Editor's Report

It's necessary to have adversity, incompatibilities, antagonisms, things that are irreconcilable, at the risk that the most sordid passions might be revealed. There's no choice. It's necessary to work with these things.

A young woman uses a visual image to describe her progress through the world and our treatment, telling me: “I feel like I'm stuck in the middle, half in and half out, barely able to move my body.” She is determined to find her way through an imagined wall of mud, an image she keeps returning to throughout our work. Over time she imagines pressing into the wall and getting stuck in the mud, sometimes successfully punching a limb or part of her body through and being able to view the other side, and at other times feeling immobilized and gazing at the barrier, resigned. I hear these images as waking dreams representing her developing physical embodiment in the world, a self getting worked out in resistance to an obstacle.

Ferro's (2005) understanding of a waking dream starts with the idea of a pictogram, a visual representation of a mental state unconsciously formed when beta-elements (primitive anxieties and sense impressions that cannot yet be directly known) come into contact with alpha function and transform into alpha-elements. These alpha-elements form pictograms that flash into consciousness, and a sequence of these pictograms can give rise to waking dream thoughts, which we might come into contact with in the course of our reveries. Waking dream thoughts visually synthesize what is being mentalized but is not yet thinkable.

The idea of a national border wall resonates with the culture-wide waking dream of the moment. It is an idea that has captivated a nation, as alive in the minds of those who support it as those who reject it. Most waking dreams are unique, unconsciously informed by the different and multiple meanings of each individual's past and present experiences, but the nationwide waking dre