the concepts in our readings and or dreams you find particularly perplexing.

Achieving the Learning Objectives will serve to further and deepen the associate’s analytic work leading to improved treatment outcome.

Introductory Readings

1. Furedy, R. (2018) A Summary of Dream Concepts
2. Furedy, R. (2018) A Guide to Working with Dreams Analytically

Learning Objectives

At the end of this course, the clinical associates will be able to:

1. Develop and demonstrate approaches to speaking with analysands about their dreams so that analysands become receptive and interested in exploring their dreams as another mode for understanding themselves and their experience in analysis
2. Utilize their feelings, thoughts and the integrative capacity of their mind in response to the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious communication of the analysand’s dream
3. Recognize the bodily communication between the analyst and analysand that may be depicted in the emotional, visual imagery of the dream, and
4. Formulate and deliver interpretations of the dream in the clinical setting.

February 7, 2020

[121 pages]

Freud, S. (1900). The Interpretation of Dreams. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume V (1900): The Interpretation of Dreams (Second Part), pp509-629

Dreams are initiated in the unconscious. For subjective awareness to occur, the dream must break through the repression barrier and be modified by: condensation, reversal, displacement, symbolic transformation, (Dream work) to make it acceptable for the preconscious. Secondary revision occurs upon awakening, remembering, and telling the dream as coherent images. Dreams are not logical and are timeless. They are hallucinatory satisfaction of a repressed infantile wish. Freud repeatedly emphasizes that the dream work only processes. It does not think. The manifest dream is literally a collage of sensory impressions, both recent and indifferent, made from the day residues and serving to express what fundamentally was an unconscious, infantile wish that had been stirred up by a current conflict or a preconscious worry.

The dream work leads to self-deception. The mind alters ideation to keep itself from being too disturbed.

Optional Reading

Solms, K., Solms, M. (2000). Clinical Studies in Neuro-Psychoanalysis, Karnac Books, pp44-69.

Solms interviewed, using a psychoanalytic informed style, patients who had significant damage to specific areas of the brain. With damage to the inferior parietal region of either hemisphere, or the deep ventromedial frontal region, the conscious experience of dreaming stops completely. Therefore, these parts of the brain are capable of initiating the dream process.

The fact that damage in the left parietal lobe stops dreaming, demonstrates that abstraction conceptualization and symbolization are functions in the complex process of dreaming.

Loss of dreaming caused by a right inferior parietal lobe lesions leads to an inability to hold visuospatial information.  Thus this region of the brain is necessary for the ability to concretely represent information in the visuospatial mode.

Damage to the ventromedial frontal region results in no dreaming and adynamia (i.e. lack of spontaneous motivational impetus).  Therefore, dreams are not motivationally neutral.  But, as Freud said, they are meaningful, psychological events.

Damage to the ventromedial occipital temporal region results in the experience of dreaming, but devoid of visual images, or aspects of visual images like color, faces, and movement.  Visual pattern activation is lost – an essential function for what Freud called “visual representability.”

Damage in the frontal limbic region leads to continual dreaming.  These individuals dream excessively, but they lose the ability to distinguish between dreams and real experience—an inability to differentiate between perceptions, thoughts, memories, fantasies, and dreams.  Thus the frontal limbic region performs a necessary inhibition or repression of the dreaming process.

Damage to the temporal limbic region leads to recurring stereotyped nightmares and, thus, plays a causal role in the generation of dreams.  The factor of affect arousal should be added to the functional matrix of the dream process.

These observations are all compatible with the idea that, motivation (frontal lobe), affect (temporal/limbic) has an initiating role in the genesis of dreaming, as does the complex functions of the parietal lobes.  During dreaming the whole process, initiated by different areas of the brain, including the pontine nuclei eventuates in the occipital area of the brain. Patterns activated in the parietal, frontal, and temporal limbic, are projected backwards onto the visual area, resulting in concrete perceptual representations.  Again as Freud noted: dreaming is a complex function involving many structures of the brain, multiple functions, with dreaming living between these various functions.

Freud’s technique of free association was specifically developed to reach the internal structures of functions that are obscured by resistance.  Stated at a meta-psychological level—the emotional resistance conceals the internal structures of personality, motivation, and other complex cognitive/affect structures that the mind deems unacceptable.

Damage to the mesopontine tegmentum severely disrupts the process of REM sleep; but the conscious experience of dreaming persists.  This suggests an unexpected dissociation of the physiologic process of REM sleep and the conscious experience of dreams.

Damage to the dorsolateral frontal areas of the brain has no effect on dreaming.  This suggests that secondary process (declarative thinking) and volitional motor activity has little to do with the process of dreaming.

Mancia, M. (1999). Psychoanalysis and the Neurosciences: A Topical Debate on Dreams. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 80(6):1205-1213.

Dreams allow old experiences to be reconsidered in the present allowing new meaning to be assigned to past experiences.