Saturated and Unsaturated Interpretations

A patient dreamed that he saw himself as a filmmaker filming a marching army. He framed his shots adventurously, taking risks. This began with a close-up shot of a soldier's hand. Then he raised the lens, taking a wider shot of other soldiers and finally the heads of all the men. At this point, he picked up the camera and climbed onto a crane to get an overview of the whole army and take a long panoramic shot. All this was in just one sequence. He associated to the image of another dream: some birds on the ground were taking flight; pale yellow and particularly beautiful birds. Their heads were completely featherless. For him this was somehow connected with the soldiers' helmets. All this probably had something to do with images of circumcised and uncircumcised penises, he added. The remark was no doubt pertinent. Moreover, it echoed other elements of the material. Everything was there, ready for interpretation: his way of filming, which was equivalent to an erection; we can even go further and see the filmmaking as an act of sexual intercourse.

And yet the patient's initial comments, however exact they may have been, felt conventional and lifeless. The analyst did not take them up. So the patient went on. The day before, he had played squash; to begin with, he had played classically, which resulted in him losing. Then he stopped playing correctly and hit a series of original and rather unorthodox shots. To his great satisfaction, they worked. He noted that in his dream, when he was filming, he had had the same feeling of pleasure, namely of doing things in a slightly unpredictable and risky way. I then intervened to take up the connection he had made between the heads of the birds and the soldiers' helmets. This was not in order to attribute some sort of meaning to it, but just to highlight the freedom the patient had shown in passing from one dream to the other. He then associated to the impact that the images of certain films had had on him, adding that there was