You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Racamier examines the relationship between madness and dreaming and suggests that the dream process and the psychotic process, even though they make use of neighboring and sometimes very similar pathways, actually run in contrary directions. He reviews previous work on the relationship between dreaming and madness and raises some interesting questions for authors who emphasize the similarities. Why, he asks, is dreaming sufficient for the majority of people? If
dreaming is the guardian of sleep, what does psychosis guard? Examining the literature on the dreams of psychotics, Racamier concludes that in actuality there is a failure of the function of dreaming and that the phenomena of psychosis are an extrusion of a dream that could not be dreamed. This view provides a key to understanding the resemblance as well as the opposition of the dream and the psychotic process. The psychotic is incapable of having a dream in the true sense. The schizophrenic, the author suggests, is something of an incarnation of a dream and lives the problematic but insistent existence of a dream.