City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 9-2017 Dreams and the Maternal Imaginary: From Nostalgic Intersubjectivity to Mourning Julie Ackerman The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/2322 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] DREAMS AND THE MATERNAL IMAGINARY: FROM NOSTALGIC INTERSUBJECTIVITY TO MOURNING by JULIE ACKERMAN A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Psychology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2017 © 2017 JULIE ACKERMAN All Rights Reserved !ii Dreams and the Maternal Imaginary: From Nostalgic Intersubjectivity to Mourning by Julie Ackerman This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Psychology in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. _______________________ ________________________________________ Date Elliot Jurist Chair of Examining Committee _______________________ ________________________________________ Date Richard Brodnar Executive Officer Supervisory Committee: Lissa Weinstein Diana Diamond Christine Anzieu-Premmereur Katie Gentile THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK !iii ABSTRACT Dreams and the Maternal Imaginary: From Nostalgic Intersubjectivity to Mourning by Julie Ackerman Advisor: Elliot Jurist This dissertation concerns the history of psychoanalytic thinking about dreams. It is about both the psychic function of dreams and their theoretical function, or the function that they have served within psychoanalytic discourse. It begins with a consideration of the significance of the dream in classical thinking, where it was conceptualized as a psychic emergence in the context of maternal absence. It traces the way in which the rise of object relational paradigms led to the reconceptualization of the dream in relation to the presence of the maternal mind rather than the absence of the maternal body. It describes how this reconceptualization led to the understanding of the analytic session as a waking dream and to the emphasis on reverie as a crucial component of analytic technique. It draws on contemporary feminist ideas to highlight the extent to which this theoretical trajectory reflects the influence of cultural fantasies and taboos, as a consequence of the link between dreams and what has been called the ‘maternal imaginary.’ It considers whether the dream has been recruited in the service of constructing the pre-oedipal mother as an object of nostalgia, and whether this nostalgia has fueled omnipotence and obscured the work of mourning. Finally, it explores the idea that psychoanalytic theories are vulnerable to collusion with sociocultural fantasies about mothers and motherhood when they do not preserve a space !iv for theorizing maternal alterity. It considers the relationship between maternal and oneiric alterity, and calls for a return to a conceptualization of the dream as an encounter with alterity and limitation that precipitates the work of mourning. !v Preface This dissertation was inspired in part by a series of dreams that I had about one of my patients early on in my training. I had the opportunity to discuss these dreams with several clinical supervisors over the years, and I became interested in the question of how they might reflect my mind’s attempt to represent something that was unbearable for my patient, something that had been communicated unconsciously. I found myself drawn to the literature on reverie to try to make sense of this experience, and was fascinated by the ideas and clinical case studies that I encountered there. I began to play with understanding my own work in these terms, but with some hesitation, as I did not want to attribute too much to my patients that might be my own in the name of receptivity, especially given my inexperience. At the same time, there was something about this literature that gave me pause, something that was for a long time difficult for me to articulate. There is something so intuitive and appealing about post-Bionian ideas, something almost seductive. My experience was one of being simultaneously drawn to them and slightly suspicious of their appeal, suspicious of my own attraction to them. I was only able to understand this experience when I encountered the feminist ideas discussed in Chapter 4. In a sense, this dissertation reflects a process of articulating what does and does not work for me about post-Bionian theory. I have long been interested in unconscious communication and attunement. Before beginning graduate school, I was involved in psychotherapy process research, and I was particularly interested in the non-verbal, affective dimension of the therapeutic process. I was drawn to the research group where I worked because they were exploring this non-verbal !vi dimension by combining psychotherapy research with social neuroscience. Through continuous monitoring of heart rate and skin conductance in patient-therapist dyads, they were able to identify a relationship between physiological concordance and patient-perceived empathy (see Marci & Riess, 2008). I remember watching a video from one of their studies that showed patient and therapist engaged in a session with moving graphs of their physiology juxtaposed beside it, so you could listen to the dialogue and watch their physiological arousal rise and fall together. I found it fascinating that the affective attunement between patient and therapist could be visualized in this way, and became interested in the question of embodied or presymbolic communication. So perhaps it is no surprise that when I began studying psychoanalytic theory, I was drawn to some of Winnicott’s ideas as well as to Kleinian and Bionian thinking about projective and introjective mechanisms. I first encountered these ideas while studying at the Anna Freud Centre in London, where the approach is thoroughly developmental and object relational. These perspectives formed the foundation of my psychoanalytic education, and I consider them to be my theoretical and clinical reference points. I suspect that this is precisely why I was struck by Green’s critique of them, discussed in Chapter 1, and even more so by the feminist critique(s) discussed in Chapter 4. These critiques shifted my perspective on the very paradigms that I inhabit intellectually; they changed my relationship with the dominant ways of thinking in our field. This is not to say that I have had to find a new intellectual home, but rather that I now reside within them with an awareness of their limitations, of the risks involved in receiving and employing them uncritically. Thus writing this dissertation has been both a theoretical process !vii and a separation-individuation process, a process of differentiating myself ideologically and developing a theoretical voice. Green has written that among the perils that face the ‘psychoanalyst who writes’ is the accusation of abstraction. This accusation is more likely to be waged when an analyst does not include clinical case material or technical considerations in his writing. It may be that this dissertation risks being accused of abstraction of this kind. In the process of seeking to understand the origin and significance of the notion of reverie, I came to believe that the only way to fully appreciate these things was to contextualize reverie within the theoretical trajectory of psychoanalytic dream theory. To do so is to reveal surprising continuities and discontinuities between the classical understanding of the dream and the contemporary conceptualization of reverie, and the significance of the contemporary view becomes legible in and through these continuities and discontinuities. While I began from a specific theoretical and technical question concerning countertransference dreams, my research brought me to consider much broader questions about the place of the dream in psychoanalytic theory and what it has represented. In the end, this dissertation is about both the psychic function of dreams and their theoretical function, or the function that they have served within psychoanalytic discourse. It is not about the interpretation of dreams or the meaning of their specific content. Nor is it about the technique of working with dreams per se. There is very little clinical material in it, and none of it is my own. My focus instead is on exploring the relationship to what Pontalis calls the dream-as-an- object, the dream as an experiential object for the dreamer and as a theoretical object for the theorist. In this sense, this dissertation is about the dream as a phenomenon as well as the theoretical process that has unfolded in relation to it. !viii Green argues that seemingly abstract theoretical work without case material remains clinical in the proper sense of the term “inasmuch as it stimulates associations in an analyst reader, in connection with his own experience or that of his patients (1986, p. 5).” This is the kind of writing that I have strived for, writing that, like a good interpretation, is generative of associations or intrapsychic work. I would also challenge the differentiation of the abstract from the deeply personal in the realm of psychoanalytic