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CWB 11:93-94 (2014)

16 October 1959: Various Forms of Dream Manifestation. Cogitations

Author: W. R. Bion

Abstract

Organic
1. The patient may be concussed – an unlikely contingency but one to be borne in mind in view of the patient's disturbed condition, and therefore the possibility that he has been in an accident.
2. He may be drunk.
3. He may have taken some other drug – cocaine, barbiturates, etc.
Psychological
1. α is in progress. That is to say, he is attempting to transform immediately current events in the room into assimilable form. This pre-supposes that his α capacity is rudimentary and is being expressed aloud presumably to get the analyst's help. But it may slide off into
2. dreaming. This is the emergence of an activity which the patient dare not allow himself out of the analyst's presence through dread of the dream's manifest content, and in particular destroyed objects, un-α'd objects and super-ego.
3. An artificially contrived dream or a hallucinated dream – the latter must be distinguished from the hallucination. Without this distinction the inability to produce associations cannot be properly understood and there is blurring of the distinction between the process intended to evacuate (hallucination) and a process concerned with a need to introject. The artificially contrived dream sounds what it is; it is consciously fabricated, and that, I think, must be taken as the distinction from the hallucinated dream. The hallucinated dream is one produced under duress; the patient must dream, and it is this compulsion which leads to an uncontrolled hallucinated dream.
  Page 93
4. Hallucination: olfactory, auditory, visual. The function is evacuatory, and it is stimulated by immediate events. If the analyst knows the content of the hallucination, then he must see it as an immediate situation not transformed (digested) at all. Thus the patient starts up, pointing and saying, “My wife, it's my wife! She's coming for me! Stop her!” This is a visual image – he is evacuating it through his eyes. It might be argued that this is how he sees me and that I must therefore be transformed mentally into a visual image

CWB 11:93-94 (2014)

16 October 1959: Various Forms of Dream Manifestation. Cogitations

Author: W. R. Bion

Abstract

Organic
1. The patient may be concussed – an unlikely contingency but one to be borne in mind in view of the patient's disturbed condition, and therefore the possibility that he has been in an accident.
2. He may be drunk.
3. He may have taken some other drug – cocaine, barbiturates, etc.
Psychological
1. α is in progress. That is to say, he is attempting to transform immediately current events in the room into assimilable form. This pre-supposes that his α capacity is rudimentary and is being expressed aloud presumably to get the analyst's help. But it may slide off into
2. dreaming. This is the emergence of an activity which the patient dare not allow himself out of the analyst's presence through dread of the dream's manifest content, and in particular destroyed objects, un-α'd objects and super-ego.
3. An artificially contrived dream or a hallucinated dream – the latter must be distinguished from the hallucination. Without this distinction the inability to produce associations cannot be properly understood and there is blurring of the distinction between the process intended to evacuate (hallucination) and a process concerned with a need to introject. The artificially contrived dream sounds what it is; it is consciously fabricated, and that, I think, must be taken as the distinction from the hallucinated dream. The hallucinated dream is one produced under duress; the patient must dream, and it is this compulsion which leads to an uncontrolled hallucinated dream.
  Page 93
4. Hallucination: olfactory, auditory, visual. The function is evacuatory, and it is stimulated by immediate events. If the analyst knows the content of the hallucination, then he must see it as an immediate situation not transformed (digested) at all. Thus the patient starts up, pointing and saying, “My wife, it's my wife! She's coming for me! Stop her!” This is a visual image – he is evacuating it through his eyes. It might be argued that this is how he sees me and that I must therefore be transformed mentally into a visual image