August 13, 2021
Freud famously wrote that “The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind (Freud, 1900, p. 608), What is less well known is that he immediately added in a footnote:
Dreams are not the only phenomena which allow us to find a basis for psychopathology in psychology. In a short series of papers (1898b and 1899a) which is not yet completed, I have attempted to interpret a number of phenomena of daily life as evidence in favor of the same conclusions [ 1909]. These, together with some further papers on forgetting, slips of the tongue, bungled actions, etc., have since been collected under the title of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Freud, 1901b).
Eugene Mahon's essay “Dreams Within Dreams” (Mahon 2004) moves me to add that another “royal road to the unconscious” is the psychoanalytic interaction between a brilliant and talented analysand and a brilliant and talented psychoanalyst in the termination phase of a successful analysis. Mr. P's dream is not only a source of knowledge about his unconscious mental life (and about dreams within dreams). It is also a product of collaboration between patient and analyst over a period of years, and especially within the process of termination of the analysis. In Eugene Mahon's pellucid article, we have his written account of the dream as narrated by Mr. P, along with associations offered by Mr. P in the analytic hour and by Dr. Mahon in the course of preparing his article.
Mahon writes:
I am suggesting that once there has been a feeling of the uncanny in waking life, what's to stop dream life from recycling it unconsciously and reprising it in dream life as a dream within a dream? Surely it is this kind of uncanny recycling that the poet tries to capture when
Page 46he says, “La vida es sueño.,” (Calderón de la Barca 1636) or “our little life is rounded with a sleep” (Shakespeare 1564–1616). If this implies an even greater continuity between dream life and waking life than is usually thought of, a reciprocal cross-fertilization of one by the other, it may also highlight a cultural mistrust of the oneiric in Occidental circles, Oriental culture being far less discriminating when it comes to distinguishing dream life from waking life, as the title of Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty's (1984), astute study, “Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities,” suggests, (Mahon 2024, p. 11).
I will pick up on the relationship between dreaming and reality shortly. At this juncture, my point is that the analyst's observations while writing about the patient's dream also count as associations to the dream. In saying this, I am seeing the dream report itself as a shared creative product arising from the dyad's work of eight years' duration. Mr. P had a dream during the night, recalled an unconsciously edited version of it in an analytic session, and reported that version within the context of an intense transference relationship which had considerable history to it. That history, within Mr. P's conscious, preconscious, and unconscious memory, provided materials used in the dream. In Eugene Mahon's article, we receive an account of how the analyst heard the dream and presented it to readers. As Thomas Ogden wrote, “The dream dreamt in the course of an analysis is in a sense the dream of the analytic third,” (Ogden, 1996, p. 884), in other words a co-construction. And the analyst's writing is in itself part of a dynamic process. As Robert Michels wrote in “The Case History,” (Michels, 2000, p. 371) “Every analyst presenting a case is like the candidate with a first case, and every case presentation, like analysis itself, is theater as well as report, with the analyst-presenter an actor as well as author, whose performance as presenter provides an important insight into his or her performance as analyst.” Taking my point one step further, writing about a case becomes part of the analyst's personal work, parallel to a patient's personal consolidation of analytic work after termination. I am extending Michels' point a bit to suggest that Eugene Mahon's textual associations while writing about Mr. P's dream also count as associations to the co-constructed dream which occurred in Mr. P's analysis. Hence, when Mahon mentions “La vida es sueño” and “Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities,” these references count as associations to Mr. P's analytic dream. “Reality,” illusion, and
the dream-within-a-dream are on a par with one another in the world of the psychoanalytic dream. I will add that “Reality,” as it appears within the context of psychoanalysis is also a “royal road to the unconscious.”
But first, I would like to comment on a central thesis in Mahon's article, and about his clinical case formulation. Mahon places emphasis “on both portions” of the dream-within-a-dream process “and the dynamic links between them,” (p. 13, this volume). I strongly agree with him when he states that, “By drawing attention to 'the dynamic linkage between the two portions of the dream sequence I believe that the multiple determinants of both are enriched and highlighted” (p. 13, this volume). His case illustration provides convincing and elegant evidence of this point. This evidence sounds like science, rather than dogma (to invert Mahon's comment about Freud's lack of clinical evidence on the issue of the dream-within-a-dream).
I believe that Mahon's summary of Mr. P's dream thoughts (p. 7, this volume) is convincing, but under-emphasizes two points. The first is a specifically homo-erotic aspect to the dream and the transference. While Mahon does write about Mr. P's wish to have a baby with him, he omits the notion of a specifically sexual fantasy about their relationship. This theme is reflected in the historical piece about the patient's memory of being punished for urinating while in bed with his father. The theme of the bearded man in the dream is accompanied by Mahon's emphasis that neither the father nor the analyst had a beard. It does not seem like a stretch to point out that the New Oxford Dictionary of English contains the alternative definition of a “beard” as “a woman who dates, or marries, a gay man to provide cover for the man's homosexuality,” (downloaded 8/13/2021).
The second point which I see as undermphasized is the trauma of telling. Mahon writes, “By putting trauma in one dream and “telling” in a dream within it, the analysand was declaring that ‘telling’ was as great a trauma as trauma itself, and that the two should not be confused” (p. 8, this volume). This way of putting it simultaneously states that “telling” was a trauma and diminishes it by comparison with the “trauma itself.” But within the transference relationship, it was the opportunity for “telling” that was about to be painfully lost with termination. The urination, within the patient's memory, can stand for the more immediate reality of a
stream of associations. Telling is not just telling, but an expression of love, including erotic love, in the face of inevitable loss. Hence, in the analytic moment described here, telling may have been the more painful trauma.
I'd like to turn now to the topic of reality. I've mentioned earlier that there are many royal roads to the unconscious, including dreams and the process of psychoanalysis itself. Freud notably added symptoms and transference, as well as “forgetting, slips of the tongue, bungled actions, etc….” Today, we might add countertransference. And now, I would like to add “reality” itself, as it is presented within psychoanalysis. Loewald wrote, “Ego, id and external reality become distinguishable in their most primitive, germinal stages. This state of affairs can be expressed either by saying that ‘the ego detaches itself from the external world’, or, more correctly: the ego detaches from itself an outer world. Originally the ego contains everything” (Loewald, 1951, p. 11). This is not simply a philosophical point. The construction of perceptual “reality” within the mind is well supported by the evidence underlying Mark Solms' recent comment about the apparent stability of visual perception: “The stabilized scene also hints at the fact that what we perceive is just that—a scene—a constructed perspective upon reality, not reality itself” (Solms, 2021, p. 140). In Solms' recent book, The Hidden Spring, this comment is extended to describe all of reality as a constructed perspective. In psychoanalysis, “Reality,” as a construct, is an emotional truth, as well as a literal one. Eugene Mahon alludes to this concept in his authorial associations to Mr. P's dream—or I should say the dream as jointly constructed by patient and analyst near the end of an eight-year analysis.
My professional experience includes what Mahon refers to as “an even greater continuity between dream life and waking life than is usually thought of a reciprocal cross-fertilization of one by the other… .” (p. 11, this volume). With my colleague, Beth Kalish, I have studied the dream-interpreting practices of the Achuar people, an indigenous group in the Amazon rainforest. The Achuar practice is to arise daily before dawn every day to share dreams with one another, to interpret their dreams, and to use their dream interpretations to make plans for the day's activities. On many visits to the rainforest, Beth and I have joined small and large groups of Achuar dream interpreters to learn how their practices resemble and differ from the ways that North American psychoanalysts use dreams (Fisher and Kalish, 2011; Kalish and Fisher, 2021;
Fisher and Kalish, in preparation; Goldsmith, Fisher, and Kalish, 2020.).
Here is an overview of our conclusions to date, as they have affected us as analysts:
* For the Achuar, dreams are more real than waking reality. When interpreted, they are a more reliable guide to action than waking thoughts. While this conclusion is easy to state, it is quite difficult for a person raised in North American culture to comprehend this worldview on a practical level. However, this perspective provides a useful orientation to psychic reality. Beth and I are now more likely to look at “reality,” as presented in analysis, as being in itself a product constructed like a dream.
* Dreams are thought to predict the future. This concept, dismissed by Freud as primitive folklore, has meaning to Beth and me in relation to our own practices of psychoanalysis. We see our patients' dreams, and our own, as reflecting wishes and predictions involving the dreamer's unconscious intentions, expected consequences of action upon those intentions, and unformulated perceptions about the world—the “unthought known.” We are more likely to see dreams as predictive of emotion and action.
* Dreams are interpreted in a social context, which consists of both the immediate dream-sharing group and the larger social reality of the community in which the dream-sharing takes place. The social context in which the dream will be reported enters into the dream itself. This occurs because the dreamer already has the anticipated audience in mind (as preconscious day residues) forming background material for the dream. Beth and I have come to see that analysts practicing psychoanalysis (as well as our patients) are participants in thought collectives that actively guide our clinical work. We have in mind psychoanalytic study groups, training programs, consultants, societies, schools of thought, conferences, and the like for analysts, and numerous cultural groups for patients. Like the Achuar, our interpretations are also group interpretations—dreamer and interpreter are engaged in the shared meanings of a small group (of two), within the shared meanings of larger psychoanalytic and cultural
groups. As a result of our experiences with the Achuar, Beth and I are more likely to reflect upon these shared meanings as constitutive of patients' dreams and our own responses to them.
For me, these conclusions, based on our observations about Achuar dream interpretation, apply to Eugene Mahon's clinical report in certain ways:
* They support Mahon's thesis that both parts of Mr. P's dream are important and that they mutually illuminate each other. Both parts refer to “reality” as a special kind of dream, as well as referring to each other.
* They support the conclusion that the near-future termination of the analysis, as well as the remote-past of the father's anger about the patient's urination, are part of the psychically immediate present, which is forcefully represented in the dream.
* They support the conclusion that Mr. P's dream is a shared creative product of the analytic dyad, summarizing years of work.
* They support the conclusion that Mahon's article can be viewed, in part, as a continuing associative process on the part of the analyst, illuminating the shared meaning of the dream, and constituting a part of the analyst's work, to deal with the loss of the patient and the analysis, and to integrate what the analyst himself has gained from the experience.
Eugene Mahon's beautiful article illustrates the fact that dreams are a royal road to the unconscious, but not the royal road to the unconscious.