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Abstract
Subject relations theory focuses on the complex issue of human subjectivity and its trials and tribulations within the psychoanalytic setting. The paper revisits some of my original assumptions from the 1990’s, helped by recent developments, plus a reading of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, where one can see here how Freud is creating the psychoanalytic subject behind all the various dream figures,
The human subject is located in two different spaces, localities or ‘scenes’, the elusive dream space, and the tangible social space of everyday life. Perhaps what ties them together is the human imagination, the unifying principle active not only in the dream, which Freud calls the process of combining into a unity [Einheit] and the synthetic function of the creative imagination in daily life.
Analysts start with the patient’s dream and hope to reach the network of dream thoughts which instigated the dream; poets start with the dream thoughts and through their creative imagination construct a ‘dream.’
I end with some clinical examples and the dilemma about how to help patients find what is alive in themselves in a world that continues to find that difficult to hear and to bear.