My invitation to contribute this article asked that I comment on a paper about a dream within a dream by Eugene Mahon. After reading Mahon's (2002) paper several times, I decided to forego an attempt at a detailed critique in favor of using it as a point of departure for a meditation on the theme of this volume: whether dreams may still be regarded as the Royal Road to the unconscious. That Mahon, himself, may accept this proposition is suggested first, by the meticulous attention he pays to dreams in this and other papers, by the seriousness with which he takes the task of disproving Freud's (1900) contention that “If a particular event is inserted into a dream … by the dream work itself, this implies the most decided confirmation of the reality of the event,” and by his disclosing that he and his patient spent several weeks analyzing the dream in question. Thus, although he does not state, explicitly, that he believes the dream is uniquely privileged, as Freud did, his approach and general attitude to dream analysis is far from being at odds with such an assumption.
As a practicing analyst who is deeply interested in dreams and other products of the imagination, I inevitably compared my own beliefs and approaches to dreams with those of Mahon throughout each of my several readings of his paper. Among the initial results of this comparison was the impression that Mahon's work with dreams was a great deal more “classical” than mine. That is, he seems, at least tacitly, to accept and use Freud's methods of dream interpretation as a template to be followed faithfully except, as in the single instance of the dream within a dream, where he feels justified in challenging the Master. Further, the phrasing and organization of his challenge has the same air of respect as theologians' approaches to scripture.
If pressed to subscribe to a particular theoretical orientation, I would probably first express earnest objections to the question on the grounds of its resemblance to an item on a forced choice test that allows for no deviation from the psychometrist's phrasing. Next, I would try to clarify
that the question doesn't discriminate among the theoretical, clinical, technical, and aesthetic components of various psychoanalytic tributaries, each of which, and aspects of which, may be preferred to others. For the purposes of this paper, however, I am content to identify myself as fundamentally Freudian, since that will give me license to specify how, despite our common ancestry, Mahon and I diverge.
To begin with, as I've already hinted, were I to meet a Freud who'd survived into the 21st Century, I fancy I would be respectful but not reverent. I would expect him to have known about the many changes in psychoanalytic thought since he began to invent it, and to have evaluated and revealed his opinions of them, as was his wont throughout his career. Some, he would anatomize, scrutinize their parts, and subject them to the kinds of ingenious refutation that comprise the subjects of many of his writings. But, for the ones that he felt could be woven into his complex fabric, he might immediately find a place or, initially rejecting them, incorporate them later on. As an imaginary example, consider what he would have done with the findings of Aserinsky, Kleitman (1953), Dement (1957), et al., and their successors, regarding conjugate rapid eye movements, and the absence of muscle tone everywhere in the body save the eyes and genitals during REM periods. Coincidentally, I would think it highly probable that these research data might have given Freud decisive support in pronouncing the dream to be the royal road. In that case, however, he would be thinking theoretically. Whether he'd then find a way of integrating this new knowledge into his theory of therapy or technique, is a different matter.
An analyst who uses The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud, 1900) as a manual would, of necessity, have to devote a great deal of time to attend to the patient's narration, elicit associations to every aspect of the content, study the day residue, deal with the secondary elaboration, arrive at an interpretation, etc. Mahon's exposition strongly suggests that he and his patient conducted their treatment of the dream, if not in absolute adherence to Freud's model, at least in a close simulacrum. Since the analysis seems to have consisted of four or five sessions per week, this regime is certainly plausible. What is more questionable, however, is the absence, in Mahon's report, of moments or events that might have given him pause for the kind of puzzlement or self doubt that occurs in the experience of any analyst, indeed, of any clinician, from time to time.
It is my impression that Mahon and his patient both have a scholar's familiarity with Freud's oeuvre. In addition, both seem richly erudite, and extraordinarily intellectualized. For better or worse, then, these traits lend to their analytic discourse an uncommon degree of the ideational as opposed to, or as a dilution of, a more spontaneously expressive dialogue. To the degree that my observations are accurate in this respect, there seems to have been an implicit agreement between the two men that their mutual project would encompass as many of the features of a “classical” analysis, along with the mandatory and equally “classical,” attention to dreams, as possible.
It seems to me that this classicism carried an array of preconceptions that informed the conduct of the analyst, and the analysand. As with all preconceptions, these appeared to have been tacitly accepted and, hence, to remain un-interrogated. For example, the author's insistence on regarding clinical psychoanalysis as a “science” rather than a hermeneutic procedure would require that we believe his interpretations to be the definitive ones or the only ones permissible. In parallel fashion, he would assert that we accept only the patient's material on which he based his interpretations, and reject or ignore the rest. Further, we would be obliged to endorse the propositions that every dream is instigated by an infantile wish, and that there exists a set of dream symbols that invariably encode specific ideas and not others.
If these characterizations of Mahon's approach in the sample contained in this paper are accurate, I believe he would reply “yes” to the question of whether dreams are still the royal road. There would be no reason to doubt that his (and his patient's) attitude to Freud's thought, even his deferential manner in challenging it, reflect a kind of sanctification.
My own take on the eponymous question is that any type of clinical material as well as the armamentarium of techniques that may be applied to it may come to qualify as the royal road depending on its function at a given time and context of the analysis. That is, every clinical encounter contains a particular clue that, when it is discovered, renders the remaining material intelligible. The clue can as well be a locution of the patient's, an enactment, a silence, an affective expression, a gesture or posture, as it might be a dream. And I would add, taking a leaf from Freud's book, that just as a forbidden or disturbing thought may be
disguised as apparently the least significant element of a dream, it may also seek refuge and disguise outside of a dream in some other seemingly trivial piece of behavior.
Early in my career, under the influence of respected teachers and supervisors, my interventions tended to be removed by varying degrees from my patients' immediate experiences. My rationale was that they needed to grasp the dynamics underlying their behavior. Some of my patients seemed receptive to this, but many did not. I was often vacillating between the wish to emulate my mentors and the realization that I was not reaching most of my patients. Here, the question of what constitutes a “correct” interpretation, and its corollary, by what criteria do we arrive at it, are paramount. For it may be posited that the most “correct” interpretation is that which reaches deepest into the causality of a behavior, i.e., gets to the metapsychological root of it. And who could argue that such an assertion lacks merit. The sole objection to it is that in the vast majority of clinical situations it is likely to have little therapeutic value: worse, it is almost certain to be taken as evidence of the analyst's failure to understand the patient and accordingly will become a locus of resistance if not a buttress for intellectual defenses.
One of my patients began a recent session by describing a dream in which he met a co-worker who'd died a few years ago. They'd been friends for a long time, but had a falling out a year or two before the man's death. It had been precipitated by the co-worker's outrage at my patient's failure to support him for a promotion that my patient felt was unmerited. In the dream, they greeted each other effusively with warm handshakes that signaled that their differences had been resolved and their friendship restored. He emphasized how happy this made him feel.
My patient said that he did not know what to make of the dream but his wife, to whom he told it, thought it applied to another friendship of his, this with a man to whom he'd been very close over a period of decades but who, recently seemed to take distance from him. He thought this plausible but not especially enlightening, and moved on to other subjects that he wanted to discuss. Recently retired, he described steps to take up a new hobby and resign from a part-time teaching position.
The relevant background of this vignette is that the patient has been depressed about the absence of direction and meaning in his life after retirement. He is also convinced that he has lost his conversational fluency, becoming tongue-tied at social gatherings, and unable to access the word he wishes to use in routine speech. He has been evaluated for cognitive and memory deficits with no evidence for either being found. His depression is also related to erectile dysfunction and a generalized anhedonia that is often enough broken through by pleasant and pleasurable experiences from which, predictably, he soon returns to his baseline dejection. His wife and children are very supportive and devoted to him and he has a wide circle of friends with whom he engages regularly despite regarding himself as socially inept.
Referring to the dream in the session that followed, he again commented on how happy he was to be reconciled with his former friend. He also mentioned his wife's idea that the friend in the dream was a proxy for the one who has currently cooled towards him. I asked him why he would have to substitute for the living friend, a dead one. He was unable to explain this but then spoke of his joy in seeing the dead friend alive. This led him to understand that he would feel a comparable joy if he were able to breathe life into a relationship that he was afraid had become moribund and, even more cogently, to breathe life back into himself.
There would have been an ample basis for asking the patient to associate to all the elements of the dream, and trace this material to early familial origins. Indeed, this patient would have welcomed such a procedure and participated in it with enthusiasm. What I did, instead, was to wait and see what would emerge. I have long accepted the hypothesis that any of the material in a session where a dream has been presented may be associations to the dream, whether or not it is so labelled, and whether or not it has been elicited by explicit work on the dream. Often this is borne out; sometimes not. My point is that using a self-conscious method such as the one Freud demonstrated in The Interpretation of Dreams, one that seems to have been emulated to a considerable degree by Mahon and his patient, might stultify and render formulaic any interpretation that would result.
Further, I should confess that often my approach to dreams does not include any attempt at interpretation or discovering a discursive
meaning. At other times, after asking the patient what she makes of a dream, I will accept her inclination either to continue to engage with it or to let it alone, but I will not stop listening for associations in whatever came before or after the dream, even sessions later, as in my example. My reason is the belief that rich and unforeseen matter tends to emerge unbidden when spontaneity is optimal.
But I have another basis for often refraining from trying to interpret or decipher the dream: it is that I am aware of a wish (the patient's and mine) that the dream stand alone, uninterpreted, having retained its distinctly dream's reality and thereby embodying a special value. I don't want to translate it into expository prose and then throw it away, emptied of its contents. I am less interested in analyzing dreams than in rescuing them from the processes of dilution, fading, disillusionment, and utility, which would deprive them of their unique difference from ordinary experience. Moreover, I believe that this way of receiving a dream has distinct therapeutic virtue. I am asserting that there is at least as much value in the pleasures of dreams and dreaming as in their interpretation. And further, that our patients can benefit as much from the one as from the other. This suggests that there is an entire realm of the therapeutic that has remained consciously unexplored although its effects have doubtlessly been applied and felt subversively.
I suspect that all the psychoanalysts who take a special interest in dreams, fantasies, movies, plays, novels, poems, and other works of the imagination are similarly drawn to their magical qualities, their dialectical function as an antidote to reality, and that they use the conceit of interpretation as the price of admission to a domain whose pleasures might otherwise be deemed forbidden.
We can conceive of many but not all dreams as the patients' poetry, imaginative entities that are brought to the analyst with the hope, implicit or explicit, that she will appreciate their special qualities and help the patient to appreciate them. This can occur through interpretation, but more because the act of interpretation demonstrates the analyst's riveted attention than the unraveling of the content. One essential reason that every patient has sought analysis is that she has repeatedly lost the attention of those in her life to whom she most wanted to communicate the things that she most needed them to know. She could not share
these with anyone else and, so, in desperation, she has taken the risk of engaging with this attentive stranger, this psychoanalyst.
Just as filmmakers create narratives for audiences, the analysand collaborates with her analyst to create a narrative that differs from the one she was given early in her life. That narrative has been spoken and enacted in myriad ways. She is the protagonist of her own play. One of the motives for her seeking psychotherapy is that she has been playacting, that is, enacting a role in her play. Among the goals she is seeking are to stop playacting and enacting, and to start playing and acting. To act, in this context, means to depart from the received script, to improvise, to do things differently. To play means to live, for as long as may be necessary, in imaginative circumstances where variability of all kinds is possible. I am proposing that the function of appreciation, in contrast to interpretation, contributes most to the creation of these imaginative circumstances. It entails the willing suspension of disbelief and what Marianne Moore described as “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” a wonderful metaphor of transference.
Because a dream may be felt as qualitatively different from other material and be brought to the analyst as a gift or offering, immediate interpretive measures, including the deliberate elicitation of associations, may be felt as a rejection by the patient, and a premature divestment of enchantment from the dream. I am here proposing nothing less than that one essential function of psychoanalysis is to help the patient to an acceptance and valuation of this domain of experience as a central component of one's inner life. In this connection, I would remind the reader of Winnicott's idea that the infant's attachment to transitional objects and related phenomena metamorphoses to an interest in all the realms of culture, as she develops towards adulthood. Thus, alongside the analytic work of helping the patient to achieve a firmer and more ego-syntonic grasp of reality, and balancing it, is the focus on enlarging and refining the capacity for play in all its forms. To quote Winnicott (1953):
This intermediate area of experience, unchallenged in respect of its belonging to inner or external (shared) reality, constitutes the greater part of the infant's experience and throughout life is retained in the intense experiencing that belongs to the arts and to religion and to imaginative living, and to creative scientific work.
The literary critic, Susan Sontag (1990), devoted an entire book to this, and related propositions. It is titled Against Interpretation, and I interpolate the following excerpt from one of its essays, “On Style,” in support of my argument and to credit her as a source of my thinking.
I am not saying that a work of art creates a world which is entirely self-referring. Of course, works of art (with the exception of music) refer to the real world—to our knowledge, to our experience, to our values. They present information and evaluations. But their distinctive feature is that they give rise not to conceptual knowledge (which is the distinctive feature of discursive or scientific knowledge—e.g., philosophy, sociology, psychology, history) but to something like an excitation, a phenomenon of commitment, judgment in a state of thralldom or captivation. Which to say that the knowledge we gain through art is an experience of the form or style of knowing something, rather than a knowledge of something (like a fact or a moral judgment) in itself.
This explains the preeminence of the value of expressiveness in works of art; and how the value of expressiveness—that is, of style—rightly takes precedence over content (when content is, falsely, isolated from style). The satisfactions of Paradise Lost for us do not lie in its views on God and man, but in the superior kinds of energy, vitality, and expressiveness which are incarnated in the poem.
Hence, too, the peculiar dependence of works of art, however expressive, upon the cooperation of the person having the experience, for one may see what is “said” but remain unmoved, either through dullness or distraction. Art is seduction, not rape. A work of art proposes a type of experience designed to manifest the quality of imperiousness. But art cannot seduce without the complicity of the experiencing subject.
Returning, now, to the consideration of whether Freud's positing the dream as the royal road to the unconscious remains valid, I fear my contribution to be equivocal. For, if my assertion that the aesthetic approach to dreams is as important as the analytic is accepted, a necessary consequence would be that the royal road is more a function of the analyst's
receptive attitude than of the inherent quality of the material that is shared. The caveat, however, is that dreams, unlike many other classes of material, come wrapped in an aura of wonder, of alternate reality, arcane consciousness. They are, therefore, repositories and representatives of the unknown, and at the same time of psychic regions to which the patient imputes unique significance.
Because a similar aura may envelop other classes of material, it cannot be said that dreams are the only royal road, but they are perhaps the most frequently trod one. It may be instructive, here, to use another literary example to illustrate the process by which an object that, on the face of it, is at the opposite pole from dreams in its ordinariness, may nonetheless attain an equally magical aspect. The passage is the well-known exposition of James Joyce's (1963) concept of epiphany. The speaker is the narrator of the novel titled Stephen Hero, from which much of the material for his better known Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was drawn.
By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech, or of gesture, or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments. He told Cranly that the clock of the Ballast Office was capable of an epiphany. Cranly questioned the inscrutable dial of the Ballast Office with his no less inscrutable countenance:
Yes, said Stephen. I will pass it time after time, allude to it, refer to it, catch a glimpse of it. It is only an item in the catalogue of Dublin's street furniture. Then all at once I see it and I know at once what it is: epiphany.
What?
Imagine my glimpses at that clock as the gropings of a spiritual eye which seeks to adjust its vision to an exact focus. The moment the focus is reached the object is epiphanised. It is just in this epiphany that I find the third, the supreme quality of beauty.
It is by the process of epiphany that the ordinary is rendered extraordinary. How, exactly, an epiphany occurs may not be specifiable but what is
clear is that the probability of its occurrence is enhanced by the intensity of attention given to the source of the experience that becomes epiphanised, in our case, the patient. Accordingly, any event that occurs in an analysis, no matter its intrinsic qualities, may acquire the radiance of an epiphany. This view may gain confirmation from the many instances in which a patient, when asked to recall a particularly mutative moment in her analysis, will frequently cite something that the analyst could never have predicted. I therefore submit that there is more than one, and probably many royal roads of which dreams may be the most often cited but perhaps not the most representative.