To Be or Not to Be Able to Dream and Paint: Discussion on Ilany Kogan's paper: Dreams and Creative Activity - The Bridge to the Unconscious

„In the following pages I shall demonstrate that there is a psychological technique which makes it possible to interpret dreams and that on the application of this technique every dream will reveal itself as a psychological structure, full of significance, and one which may be assigned to a specific place in the psychic activities of the waking state. Further, I shall endeavour to elucidate the processes which underlie the strangeness and obscurity of dreams, and to deduce from these processes the nature of the psychic forces whose conflict or cooperation is responsible for our dreams. This done, my investigation will terminate, as it will have reached the point where the problem of the dream merges into more comprehensive problems, and to solve these we must have recourse to material of a different kind.” (S. Freud, Dream interpretation, chap.1)

First of all, I wish to express all my gratitude and my appreciation for Ilany Kogan and for her passion (in the Bion meaning of the term) for the psychoanalytical work on dreaming, painting, living, and being. Her paper, so rich and so open-minding to reverie and thinking, reminds me, from the beginning to the end, the Marion Milner's book About not being able to paint, but I dare to say that the Ilany's paper is a reflection on how it could be possible, in the analytic cure, to transform (again in the Bionian view) the impossible dream and creativity, into a mature way of being, thinking and creating. Like Bion said in his Transformations: