25 July 1959. Cogitations

I shall assume that the patient's fear of the murderous super-ego prevents his approaching the Positions [paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions]. This in turn means that he is unable to dream, for it is in dream that the Positions are negotiated. He therefore postpones this experience till the analytic session in which he hopes he will have support, or perhaps, feeling he has support, dares to have the dream he cannot have without the consciousness of support.

He has to dream – the important thing here is not the content of the dream, but his having to ‘dream’, a positive transitive act for which a transitive verb is necessary. Not only the creative person needs to dream to accomplish the act of creation involving experience of the Positions, but also the lesser mortal who needs to do it to ‘understand’ the interpretation, each good interpretation being, as I have said before, an event that is, or should be, significant as one of the selected facts to which Poincaré draws attention. The patient who consistently ‘cannot understand’ may not simply be resisting, but resisting in a particular way. Indeed it may be that here lies the essential difference between the resistance as something peculiar to the neurotic and relegation to the unconscious, and psychotic destruction of the means for understanding which is associated with an apparently full consciousness of what is ordinarily the furniture of the unconscious. “I do not understand”, or, “do not know why”, or “do not know how”, etc. may be taken either as a positive statement of inability to dream, or a defiant assertion of a capacity for not dreaming.

If this is so, psychoanalytic use of the dream as a method by which the unconscious is made conscious is an employment in reverse of what is in nature the machinery that is employed in the transformation of the conscious into material suitable for storage in the unconscious. In other words, the dream-work we know is only a small aspect of dreaming proper – dreaming