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 internal) need to be dreamed (phantasied) in order to be processed, and

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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 phantasying 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 experiences to be summoned, so that some of them may be symmetrical to or match up with the analysand’s still unfathomable projections (β-elements, O). Eventually, the analyst sees a pattern in the material—that is, the pattern becomes the selected fact that allows the analyst to interpret 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 experience 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.

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experience because he is better able to think—because he is more able to distinguish (separate). One must first be separate in order to separate 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 projective 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 differentiation) 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 common 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.

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 secondary 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 hypothesis 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). Thus, he stood the psychic apparatus and the theory of the unconscious on its head. His conception of the binocular complementarity and reciprocity between the Systems Ucs. and Cs. became a radical revision of Freud’s view of their being in adversarial conflict. Bion views them as oppositional partners situated in different vertices, each responsive to and participating in mediating O (β elements, the Absolute Truth about Ultimate Reality, noumena, things-in-themselves, godhead). Bion was to do the same with Klein’s (1940, 1946) concepts of the paranoid–schizoid and depressive positions—that is, reinterpret them as being cooperatively 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.

and complementarily dialectical in confronting and processing (trans- forming) O (P–S ↔D).] The Raw, Absolute Truth had to be mitigated by being subjected to dreaming (phantasying) according to aesthetically creative consid- erations, so that two masters had to be accommodated: (1) the reality principle primarily, and (2) the pleasure principle secondarily. Implicit in this conception is the notion of a binocular function of the two prin- ciples in which the reality principle is predominant and mediates the operation of the pleasure principle. We witness this idea in dreams. Like miners sifting for gold, we analysts respect the truth that is implicit in dreams, thanks to the reality-principle aspect of α-function, and carefully sift through their manifest content, replete as the latter is with protective censorship and distortion, thanks to the operation of the pleasure-principle aspect of α-function (see Ehrenzweig, 1967; see also chapter 25). Thus, by using binocular vision, Bion places dreaming (phantasying) and cognition on parallel, dialectically interacting courses. According to Albert Mason (2000), who had been in training supervision with Bion in London: I have often likened analysis to riding a bicycle. Recalling the process, I ﬁrst had to learn to hold the handlebars and use the brakes, then to balance, and to learn all the rules of the road. When these were mastered, Paula Heimann told me to take my hands off the handlebars and let my countertransference take over. Finally, Bion removed the front wheel and told me to steer with that intuitive binocular mind, which I hoped was a distillate of all that I had learned and had now forgotten. While it appears to have no memory or desire, the binocular mind has digested its experiences and now faces the unknown enemy outside in the patient, as well as the saboteur within itself. [Mason, 2000, p. 988]

The breakdown of “binocular vision” The protocol described above applies to the normal situation of the unitary self—or to the normal or neurotic aspect of a troubled personality. As for the troubled, split-off, dissociated aspect of the personality, Bion variously dealt with this aspect as “The Imaginary Twin” (1950) and “Differentiation of the Psychotic from the Non-Psychotic Person- alities” (1957b). Both here and in his other early case descriptions in Second Thoughts (1967c), he attributes this to an “infantile catastrophe” that had occurred in many of the cases, resulting in a major cleft in the personality. 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.

As the personality divides, the binocular vision disappears, and each split-off self becomes concretistically monocular. As a result, the pleasure principle functions no longer under the hegemony of the reality principle but almost entirely along the principle of avoiding un- pleasure at all costs. This is what Bion (1956, 1957b, 1958, 1959, 1962a) calls “psychotic thinking”. It is characterized, inter alia, by an avoid- ance of reality, an intolerance of frustration, excessive protective identi- ﬁcation (as opposed to introjection) in order to rid the psyche of painful thoughts and feelings, hallucinosis as a substitute for dreaming, and a reversal of α-function. Today I believe that we can apply what Bion ascribed to the psychotic to the split-off aspects of primitive mental disorders and to pathological organizations or psychic retreats (Steiner, 1993).2 If Bion is right, then Freud’s (1911b) distinction between the primary and secondary processes applies only to psychopathology where a split or dissociation has occurred, the secondary process loses its dominion over the primary process, and the latter becomes pathologi- cally autonomous as a psychic retreat (Steiner, 1993) or is transformed into “α-function in reverse” (–K) (Bion, 1962b, p. 25). In these cases a seemingly separate pathological personality evolves that functions—solely along the pleasure–pain principle—to abrogate the reality principle and to sabotage progress. Bion (1962b) wrote about “α-function in reverse” (p. 25), where the psychotic personality had purloined the healthy personality’s α-function for itself and had thereby developed “method in its madness”. Bion’s other way of for- mulating this rupture of the personality is to consider the dreaming or phantasying process itself as being impaired. We now turn to Bion’s hypothesis about defective dreaming—the origins of dreaming itself in the container (1962a, 1962b).

The “truth instinctual drive” Behind these assumptions is Bion’s (1965, p. 38) belief that the psyche requires truth in the way the soma requires food. This and his conception of O (which he associates with the Absolute Truth about the Ulti- mate Reality of raw Circumstance3 and which he also associates with β-elements—that is, unprocessed mental elements), transcends Freud’s (1911b) concept of the hegemony of the libido principle and Klein’s (1933) concept of the primacy of the death instinct in unconscious mental life by pos- tulating the activity of a “truth instinct” (Bion, 1992, pp. 99–101, 299–300; personal communication, 1979). 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.

Having transformed Freud’s (1905d, 1920g) drive theory and add- ed Klein’s (1930) emphasis on the epistemological part-instinct, Bion conceived of the L, H, and K basic and inherent links between self and object (1962b). Though he speaks of them individually, he implies that they are inseparable when experienced—that is, one “knows” the object by how one feels (L and/or K) about it. In other words, these links conflate affects and drives and reorganize them as personal and emotional ways of knowing how one feels about an object. They represent emotional (loving and/or hateful) knowing. Bion (1965, p. 38; personal communication, 1979) then extended K to include the “truth instinct” and linked its operation with the evolutions of O and its intersections with the individual’s emotional frontier. One learns (gains) from experience by being able to tolerate its uncertainty and/or severity and by being able to process it into its personal (subjective) and object meaning, according to Bion (1962b). This processing is originally performed jointly by mother and infant, using the mother’s reverie and α-function, and later by the infant alone as he incorporates the experience of mother’s α-function for himself. The “Absolute (impersonal and infinite) Truth about Ultimate Reality”, if initially tolerated and accepted, becomes transduced, first, into “personal truth” (K) about oneself vis-à-vis how one responds to O’s impact (paranoid–schizoid position) and, second, into “objective (realistic) truth” (depressive position).

“The truth of the matter is that I cannot face the truth!” Bion (1970, p. 98) distinguishes between falsehood and lies. The former relates to well-known defence mechanisms that operate so as to censor, alter, or disguise the truth for palatability. Lies, on the other hand, ut- terly disavow truth in favour exclusively of the pleasure–pain principle. Paradoxically the liar, like the psychotic, is closer to the truth than is the neurotic, whose defence mechanisms are such that they partially falsify the truth. The liar and the psychotic seem to have a more genu- ine estimation of their vulnerabilities regarding their inability to face truth as well as of the broader implications of the truth that they feel fated to confront.4 Psychotic patients, those with character disorders, and those suffering from other primitive mental disorders all claim, if I may summarize their beliefs in a collective statement: “The truth of the matter is that I cannot face the truth because I know the truth all too well, having not been sufﬁciently shielded from it, and I know the limitations of my inner resources (my α-function) to deal with 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.

it—and that’s the truth.” This “truth” may explain why so many of the psychotic patients discussed by Rosenfeld (1965) and Bion (1967c) experienced negative therapeutic reactions when they encountered the threshold of the depressive position—that is, the “moment of truth”. Yet another perspective of their plight vis-à-vis truth is their apparent forfeiture of their “entelechy”—their hopes for future development. It is as if they had early on made a veritable pact with the devil (their death instinct5) to eschew promise and progress in order to maintain the illusion of safety, a safety “vouchsafed” by their “protective” psychic retreat (Steiner, 1993). Parenthetically—following on from Fairbairn’s (1943) conception, with which I agree, that only bad objects are internalized, not good objects (p. 63)—one might hypothesize that all internal objects constitute defective containers of O.

“Binocular vision”: α-function conﬂates primary and secondary processes

Central to Bion’s (1965) thinking is the concept of “binocular vision” or “mental stereoscopy”—a dual-track model in which polar oppo- sites conjoin collaboratively for a common goal, much like the operation of the two cerebral hemispheres. Bion’s view is that the primary and secondary processes combine as a binary-oppositional structure (α-function) to constitute a binocular vision of internal and external mental life. Similarly, the Systems Ucs. and Cs., rather than being in conﬂict with one another, constitute a binocular vision of O. To apply this to the clinical situation: when an interpretation is validated (by the analysand’s unconscious), this means that: (1) a truth has been acknowledged and accepted by the analysand, with corresponding emotional growth; and (2) the truth was acceptable because it was not the whole truth—that is, the Absolute Truth about the Ultimate Reality of raw Circumstance. Dreaming (phantasying) attenuated its impact. Some ﬁctionalization must always accompany the truth—except in the case of the mystic—according to Bion (1970).

The container and the contained (♀♂) and their coalescence with dreaming and phantasying

Bion (1956, 1959, 1962a) began to realize that the psychotic patients whom he was analysing had lacked the childhood experience of 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.

having competently caring mothers who could “contain” their infants’ cries of distress, which Bion interpreted as projective identifications into them of their fear of dying (Bion’s way of referring to the death instinct). He then formulated—independently of Winnicott’s (1960b) “holding environment”—the concept that in normal development the infant experiences intolerable (for the moment) emotions and experiences that require the mother, in a state of reverie (thoroughly im- mersed in her infant’s experience to the exclusion of self) to allow her α-function to enhance her “dreaming her infant”. This “dreaming” can be compared with Stanislavski’s (1936) “method acting”, in which the actor, rather than attempting to understand the role he is to play, allows instead his own inner repertoire of life experiences to match up symmetrically with the part.6 The principle is virtually the same with the mother as container with the infant and the analyst with the analysand. Bion then enjoins the mother, as well as the analyst, to “abandon memory and desire” (as well as preconceptions and understanding) so that the container–mother-analyst can “cast a beam of intense darkness into the interior so that something hitherto unseen in the glare of the illumination can glitter all the more in that darkness”.7 As Bion (1970) states: “Freud said that he had to ‘blind myself artificially to focus all the light on one dark spot’” (p. 57; see also p. 43). Bion (1962a, 1962b) goes on to suggest that the normal infant proj- ects into its mother as container, who, in her reverie, willingly receives, absorbs, and processes her infant’s projections. “Processes” means allowing them to settle within her and allowing her internal world to match up symmetrically with the content (unconsciously). At first she may experience uncertainty or anxiety, or even chaos or randomness. After a while her patience is rewarded with an intuition of sudden awareness about a coherence in all the chaotic data she has experienced. Freud called this the moment of “aha Erlebnis” and Bion the “selected fact”. One may also think of it as the “strange attractor” of chaos theory. It must be remembered, however, that the containing process is equated by Bion with dreaming. The mother as container must dream her infant (as well as her infant’s content—that is, “contained”). This maternal dreaming function includes: (1) a renal-dialysis-like function in which a “detoxification” of the emotional projections occurs; (2) a sorting-out and matching-up with unconscious, and then conscious, aspects of the mother’s own repertoire of experiences; (3) a repression of those elements that the infant is not prepared to “digest” at this time (issues of 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.

timing and dosage); and (4) corrective action of one kind or another that would amount to doing something appropriate—or giving an interpretation, if one is an analyst. Bion theorizes that as time goes on, the normal infant introjects the mother’s use of her α-function for himself and thereafter begins to project internally. Bion considers this operation to be the foundation of thinking, which he distinguishes from thoughts proper. The latter were the β-elements, the content of the infant’s projective identiﬁcations, which Bion (1992, p. 325) also terms “thoughts without a thinker” awaiting a thinker (a container) to think them.8 Thus, the capacity for “successful dreaming and/or phantasying is directly dependent on the individual’s own self-”containing” capacity, which is, in turn, dependent in great measure on the legacy of having been successfully contained— that is, dreamed—by caretaking objects. Lest these ideas appear to be too recondite, let me approach them in another way. The infant looks at reality through the veritable periscope of his mother’s eyes. If mother (and father) can countenance their own experience of O, then the infant can. Tol- erating O is made possible only by virtue of dreaming-containing.

The contact-barrier and dreaming

One of the functions of dreaming is to render a continuing supply of α-elements to the contact-barrier, according to Bion (1962b, p. 17). This seems almost identical to Freud’s (1915d) repressive barrier, but it differs in one significant way, as we shall soon see. The purpose that lay behind the need to maintain the integrity and functioning of the contact-barrier is to guarantee its operation as a gatekeeper in separat- ing the System Ucs. from the System Cs.—and the reverse. It seems to have been Freud’s idea that the System Cs. needed protection from irruptions from the System Ucs. but not the other way around. Bion, however, sees both systems as constituting a cooperative, binary-oppositional (not necessarily conflictual) complementarity in which both scan O and inform one another of their respective findings—a trian- gulation of observation. The contact-barrier may be expected to manifest itself clinically—if indeed it is manifest at all—as something that resembles dreams. [1962b, p. 26] We have just seen that Bion equates dreaming with containing. Now we shall see what I believe to be a seamless chain of continuity between 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.

dreaming, containing, and other entities, such as: (1) dreaming or phantasying itself; (2) the “caesura” between fetal-dom and birth; (3) “negation” (as a necessary aspect of Aristotelian logic), (4) the “Oedi- pus complex” (both Kleinian and Freudian versions9); (5) the “analytic frame”—itself an ongoing temptation to the analysand to challenge and an obligation by the analyst to vouchsafe; and (6) the “container” (Bion, 1959, 1962b) whose task it is to absorb, process, transform (trans- duce and translate) some aspects of the subject’s distress—as the “contained”—into tolerable meaning as interpretation and hold on to other aspects that the subject is not yet ready to bear (repression, dosage, timing, the destiny of the “return of the repressed”).10 The contact-barrier can be likened, to some extent, to a cell membrane, which must contain and define the cell within the tissue of its location and at the same time be able to allow nutrients into and waste- products out of the cell. In other words, it must function as a selectively permeable membrane.11 Dreaming is equivalent to α-function, which, in turn, is equivalent to an ongoing contact-barrier, and it functions to maintain the intactness of the boundary between the Systems Ucs and Cs. while at the same selectively allowing certain “qualified” elements across its frontier—each way. Moreover, not only does dreaming supply α-elements to reinforce the contact-barrier, but the contact-barrier itself, by virtue of its ability to separate the Systems Ucs. and Cs., makes it safe for dreaming to take place. In other words, a closed loop seems to exist between them. Bion (1965, p. 38) also considers the function of the Systems Ucs. and Cs. to be to reveal truth (as a mercifully diluted and processed version of the Absolute Truth about the Ultimate Reality of raw Cir- cumstance, O, β-elements). Freud (1915e), on the other hand, views the System Ucs. as a “seething cauldron” and unadulteratedly hedonic (only desiring fulfilment of its wishes). Bion states that psychotics (or the psychotic portion of the personality) seek to evade truth and therefore use splitting and projective identification not only to rid their minds of intolerable emotions but also to rid themselves of the mind that could potentially harbour these feelings. They follow the pleasure–pain principle to the exclusion of the reality principle, according to Bion.

Notes on unconscious phantasies Isaacs (1952) wrote that Klein’s theory of phantasies constituted the mental representations of instincts. In a more recent contribution, Spil- 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.

lius clariﬁed the differences between Freud’s and Klein’s understanding of phantasies:

In Freud’s view, although there are phantasies in the system unconscious, the basic unit of the system unconscious is not phantasy but the unconscious instinctual wish. Dream-formation and phantasy-formation are parallel processes; one might speak of “phantasy work” as comparable to the “dream work”; both involve transformation of primary unconscious content, and dreams are a transformation of it. For Freud, the prime mover, so to speak, is the unconscious wish; dreams and phantasies are both disguised derivatives of it. For Klein the prime mover is unconscious phantasy [Spillius, 2001, p. 362] Klein developed her idea of phantasy gradually from 1919 onwards, stressing particularly: the damaging effect of the inhibition of phantasy in the development of the child; the ubiquity of phantasies about the mother’s body and its contents; the variety of phantasies about the primal scene and the Oedipus complex; the intensity of both aggressive and loving phantasies; the combination of several phantasies to form what she called the depressive position . . . the paranoid–schizoid position was to come later. . . . Essentially, I think that Klein viewed unconscious phantasy as synonymous with unconscious thought and feeling, and that she may have used the term phantasy rather than thought because the thoughts of her child patients were more imaginative and less rational than ordinary adult thought is supposed to be. [p. 364]

From Spillius’ account it would seem that Klein gave a more central role to unconscious phantasies. She believed (1) that they constituted unconscious thinking, (2) that all fundamental communications and relationships between self and self (internally) and self and others (internally and externally) are conducted through unconscious phantasies, and (3) that even all defence mechanisms—schizoid mechanisms (splitting, projective identiﬁcation, idealization, and magic omnipo- tent denial), manic defences (triumph, contempt, and control), or ob- sessional defences, and even repression—are themselves more nearly permanent (concretized) phantasies.

“Daddy, tell me a story”: psychoanalysis as a “dream mender” We are now in the age of Harry Potter and need not wonder why this wonderfully crafted phantasmagoria is enjoying unparalleled popu- larity and acclaim. Those of us who are parents know well the timeless 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.

plea of children: “Daddy (or Mummy), tell me a story!” Stories, legends, fairy tales, fables, parables, and myths are all different versions of dreams or phantasies. They are all narratives that give meaning to the chaotic outpourings of the unconscious. More specifically, if we employ Bion’s binocular model, as alluded to earlier, we can come up with the following image: If we conjecture that the paranoid–schizoid position constitutes one pincer that intercepts O and the depressive position another, and also that the former functions to lay down a barricade of unconscious phantasy or myth to hold back the β-elements of O and the latter seeks to give a more realistic version of Truth in tandem with (following) the initializing phantasmatization (mythification) of Truth, we acquire a model of the importance of stories for unconscious well-being and for the well- being of the individual. Stories, phantasies, or dreams are the first line of defence against being overwhelmed. We must first be able to falsify (alter) or attenuate Truth in order to tolerate it, after which we must personalize it as our own subjective experience that we (re-)create from within ourselves in order to vouchsafe our sense of agency. Thanks to the objectivity offered by the depressive position, we can then objectify its Otherness. To restate this from another angle, traditionally, when psychoana- lysts interpret unconscious phantasies to analysands, the predominat- ing point of view has been that from an external factual reality—“When you were in the waiting room and heard me on the phone, you thought that I was talking with my mistress” (in fantasy12)—I imply that, in reality, I was not. In other words, phantasies were understood as the prime cause of pathology, and a debunking of the phantasy by a safe restoration of reality was the cure. I believe that while that premise may be valid, there is another, obverse way of understanding the role of phantasies. I conceive of them as the first line of defence against the evolution of the β-elements (unprocessed non-mental proto-experiences, O). Phantasies arrest their impact by mythifying them and converting them into personal narratives that flow and cascade in the ongoing mythic stream of the unconscious. By interpreting phantasies, we are validating their importance and their inner truth in preparation for the succeeding process—that of allowing the mechanisms of the depressive position to conduct trans- formations of the phantasies into statements of objective (separate) reality. Thus, an interpretation about an unconscious phantasy ver- bally completes and therefore validates the phantasy by allowing for a transformation from the sensual image to the verbal abstraction, in 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.

addition to a veriﬁcation of its function by the analyst. In other words, there must be an alignment between the unconscious phantasy and its conscious descendant, the thought. Furthermore, when Shakespeare said, “Sleep knits up the ravelled sleeve of care”, he could just as well have said “dreams and/or phantasies knit up the ravelled sleeve of care”—in preparation for an emotional processing and mental diges- tion that will happily culminate in abstract thought about one’s emotions. All the above is probably well known to infants and children in terms of their preoccupation with fairy tales and fables, which they need to have repeated over and over again. Dreams, fables, legends, myths, and/or phantasies are the lost primal tongue of imagery that has dominated the preverbal life of infants. They washed away the tears of grief and care and preserved the innocence of the infant. They subsequently submerged and surrendered to the overlord of word symbols, but they can still be located in the nether world of our being as our “silent service”, imagistically licking our wounds and being at our beck and call for all our rites of passage and wrongs at the hands of circumstance.

NOTES

This chapter is an abbreviated version of a longer annotated contribution that explored virtually all of Bion’s contributions on the subject of dreaming. Editing was undertaken here in order to reduce redundancies. 1. I should state that this is my own opinion as I reflect on the implications of the extensions of Bion’s conception. 2. With regard to “psychotic dreaming”, I believe that Bion’s case material on the subject would perhaps be better explained by hypothesizing that the psychotic, rather than being able to dream, becomes “dreamed” by a persecutory object, as suggested in Tausk’s (1919) “influencing machine”. 3. This arrangement is strictly my own way of editing Bion to make sense of these items. He himself lists them separately as “Absolute Truth”, “Ultimate Reality”, “β-elements”, inherent pre-conceptions”, “noumena”, “things-in-themselves”, and “godhead”. I believe that my edited version does greater justice to his views. The simplest way of understanding O would be pure, raw experience before we process it. 4. This self-recognition of unconscious inner incompetence is noteworthy among schizophrenics, who seem to carry with them constitutional flaws in mental processing of emotional information. They are afflicted, inter alia, with a tendency towards overinclusion of sensory stimuli, a sensory-gating problem that closely correlates with Bion’s concepts of the contact-barrier and the Grid. 5. It is noteworthy that Kleinians, including Bion, never contemplated the adaptive (Hartmann, 1939) aspects of the death instinct. Bion himself, whose O 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.

transcends it, seems never to have come to realize that the death instinct may be an adaptive defence for those whose defective α-functions had failed them, and who thus default into the use of the death instinct as their only hope. 6. Francesca Bion informed me that Bion had been familiar with Stanislavski’s ideas. 7. This is an exact quote from Bion during my analysis with him in 1976. He mentioned that he had obtained it from one of Freud’s letters to Lou Andreas- Salomé (Freud & Andreas-Salomé, 1966). 8. I differ somewhat from Bion on this issue. I believe that the infant is “hard- wired” from the beginning with its own rudimentary α-functions as a Kantian primary category; this would explain why infants can communicate with their objects nonverbally from the beginning and are apparently able to dream from the beginning. I believe, however, that the mother’s α-functions are, nevertheless, necessary. 9. The barrier or taboo in the Kleinian version refers to the sanctity of the in- sides of mother’s body (part-object). In the Freudian version the barrier or taboo refers to the incest object qua whole object. 10. The contact-barrier designation may also apply to the concept of the “pas- sive stimulus barrier” (Freud, 1920g) which itself is related to Hartmann’s (1939) concept of inborn “stimulus threshold” as an apparatus of primary autonomy. 11. I suggest that the contact-barrier’s capacity for selectivity predicates the operation of a cryptic, numinous, and vitalistic presence or intelligence within the structure. 12. Here I spell “fantasy” with an ““f” rather than a “ph” because in this usage it is conscious or preconscious, not unconscious. 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.