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This is not an easy paper to read, above all for those who have no familiarity with the author’s work and that of his closest precursors—in which case, the exhaustive introduction by Marilia Aisenstein and Marina Papageorgiou will be helpful. A second order of difficulty arises from the very dense and rhapsodic style of this writing, which precludes the systematic development of the argument and the full justification of some statements. However, for readers with the patience to work through the terseness of the discussion, this study will offer the opportunity of getting to know an original thinker of unquestionable theoretical depth.
In the brief space of this commentary it will not be possible to discuss the many questions addressed by the author, or to examine the numerous metapsychological concepts that are unconventionally employed in dealing with them. I will emphasise two points of particular interest, but which are also problematic.
The first is the revision of dream-theory through the application of Pierre Marty and Michel de M’Uzan’s concept of operative thought: that is, as Fain writes that a mental activity which negates oneiric hallucination, in that it is characterised by a close link with somatic reality. Hence, the vision of the dream process not only as the hallucinatory realisation of a repressed desire; but, at the same time, as the principal activity of mentalisation: which does not coincide with dream-work as we know it, but is, if anything, closer to its opposite. For Fain, it is in fact derived from the dream’s function as the guardian of sleep, a function directed at restoring the soma, and characterised by the dis-investment of the sensorimotor system, and, hence, of the hallucinatory activity. The two activities are even mutually antagonistic: whereas the first presupposes the existence of a satisfaction which has been experienced and repressed (and which the dream aims to reproduce by means of hallucinatory satisfaction), the second does no