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Dreaming, Phantasying, and the “Truth Instinct”

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Dreaming, Phantasying, and the “Truth Instinct” CHAPTER 26 Dreaming, phantasying, and the “truth instinct” n this chapter I seek to throw new light on the nature and function of unconscious phantasies. Freud (1914d) wrote that IPhantasies were intended to cover up the autoerotic activity of the first years of childhood, to embellish it and raise it to a higher plane. And now, from behind the phantasies, the whole range of a child’s sexual life came to light. [Freud, 1914d, p. 18] I pose the question: Does a validated interpretation mitigate the effect of the operant unconscious phantasy in favour of reality, and/or does it release a troubled or obstructed—and therefore clinically failing— phantasy from its obstruction so that it can then proceed on its way and re-enter the mythic stream or phantasy cycle of the unconscious? Behind this question lies yet another: May not psychopathology be due, from one perspective, to defective or inadequate phantasying and/or dreaming, as Bion suggests in his radical theory of dreaming? If that is indeed the case, then the effect of validated interpretations may be, in part, to assist, correct, reinforce, supply, or free-up extant troubled phantasies or dreams (phantasies/dreams that themselves are in trouble: that is, not properly functioning). Behind this line of thought is Bion’s hypothesis that all experiences (external and inter- nal) need to be dreamed (phantasied) in order to be processed, and Copyright © 2007. Karnac Books. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 290 EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 8/21/2017 8:48 AM via ANTIOCH UNIVERSITY AN: 366847 ; Grotstein, James S..; A Beam of Intense Darkness : Wilfred Bion's Legacy to Psychoanalysis Account: s8879358 DREAMING, PHANTASYING, AND THE “TRUTH INSTINCT” 291 that psychopathology may be due—if not totally, then in part—to a defect, the source of which lies in defective “α-function” or “dream- work-α” (Bion, 1962a, 1962b)—that is, defective or inadequate phan- tasying or dreaming. Alpha-function combines the primary and secondary processes. These premises derive from the cooperative bimodal “binocularity” (stereoscopy) that he posits to exist between the Systems Ucs. and Cs., which he considers to be in collaborative dialogue—in opposition but not in conflict with each other, provided that the contact-barrier that separates and mediates them is intact, which fundamentally depends on the operation of α-function to supply α-elements to maintain and restore it. Bion’s psychoanalytic epistemology The analyst must abandon memory and desire, the derivatives of sensation, so as not to be misled by images or symbols of the object, which, though they represent the object, are not the object (Bion, 1962b). Only then can the analyst, with much patience—the patience of toler- ating uncertainty and doubts—be qualified to “become” the analysand or, more precisely, “become”, through immersion and absorption, the analysand’s distress, O (β-elements) (Bion, 1965, 1970). In this state of reverie, the analyst has become the container for the analysand’s pro- jected mental content (contained) (Bion, 1962b). Bion calls this thinking and also dreaming. As the mother does for her infant, so the analyst absorbs the analysand’s pain by partial or trial identification (“becom- ing”) and allows it to become part of himself. In his reverie he then allows his own repertoire of conscious and unconscious personal expe- riences to be summoned, so that some of them may be symmetrical to or match up with the analysand’s still unfathomable projections (β-ele- ments, O). Eventually, the analyst sees a pattern in the material—that is, the pattern becomes the selected fact that allows the analyst to inter- pret it (create a permanent constant conjunction of the elements). The analyst’s function as container seamlessly blends with Bion’s (1965, 1970) notions of dreaming, thinking, α-function, the Grid, and the contact-barrier between the Systems Ucs. and Cs. Alpha-function (dreaming) intercepts the β-elements (O) of raw, unmentalized ex- perience and transforms them into α-elements that are suitable for memory and thought—but also for reinforcing the contact-barrier. The sturdier the contact-barrier, the more the analysand can learn from his Copyright © 2007. Karnac Books. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 8/21/2017 8:48 AM via ANTIOCH UNIVERSITY AN: 366847 ; Grotstein, James S..; A Beam of Intense Darkness : Wilfred Bion's Legacy to Psychoanalysis Account: s8879358 292 A BEAM OF INTENSE DARKNESS experience because he is better able to think—because he is more able to distinguish (separate). One must first be separate in order to sepa- rate mentally. For Bion, thinking (dreaming) occurs after thoughts first arrive as “thoughts without a thinker” (“β-elements”, O”), awaiting a thinker (thinking mind) to think them. The mother’s α-function is the infant’s first thinker/dreamer. When the infant introjects mother’s α-function, he is then able to think/dream his own thoughts. The pro- jective identification of β-elements into the container (first the mother, then within the self) is the origin of thinking and dreaming. Thus, the better the container with its (his) α-function, the better the analysand can think. What does thinking mean here? For Bion, thinking has two forms. The first—not Cartesian—form, the one just discussed, consists of dreaming (phantasying, α-function), much of which is involved in reinforcing the selectively permeable contact- barrier. The better the containment by the object or the self, the more effective is the selectivity of the contact-barrier in its capacity to define, refine, and guard the frontiers between Ucs. and Cs. and allow through “wild thoughts” (inspired) from Ucs. to Cs. and irrelevant thoughts from Cs. to Ucs. In other words, in this form of thinking, the subject becomes what he is processing as an experience. The second form of thinking is Cartesian (subject–object differ- entiation) and is characterized by abstraction, reflection, correlation, publication, and shifting of perspectives. The second form of thinking can be seen in Bion’s Grid (1977a), which is a polar-coordinated table in which the left-hand column, the genetic axis, designates, from top to bottom, the progressive sophistication and abstraction of thoughts. The horizontal axis designates thinking itself—how the thoughts are being thought about. Interpenetrating Bion’s ideas about the first and second forms of thinking is his notion of the contact-barrier or caesura (1965, 1977a) and its flexible function of dividing and reuniting different elements. He refers to this in his formula P–S ↔D, where the former divides (splits) and the latter unites in improvisational combinatorial virtuos- ity (creative or inventive thinking). The Oedipus complex represents one aspect of the barrier. Abstraction refines the essence of the com- mon denominator in any element. Correlation represents the compari- son function. Publication is the ability of the mind to be receptive to its own “wild thoughts”. Shifting of perspectives from multiple vertices represents the ultimate ratiocinative reflection on data obtained from within or externally. In A Memoir of the Future (1975, 1977b, 1979, 1981) he referred to it as “disciplined debate”. Copyright © 2007. Karnac Books. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 8/21/2017 8:48 AM via ANTIOCH UNIVERSITY AN: 366847 ; Grotstein, James S..; A Beam of Intense Darkness : Wilfred Bion's Legacy to Psychoanalysis Account: s8879358 DREAMING, PHANTASYING, AND THE “TRUTH INSTINCT” 293 Phantasy as the obligatory counterpart or accompaniment to reality (binocular vision) In Learning from Experience Bion presents his next major difference with Freud, that of the latter’s distinction between the primary and second- ary processes (Freud, 1911b): The weakness of this [Freud’s—JSG] theory of consciousness is manifest in the situation for which I have proposed the theory that α-function, by proliferating α-elements, is producing the contact- barrier. The theory of consciousness is weak, not false, because by amending it to state that the conscious and unconscious thus constantly produced together do function as if they were binocular therefore capable of correlation and self-regard. For these reasons . I find the theory of primary and secondary processes unsatisfac- tory. [Bion, 1962b, p. 54] Here Bion, who had already challenged Freud on the primacy of the wish-fulfilment hypothesis that Freud (1900a) had assigned to the motive of dreams, was now challenging him again in terms of the autonomy of the wish-fulfilling notion of the unconscious as well as of the primary processes. Eventually, Freud’s wish-fulfilment hypoth- esis seems, in my opinion, to have ended up in Column 2, the “psi column”, of Bion’s (1977a) famous Grid, as the saturated element that attacks and challenges the truth that inheres in the emerging definitory hypothesis of Column 1.1 The implications of this for psychoanalysis were to become so far-reaching that to this very day they have not been fully realized. Bion believed that the unconscious emits the Absolute Truth about Ultimate Reality (which he would later call O—1965, 1970) vis-à-vis what I call the “truth instinct”, not wish-fulfilling drives primarily. Dreams mediate and facilitate the acceptance of Truth in trans- formations initiated by what Bion (1962a) was to call “α-function” (“dream-work α”—Bion, 1992).
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