WEAVING DREAMS

GODOY MOREIRA, Maria Stela (Ph.D.)

.

..the patient who cannot dream

cannot go to sleep and cannot wake up"

Bion (1962 p. 7)

SUMMARY

Making use of Bion's theories, the author presents dreams as the generating matrix of psychic reality, and describes the analytic session as a space sharing this same dreamlike quality, having a similar potential for generating this new reality. The analyst, using his "alpha-function", promotes the process of transforming sense experiences into dream-thoughts, supplying the alpha-elements through which psychic reality will be continuously generated. Such transformation is illustrated by clinical vignettes, where a predominantly psychotic patient, living in a world of concrete objects, incapable of discriminating between waking life and dreams, starts on his way towards this differentiation.

 

I- DREAMS as first stage of THOUGHT

Bion sees dreams as being generated by the urgency of a new meaning, born from the perception of an emotional experience. In this "bionian" sense dreams do not use symbols, because they are, themselves, a specific and basic symbolic function, in other words, a first stage of thought. (Bion, 1977: the C category of the Grid).

Since dreams are the generating matrix of psychic reality and of the reality of analysis, we may conjecture, together with Bion, (1970, p. 71) that what applies to dreams applies also to most of the experience of an analytic session, because the material brought by the patient will require that the analyst should use his capacity for rêverie, so as to be effective at the level of dreams.

The dreams we produce during sleep are the expression of a specific configuration of the alpha-screen, thence their importance. Dreams are, then, like a virtual barrier, the alpha-screen, that separates and maintains unconscious part of mental experience, due to the effectiveness of its repressing power. The censorship and the resistance belonging to dreams become instruments by means of which the alpha-screen (contact- barrier) creates and also continuously differentiates conscious from unconscious.

Since the alpha-function operates without interruption while transforming sense data into alpha-elements, the alpha-screen is also in a permanent process of being formed. (Bion 1962, p.17: 8.1). Therefore, conscious and unconscious are ceaselessly being produced, which fact significantly alters the status of these two instances, for they can no longer be regarded as two psychic provinces, but as transitory and reversible states of mental experience.

 

II - The CONCEPT of contact-barrier

The contact-barrier (Bion, 1962 p.17: 8.1), depending on its structure, creates a variety of modes of thought. The alpha-elements which constitute it may associate between themselves and become agglomerated. Those are the incipient forms of thought, which will later be ordered sequentially and take the appearance of a narrative, as revealed in dreams, and, finally, they will be ordered logically.

Bion (1962, p.21: 9.3) states that "the contact-barrier owes its existence to the proliferation of alpha-elements by alpha-function and serving the function of a membrane which, according to the nature of its composition and permeability, separates mental phenomena into two groups, one of which performs the functions of consciousness, and the other the functions of unconsciousness". When the alpha-screen offers no resistance, there is an outpouring of elements from one zone to the other, which demonstrates the screen is incapable of establishing conscious and unconscious, leading to an anomalous development of memory and of repression. "The difference in the two states derives from the differences between a contact-barrier composed of alpha-elements and one composed... of beta-elements". The latter seems to lack the capacity for establishing links. This beta-screen, clinically, presents itself as a flow of disconnected phrases and images, as a confused state similar to dreaming.

The contact-barrier constitutes a model that corresponds to the theory according to which the object of psychoanalysis would not be the study of observation of the patient's or the analyst's conscious or unconscious, of illness or "health", but by means of the change of state, of the construction and destruction of thinking and thoughts, of mind and body intertwining, of the integrating and disintegrating movements, and of psychic reality's forming itself as the product of such transformations. These transformations, characteristically, run in both directions: analyst <---> patient, being, therefore, transitive and reversible. This formulation by Bion implies a number of consequences:

 

III - CONSEQUENCES derived form the concept of contact-barrier

1- Since the alpha-function operates on the sensorial impressions and on the emotions, dream-thoughts become an integral part of the waking thoughts (Bion, 1970), thus becoming a bridge to a broader exercise of conscious thought.

2- In the classical theory, dream-thoughts belonged to the unconscious, in the sense that the "original text", distorted by censorship through dream-work, was turned into a "second text" (where mechanisms of condensation, displacement and symbolization predominated), upon which the analyst would exercise his sagacity and ingenuity. Bion (1962, p.16: 7.3), while developing his theories on thinking, inverted the relation proposed by Freud (1900) between what is the dream and what is the unconscious. For Bion, it is not the unconscious that produces the dream. Rather, in forming itself, "dreams create the unconscious". In other words, consciousness and unconsciousness share the characteristics originating in a differentiation operated and managed by the alpha-function.

 

IV - APPLICATION OF CONCEPTS TO CLINICAL WORK

 

Riolo (1983), discussing the theory of knowledge in psychoanalysis, emphasizes the peculiar nature of the analytic task, which is based on two processes:

1- how "psychic reality" is known.

2- how this reality is produced. We can work with our patients in the light of these two processes, the cognitive and the transformational, since they are specular and symmetrical. Psychoanalysis presents itself as the interaction of the transformational and of the cognitive processes, modifying and restoring the observed field itself. That is the basis of its therapeutic dimension, which is more than a mere effect of its practice, but also one of the vertexes from which such reality can be described.

I understand psychoanalytic work as a dynamic combination, as an alternation of transformations in K and transformations in O, as an oscillation between interrogative-cognitive and emotional-phantasmic mental states.

1- It is possible to reconstruct, in a diachronic axis, the process through which the subject gets to know his own psychic reality (transformation in K), in an evolutive (non-linear) path starting from the very first pre-natal and pre-mental experiences, from the early relations directed to his own soma, and reaching the more differentiated levels of object relations, where the relationship with the total object of Klein's "depressive position" (1937) comes to the fore.

2- It is possible, through the practice of psychoanalysis, to observe the living production of this psychic reality, as well as its expression (evolution in O). That is to say, we can share the experiences of transformation, both somatic and psychic, of the transformation of relationships, of dreams and of transference phenomena.

I believe psychic reality is constantly being recreated, and the act of psychoanalytically learning about an object means, in itself, transforming this object.

Assuming that:

1- dream-thoughts become integral parts of the waking thoughts; and that

2- dreams create the unconscious;

we may suggest that:

· the contact-barrier can be produced within the analytic session; and

· the alpha-elements, generated by means of transferential exchanges between analyst and analisand may be understood as modes of dreaming. (Bion, 1962, p. 26: 10.4; p.7: 3.4).

If by interpreting a dream we mean the operation of "constructing meaning", the analyst's work will be that of a builder, not the work of a mere decipherer of riddles who unveils a preexistent meaning. Since the alpha-function corresponds to the realization of the transformation of something unknown into something known, the direction that makes this construction of meaning possible (an actualized and vitalized meaning) will be examined within the container-contained configuration and within the analytic relation. This part of the mental apparatus - the alpha-function of the analyst interacting with the patient - observes and, simultaneously participates in the live building of the contact-barrier.

Starting from the assumption that the contact-barrier represents the model of mental functioning of the analytic couple, I will illustrate, by means of my interaction with my patient Jacques, how this contact-barrier came to form itself as a result of such relationship.

(clinical material omitted here)

 

It is my belief that the clinical material of these vignettes illustrates the process through which the concrete elements in the thinking of this predominantly psychotic patient, his "symbolic equations", gradually acquire a "niche", a space where growth-propitiating emotions and ideas can develop. It also illustrates the psychoanalytic function of the personality that Bion, using an abstract model, named as "container-content" (1962, p.90: 27.7), in which this configuration is permeated by emotion and is associated with learning.

In the weave of this text, I try to present the evolution of something built within the relationship of the analytic couple, where the analyst's rêverie and the affective tone of the interpretations enabled Jacques to start delineating and organizing his sensations, and also to discriminate between his sensations and himself. By "dreaming" with her patient, watching and participating in the "live" building of a mental container, the analyst formed a pair with him, a pair capable of generating a "new" psychic reality, thus propitiating the transferential exchanges inherent to all analyses. By dreaming with her patient, the analyst transformed the analytic meeting, that is then no longer a re-edition of the past, becoming a project of things to come, an antecipation of the future.

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BION, W.R. (1956) Development of Schizophrenic Thought. In Second Thoughts, London, Heinemann, 1967. p. 36-42.

(1957) Differentiation of the psychotic from the non- psychotic personalities. In Second Thoughts, London, Heinemann, 1967. p. 49.

(1959) Attacks on Linking. In Second Thoughts, London, Heinemann, 1967. p. 105.

(1962) Learning from Experience. London, Karnac Books, 1984.

(1963) Elements of Psychoanalysis. London, Karnac Books, 1984.

(1965) Transformations. London, Karnac Books, 1984.

(1967) Second Thoughts. William Heinemann, Medical Books.

(1970) The mistic and the group, In: Attention and Interpretation. London, Tavistock.

(1977) Two Papers: The Grid and Caesura. Rio de Janeiro, Imago.

(1992) Cogitations, (ed) Francesca Bion. London, Karnac Books.

FERRO, A.. (1992) A Técnica na Psicanálise Infantil (La Tecnica nella Psicoanalisi Infantile) trad. Márcia Justum. Rio de Janeiro, Imago, 1995.

(1994) Mondi possibili e capacità negative dell'analista al lavoro. Versão pré-publicada dos trabalhos do 10º Congress o Nacional da Sociedade Psicanalitica Italiana, p. 261-267.

FREUD, S. (1900) A Interpretação dos Sonhos, E.S.B. IV, Rio de Janeiro, Imago.

KLEIN, M. (1937) Love, Guilt and Reparation, London, Hogarth,

219-32.

MELTZER, D. (1986) Studies in Extended Metapsychology, London,

The Roland Harris Education Trust.

RIOLO, F. (1983) Sogno e Teoria della Conoscenza in Psicoanalisi, Riv. Psicoanal., 29, nº 3, p.279-95.


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Maria Stela de Godoy Moreira
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