Hilda Catz de Katz' Paper

SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE ANALYST'S DAYDREAMING, THE ANALYTIC FIELD AND ITS POSSIBLE TRANSFORMATIONS.

Hilda Catz de Katz

"My whole being hollows to shelter you..."

(from a poem by Hilda Catz)

Introduction

This paper aims at dealing with the counter-transference that the patient evokes in the analyst and its necessary working through in the analysis of what is being evoked. One of the possible boundaries of this analysis being the extent of the analyst's own free associations, which give evidence of his imaginative capacities, that is to say, his ability to register the instinctual drives as representations within a continent and a language whose rhetoric and fictional capacities have been widened. In this way, the freedom that psychoanalysis bestows to the patient and to the analyst is exemplified in the various types of interpretation we are able to formulate.

Borges' sentence: "In the dream of the man who was dreaming, the man who was dreamt of woke up" is the metaphor I'm going to use to represent, from my viewpoint, the analyst's daydreaming as a perspective from which the analytic field opens to infinite possible developments.

The word "reverie" may be translated as daydream, though the latter does not exactly describe the former, but it is used in this paper to illustrate the characteristic exhibited by the analyst's mental function of being able to harbour those dreams neither dreamt nor daydreamed by the patient.

"The man who was dreamt of woke up" alludes to the type of reality existing in the fiction established in the dynamic field of the analytic situation, which involves both members of the analytic couple. That is to say, in the bipersonal field stated by Baranger, one can never feel sure about who is the "dreamt of man" who wakes up, or which is going to be the emerging text, a text created by the patient's clinical material, his history and his projective identifications.

It is my view that Borges' sentence encompasses both Baranger's concept of the "analytic field" and Bion's concept of transformations, inasmuch as Borges' words allude to a process that includes the proto-relations before they are experienced in the link, and as it allows them to take shape symbolically, by waking up "the undreamt-of man", who could otherwise remain obstructed by a premature interpretation, or on the contrary, by a delayed one.

The "undreamt-of man woke up" is like a signal of the emotional linguistic text, applying Ferro's concept, that emerges in the analytic space and develops as an outcome of that dynamic interaction. Thus, along an unpredictable path, a new narrative is displayed regarding the emotions, via the movements that appear in the analytic field. These movements would correspond, according to Bion's approach, to the transformations, that is, at least in that direction, of Beta elements into Alpha elements.

To find what is unexpected, in the act of discovery implicit in the capacity for daydreaming, would be a point of convergence between psychoanalysis and the creative capacity which comes into play in the analytic dialogue. In this interplay, we can sometimes see the appearance of certain constellations of ideas, images and sensations, which coagulate scattered symbols that remained in a space empty of meaning.

According to this view, the psychoanalytic process would have many points in common with the process of creation in general. In film making particularly, such convergence takes place, for example, when the psychoanalyst, as if he were the editor, makes the montage of the film; together with the patient, who is the director of his dreams and of his free associations.

The psychoanalyst, as editor, cuts, separates and joins the segments again, and in that way the "alloy" of image and sense within the setting emerges.

I think, taking into account the perspectives of this paper, that Freud alludes to daydreaming when he says: "We allow ourselves to be led on by our thoughts regardless of the direction in which they carry us and drift on in this way from one thing to another. But we cherish a confident belief that in the end, without any active intervention on our part, we shall arrive at the dream-thoughts from which the dream originated."..... "What is remarkable is that such an aimless and arbitrary train of thought should happen to bring us to the dream- thoughts."

According to Bion's theory, the dream-thoughts are the outcome of the Alpha function, the undreamt dreams have not had access to the work done by the Alpha function, they are sense impressions that have not had access to being worked on as emotional experiences. My proposal points at the fact that such a function may be severely impaired when in the structuring of the psychic apparatus, a daydreaming function similar to the mother's "reverie" was not established so that it might become the continent of the baby's emotional projective activities.

From this viewpoint, the undreamt dreams would be those that have been truncated and thus unable to contribute to psychic growth; as if they were an exposed film, symbolically alluding to the damage produced by the lack of an adequate continent. The dreams neither dreamt nor daydreamed are put at the service of "acting out", ruled by projective identification, omnipotence and splitting, therefore loosing their singularity-- namely, the function of transforming psychic reality.

I think that there exist elements, which are as invisible as they are essential, in what Baranger calls "the field of the analytic situation"; these elements provide us with a heterogeneous perspective oriented towards an innovative transformation. The efficacy of such a transformation lies in that what is concealed is not only displayed in the contents of the message but it attains its meaning, the staging of the fantasy, the going through chaos, in the act of discovery which is implicitly involved in the capacity for daydreaming, as the analyst's mental function.

Thus conceived, this capacity would be intrinsically linked with that drifting stated by Freud, with that apparently aimless and arbitrary train of thought. It provides us, however, with an invisible point through which we watch; which tells us about a blind spot from where the interpretation can be formulated.

Development and clinical reflections: Two different clinical vignettes are presented to illustrate the above. The first belongs to a 38-year-old woman; and the second to an adolescent girl aged 12. (These vignettes are omitted here).

It could then be considered that in the analytic dialogue, the analyst's capacity for daydreaming is essential to that transformation, because it is similar to the maternal "reverie". The analyst becomes a mother-analyst that daydreams and acts as a receiver of the patient's projective identifications.

One of the aspects of this receptive disposition, the analyst's daydreaming, is represented in the sentence by Borges quoted at the beginning of this paper: "In the dream of the man who was dreaming, the dreamt of man woke up". Such a disposition would also constitute an attempt to encompass the present, past and future of the awakening of the patient's dreamt and / or daydreamed aspects.

In the backwards and forwards motion between the experience of lack of orientation on the one hand, and the partial gathering of data on the other, daydreaming appears as one of the ways of approaching the dark point, the blind spot that puts its seal on the essence of psychoanalytic insight and the creative discovery.

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Hilda Catz de Katz
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1426 Buenos Aires
Argentina