IV. Dreaming as Unconscious Thinking

In framing a theory of dreams that rests firmly on Freud's clinical use of dreams in psycho-analysis but which grows organically out of the Structural-Phenomenological rather than Topographical-Neurophysiological model-of-the-mind, it is necessary to establish our vocabulary for describing dreams. This vocabulary must be truly meta-psychological (in its extended sense, including the geographical dimension of Klein and the epistemological dimension of Bion, in addition to Freud's original four-part definition). The most lucid sequence would seem to require the definition of the dream-process as one of thinking about emotional experiences, after which the way would be clear to examine what Freud calls the “considerations of representability” (by which we will mean symbol formation and the interplay of visual and linguistic symbolic forms) and the “dream work” (by which we will mean the phantasy operations and the thought processes by which the emotional conflicts and problems seek resolution).

In order to carry through this first task I have chosen to turn to an unusual type of clinical material which we had the pleasure of hearing and discussing at a seminar for child-analysts and psychotherapists in Paris in the Spring of 1980. It relates to an extraordinary infant-observation carried out by a therapist in a municipal nursery for the children of working mothers. This observation started when the child, Matthieu, was seven months old and, because of great concern for his unsatisfactory development, metamorphosed into a three-times per week therapy by the time he was one year of age. Because the child's activities were almost entirely pre-verbal, even at the age of 23 months when the sessions now to be presented occurred, and because his understanding of language was still rudimentary, with the therapist's interpretive interventions also largely non-verbal, the whole process had a very striking resemblance to dream-content. It will be seen to illustrate phantasy an