Chapter 2 On Talking-as-Dreaming

‘Auntie, speak to me! I’m frightened because it’s so dark.’ His aunt answered him: ‘What good would that do? You can’t see me.’ ‘That doesn’t matter,’ replied the child, ‘if anyone speaks, it gets light.’

I take as fundamental to an understanding of psychoanalysis the idea that the analyst must invent psychoanalysis anew with each patient. This is achieved in no small measure by means of an ongoing experiment, within the terms of the psychoanalytic situation, in which patient and analyst create ways of talking to one another that are unique to each analytic pair at a given moment in the analysis.

In this chapter, I will focus primarily on forms of talking generated by patient and analyst that may at first seem “unanalytic” because the patient and analyst are talking about such things as books, poems, films, rules of grammar, etymology, the speed of light, the taste of chocolate, and so on. Despite appearances, it has been my experience that such “unanalytic” talk often allows a patient and analyst who have been unable to dream together to begin to be able to do so. I will refer to talking of this sort as “talking-as-dreaming.” Like free association (and unlike ordinary conversation), talking-as-dreaming tends to include considerable primary process thinking and what appear to be non sequiturs (from the perspective of secondary process thinking).

When an analysis is a “going concern” (Winnicott, 1964, p. 27), the patient and analyst are able to engage both individually and with one another in a process of dreaming. The area of “overlap” of the patient’s dreaming and the analyst’s dreaming is the place where analysis occurs (Winnicott, 1971, p. 38). The patient’s dreaming, under such

circumstances, manifests itself in the form of free associations (or, in child analysis, in the form of playing); the analyst’s waking-dreaming often takes the form of reverie experience. When a patient is unable to dream, this difficulty becomes the most pressing