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Listening to Bach's Goldberg Variations, the Sitkovetsky Transcription for Strings, I am reminded of the interplay between waking, dreaming, embodying, and all of these resting on the societal and environmental matrix which in turn shapes us even as we shape it. Each voice is needed for the fullest disclosure of being and of beauty. So also with dreams and our work with them and their work on us: we are led to reaffirm this stance with evocative guidance from Paul Lippmann in his ‘On dreams and interpersonal psychoanalysis’.
This masterly essay invites our own dialogue with dreams, an exchange which will be served best, not by the attitude of ‘it was in Jung all along’, but what Lippmann's work offers Jungians and what in turn Jungians have to offer the interpersonalist method.
Lippmann argues that we work with dreams in a fashion which enhances a free and flexible appropriation of the immediate and deep concerns which manifest in the analytic process. Playfully exploring wishing and wish fulfilment, he expands on the ordinary understanding of wish; wishes include the wish to tell, to listen, to wonder, to work together to make meaning, and so forth. Freud's initial genius, discovery of the hidden unbidden wish, became a rigid royal path, as Lippmann notes, and the offerings coming to us, if forced onto such a straight and narrow way, no longer bring the breadth of life, rather they take our breath away.
Lippmann proposes that we revisit the dream as image and that we do so within the context offered by interpersonal theory with its non-organized set of hypotheses, but without falling exclusively into its social process preoccupations. Allowing the image to be revelatory and surprising requires that relational and transference/counter-transference dynamics do not have a corner on the market of interpretation. Perhaps, ironically, this is rather like what Freud's ‘evenly hovering attention’ entails.
Lippmann elaborates on his theme by delving into three separate dream ex