Bringing in the Dreamer: Some Reflections on Dreamwork, Surprise, and Analytic Process* Philip M
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(2000). Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 36:685-705 Bringing in the Dreamer: Some Reflections On Dreamwork, Surprise, And Analytic Process* Philip M. Bromberg, Ph.D. About Forty Years ago, Lancelot Law Whyte (1960), in his book The Unconscious Before Freud, wrote: There is no one Zeitgeist, no single state of awareness in any community, even in a small professional group, at any one time. There may be traditional elements in decline, a variety of dominant elements, and new ones emerging…. Moreover, ideas may undergo cycles of influence, and may be temporarily inhibited, and consciously or unconsciously, transformed…. [O]nly the greatest ideas or men can continue to be fertile in the new context which they have themselves helped to create. [p. 12] Whyte's contention was that the “unconscious mind” is such an idea, and that Sigmund Freud was such a man, but that “the antithesis conscious/unconscious may have exhausted its utility” (p. 174). “The trouble,” he says, “is not that they are ambiguous; that might be overcome by providing better definitions. It is that we do not yet know the right definitions to use, the meanings which would throw most light on the structure of mental processes. What we need is not merely words with definitions using other words, but insight into the changing structure of mental processes” (p. 15). To underscore his argument about there being no single zeitgeist at any point in intellectual history, Whyte quotes H. A. Taine, a French historian who, as far back as 1871, questioned the idea of separating conscious and unconscious into different realms. In imagery that I find breathtakingly comparable to current thinking about the structure of the ————————————— Early versions of sections of this essay were presented at the Fall 1998 meeting of The American Psychoanalytic Association as part of a panel entitled “Have We Changed Our View of the Unconscious in Contemporary Clinical Work?” and at the February 2000 meeting of the PEP-CD ROM Conference, “Journeys on the Royal Road: Current Perspectives on the Clinical Use of Dreams.” WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 685 - mind, Taine, in a volume entitled On Intelligence (cited in Whyte, 1960, pp. 166-167), writes the following: One can … compare the mind of a man to a theatre of indefinite depth whose apron is very narrow but whose stage becomes larger away from the apron. On this lighted apron there is room for one actor only. He enters, gestures for a moment, and leaves; another arrives, then another, and so on…. Among the scenery and on the far-off backstage there are multitudes of obscure forms whom a summons can bring onto the stage … and unknown evolutions take place incessantly among this crowd of actors. It may be wrong, Whyte says, “to think of two realms which interact, called the conscious and the unconscious, or even of two contrasted kinds of mental process, conscious and unconscious, each causally self-contained until it hands over to the other. There may exist, as I believe, a single realm of mental processes … of which only certain transitory aspects or phases are accessible to immediate conscious attention” (p. 15). This way of thinking about the mind and personality structure will, obviously, influence what an analyst believes is taking place while he is being an analyst, and what he believes is taking place while he and his patient are accessing “the royal road” to the patient's unconscious. In an article titled “Potholes on the Royal Road: Or Is It an Abyss?” (Bromberg, 2000), I began by noting Theodor Reik's (1936) startling suggestion—startling because it was so far ahead of its time—that there is no “royal road” to the unconscious, and if there is a road at all, it is to be discovered most vividly, not in dreams, as Freud (1900, p. 608) suggested, but rather in the experience of surprise, in that surprise allows an analyst to find something new, which will then create its own technique. I offered the view that Reik's contribution opened the door to recognizing that the road to the patient's unconscious is not discovered but created—and that it is created nonlinearly by the analyst's own unconscious participation in its construction while he is consciously engaged in looking for it. To put this in contemporary terms, some aspect of what is unconscious in the patient and unconscious in the analyst is always present in what we call “enactment.” It is the enacted piece of each partner's impact upon the other that makes the royal road a “bumpy road,” and makes it all too evident that the raw material from which the road is constructed is drawn WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 686 - from the unconscious, not only of the patient, but also of the analyst. It is the bumps in the royal road— what Reik called “surprises”—that provide the greatest leverage for therapeutic action, because they are the most powerful ongoing source of novelty, unpredictability, and spontaneity—the true wellspring of the unconscious. Paving the potholes in the royal road—that is, bringing the bumps from the level of enactment to the level of conscious perception and conscious thought—is the biggest, and I feel, the most interesting part of the analytic work. And yet, I believe that working with dreams is, exactly as Freud said, an indispensible aspect of the process I've just described, even if it isn't literally a “road” in the way he perceived it. I think that Freud was correct in his view that dreams provide something unique, and I want to share a few of my thoughts about what this “something” is, and how I use it in my own work. Sometimes a patient starts a session saying “I don't have anything to talk about today; I wish I had a dream.” We are all more or less familiar with this, and most of us would agree that the meaning of it can be fully grasped only as an event that is unique to the analysis in which it occurred. Nevertheless, I think that there are certain meanings that tend to emerge more than others, and I've found these to be typically organized around the concept of resistance. It is as if the patient were saying: “If I had a dream I would be spared having to think about why I have nothing to say today.” But there is another version of that opening remark, one that occurs much less frequently and, when it does, captures my attention more than the first. It was, in fact, said very recently by a patient who I talk about in more detail shortly. The remark was “I feel like I want to tell you a dream, but I don't have a dream.” As the session progressed, the patient's “felt need to tell a dream” was more and more clearly understood as expressing the same thing that the dream itself would have expressed had he indeed arrived with one—a voice from a dissociated part of the patient's self that was ready to be heard, but that the patient was not quite ready to acknowledge as “me.” There are many variations of this opening remark, and I've come to discover that more often than not, if such a comment is not seen routinely as “resistance,” it will be found to convey the message I've just described—as if the patient were saying, “I don't have anything to talk about today, but maybe somebody else in there does.” My approach to working with dreams is simply a reflection of my overarching WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 687 - “self-state” perspective on the human mind and my belief that, no matter what one's theoretical persuasion or loyalty, a clinical stance derived from this perspective facilitates the deepest and most enduring personality growth in every patient. A few words about this overarching perspective before I get into the specifics of how this influences the way in which I work with dreams. The continually shifting configuration of self-states that we call “self-hood”—this realm of mental processes of which, in Whyte's (1960, p. 15) words, “only certain transitory aspects or phases are accessible to immediate conscious attention”—in order to function optimally, must be at once fluid and robust. That is, a person's transitions between self-states must permit spontaneity and novelty without threatening the stability of self-continuity, self-cohesiveness, and secure attachment to others, thereby allowing an individual to lead his life creatively, relatively safe from the traumatic spectre of self- invalidation or, in its most extreme form, self-annihilation. Though influenced by a variety of factors, the developmental achievement I am describing depends, in turn, on how well the capacity for affect-regulation and affective competency has been achieved. We know that interpersonal transactions between infant and caregiver mediate the development of self, and that the development of the infant's capacity for affect-regulation and secure human-relatedness is a central outcome of this process.1 When these patterns of interpersonal interaction are relatively successful they create a stable foundation for internal affect-regulation that is largely nonverbal and unconscious and allows for further successful negotiation of interpersonal transactions at increasingly higher levels of self- development and interpersonal maturity.