You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
≪…the best colleague you are ever likely to have — besides yourself — is not an analyst or supervisor or parent, but the patient≫.1
I shall here apply this Bionian principle (≪the patient as one's best colleague≫) to a dream which I shall present as evidence that the α-function is constantly at work. A kind of satellite navigation system dreams in real time what takes place in the analyst's consulting room after an interpretation. This ≪dream≫ need not in my view necessarily be interpreted, but it can be used to facilitate the development of the field.
Through the example I shall give below, I also wish to share some of the salient aspects of my method of working. Whereas the concepts of the field, of unsaturated interpretation and of narrative transformation are now quite widely accepted, the notion of transformation into a dream, as a complement to other types of transformation, no doubt calls for some explanation. Transformation into a dream is an activity carried on constantly by the analyst's mind, which strips the patient's communication of its reality status and regards the patient's narration as a dream that assembles, transforms and constructs itself in real time in the encounter between the two minds at work. This is so because the central operation performed in analysis is deemed to be enrichment of the ≪dreaming ensemble≫ (Grotstein, 2007). In other words, development of the α-function and of the apparatus for dreaming dreams is seen as the purpose of analysis. This implies a constructivistic vision of an unconscious engaged in an ongoing process of construction and transformation — an unconscious that must at the same time be dreamed (thoughts in search of a thinker) and will expand as it is