4 a Lacanian Approach to Dream Interpretation
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A Lacanian Approach to Dream Interpretation Filip Kovacevic University of Montenegro, Podgorica, Montenegro In the century-old history of psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan was one of its most controversial practitioners. Though found opaque and convoluted by many, Lacan’s ideas have transcended the confines of psychoanalytic practice and have since the 1960s been applied to the study of cultural, social, and political processes and phenomena. In this article, the author presents the main aspects of a Lacanian approach to the interpretation of dreams. He examines Lacan’s reinterpretation of a crucial dream from Freud’s classic work Interpretation of Dreams: Freud’s own dream of Irma’s injection. He shows the importance of Lacan’s conceptualization of the psyche as the structure containing the registers of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real for the interpretation of this dream. Furthermore, he demonstrates the applicability of a Lacanian approach by interpreting several other dreams: Descartes’ 3 dreams, which have determined the development of modern science, and his own dream. The article is intended for all audiences and its aim is to expand the number of theoretical approaches available in the field of dream interpretation. Keywords: dreams, desire, death, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan Many historians and scholars of psychoanalysis consider Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) to have been one of the most talented, though controversial, psycho- analysts, the so-called “French Freud.” Lacan himself thought that he was the most faithful interpreter of Freud’s ideas to such an extent that, in the 1950s, he presented his year-long seminars to the French intellectual elite at the Paris psychiatric hospital St. Anne under the title of a “return to Freud.” Among many of Freud’s ideas that Lacan discussed and commented upon in these seminars, the key place was taken by the reexamination of Freud’s first ground-breaking book Interpretation of Dreams (Traumdeutung) and certain dream interpretations Freud presented there. In this article, I will offer a close reading of Lacan’s analysis of Freud’s dream interpretations to extract what can properly be called a Lacanian approach to dream interpretations. Later, I will use this approach to interpret certain dreams important for the history of philosophy, such as Descartes’ three dreams. This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of individual user and not to be disseminated broadly. Appropriately enough, Lacan mentioned Freud’s book in the very first public seminar he gave, the seminar on Freud’s technique in the academic 1953–1954. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Filip Kovacevic, Associate Professor of Political Psychology and Psychoanalytic Theory, University of Montenegro, 81000 Podgorica, Montenegro. E-mail: fi[email protected] 78 Dreaming © 2013 American Psychological Association 2013, Vol. 23, No. 1, 78–89 1053-0797/13/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0032206 Lacanian Approach to Dreams 79 Here he compared Freud’s work on dreams with Maimonides’ Guide to the Perplexed. Namely, the idea common to both Freud and Maimonides is that discourse (be it a dream discourse or a public discourse under strict censorship) reveals by its organization and style what cannot, or must not, be said openly.1 This is why Freud compared every dream to a rebus and posited the mechanisms of condensation and displacement as keys to the interpretation of its meaning.2 The day-residues (Tagesresten), which, according to Freud, make up most of the dream content acquire, within the dream structure, a meaning different from the one they had during the day. The structure of the dream, brought into being by an unconscious desire, which “we only ever see silhouetted at back,” assigns them a role to play according to the utility they have for the desire’s covert manifestation.3 This desire, according to Freud—and Lacan put an added stress on this claim—is always addressed to an other, a person with whom the dreamer is in an intimate emotional (transferential) relationship. For those undergoing an analysis, this person is the analyst. To provide an example of how exactly this works in practice, Lacan mentioned the dream of a Freud’s patient, of which the patient could recall just a single word—the word channel.4 After a session of free-associating with Freud, the patient recalled that the impetus for the dream was the French witticism ostensibly commenting on the French–British relations, but which, in the actual dream, was put into the service of expressing the patient’s unconscious attitude toward psychoanalytic procedures. The untranslatable witticism goes, “De sublime au ridicule, il n’y a qu’un pas.” “Oui, le Pas-de-Calais [that is, the English Channel].”5 Hence the key importance of the word channel. A FREUD’S DREAM Although in Seminar I Lacan does offer several perceptive insights on Freud’s dream theory, he does not go into the extensive analysis of a single dream until the second part of Seminar II, held the following year.6 The dream in question is Freud’s own dream, which in the psychoanalytic literature came to be known as the dream of Irma’s injection. Here’s the text of the entire dream: A large hall—many guests, whom we receive. Among them Irma, whom I immediately take aside, as if to answer her letter, and to reproach her that she doesn’t accept the “solution” yet. I say to her: “If you still have pains, it is really only your fault” She answers: “If you knew what pains I have now in my throat, stomach and abdomen, it’s tightening me up.” I am 1 Lacan, Seminar I, p. 245. This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of individual user and not to be disseminated broadly. 2 Lacan, Seminar I, p. 266. 3 Lacan, Seminar I, p. 155. 4 Lacan, Seminar I, pp. 45–46. 5 Literally, “From the sublime to the ridiculous, there is but a step.” “Yes, the Step-of-Calais [which is how the French call the English Channel].” 6 In his seminars, Lacan very rarely mentioned Karl Jung, another great interpreter of dreams. But there is a reference to him in the Seminar I, when Lacan, in passing, made a critique of Jung’s theory of the archetypes, rhetorically asking “how are they truer than what is allegedly at the surface? Is what is in the cellar always truer than what is in the attic?” See Seminar I, p. 267. This critique has to do with Lacan’s claim that truth is what is said in speech that is, what is on the surface, even if it is (very likely) not heard. 80 Kovacevic startled and look at her. She looks pallid and puffy; I think, after all I overlooking something organic. I take her to the window and look into her throat. With that she shows some resistance, like women who wear a denture. I think to myself, she doesn’t need to do that. Her mouth then opens properly, and I find on the right a large white spot, and elsewhere I see some remarkable curled structures which evidently are patterned on the nasal turbinal bones, extensive white-gray scabs. I quickly call Dr. M., who repeats and confirms the examination...DrM.look entirely different from usual: he is very pallid, limps, is beardless onthechin...Myfriend Otto now also stands next to her, and my friend Leopold percusses her over the bodice and says: “She has dullness below on the left,” points also to an infiltrated portion of the skin on the left shoulder (which, I, in spite of the dress, just as he, feel)...M. says: “Without a doubt, it’s an infection, but it doesn’t matter; dysentery will follow and the poison will be eliminated...”We also directly know where the infection comes from. Recently my friend Otto, when she was not feeling well, gave her an injection of a preparation of propyl, propylene...proprionic acid...trimethylamine (whose formula I see in heavy type before me)...onedoesn’t give such injections lightly...Probably, the syringe wasn’t clean.7 Lacan’s approach to interpreting this dream consists of interpreting it together with Freud’s own interpretation of it. For Lacan, both the dream and its interpretation form a whole, which, if properly analyzed, could offer a significant insight not only into Freud’s unconscious, but also into the structure of the unconscious in general.8 In other words, his framework includes two aspects. First, what Lacan called “imagining the symbol”, that is, analyzing the transformation of the symbolic idea into the image, which is the work of actual dreaming with the dream as the final product. And, second, “symbolizing the image”, transforming the given image into the symbol, which is the work of actual dream interpretation. Here Lacan introduced one of the ideas that marked his entire psychoanalytic opus, which is that “the unconscious is structured like a language.”9 This means that what is done in dream interpretation is actually the kind of translation of the material which was already translated once before. And, as in every other translation, certain shades of meaning (sense) will inevitably be lost. This is why Lacan emphasized Freud’s correctness in claiming that no dream could be completely analyzed—there is always something that cannot be recalled on awakening. In this particular case, as Lacan pointed out, Freud consciously decided not to pursue certain associations and so the full meaning of his dream will forever remain unknown.10 Yet, there is still quite a lot to analyze.