Dreams And Affect: A Hundred Years Later

Harold P. Blum introduced the panellists, explaining that Jacob Arlow was not able to attend after all and had declined to send a paper. The paper sent by Annalisa Ferrerti, who was also unable to attend, would be read by Jacqueline Amati Mehler.

The first panellist, Germano Vollmer, presented his paper: ‘Affect in dreams: a hundred years later’. Vollmer stated that in Freud' topographical model affects are differentiated from energy, they have qualities and functional value. The analysis of dreams is recognised as the main means of reaching the unconscious and affects are the best guide for interpreting them. Furthermore, Freud thought that a ‘mood’ or tendency to some affect could have a determining influence upon dreams. Although the origins of affect in psychic life remains obscure, they undergo the same vicissitudes as instinctive desires to achieve consciousness. This occurs through the dream work, which, due to censorship, transforms latent content of the affects so that they can be expressed in the manifest content of the dream.

Klein' description of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions advanced the understanding of the emotional qualities of the internal world. For her, unconscious fantasies were relationships between the subject and his/her external objects that occur in the internal world of affective experiences. These concepts gave a new meaning to dreams. They started to be considered as representatives, in the dream life, of the emotional experiences that happen to the individual, whether he/she is awake or sleeping.

Bion made a major contribution in conceptualising the function of thinking. He conceives thinking as a result of the transformation of non-elaborated emotional experiences. The mother, in the beginning, performs the mental functions that the baby is unable to effect. The emotional experiences of the baby are projected into the mother' mind, who makes them return in a modified and tolerable way, and thus they can be thought and, esp