Adela Toplean
University of Bucharest
adela.toplean@gmail.com
adela.toplean@spray.se
Researcher, collaborator-lecturer at FJCS ( Univ. of Bucharest ),
Has translated a book on qualitative methodology, published 8 studies on the anthropology of death and history of death representations. Researcher at Lund Universitet beginning with Sept. 2005, Department of Psychology of Religion.
The Shadow : I didn’t hear you talking in ages
Today I will give you this opportunity.
The Traveller : I hear voices. Who’s talking? Where this talking comes from?
It’s like I hear myself talking. It’s just that the voice I’m hearing is
weaker than mine…
(F. Nietzsche, The Traveller and His Shadow)
(our translation)
Part II
(for Part I, see Europe’s Journal of Psychology, Vol. I, No 2/2005)
Abstract
Is the reality of the dream something (slightly) different from the psychical reality? We will try to answer this question by fitting the problem of dream into a classic communication pattern and looking at the psychic agencies from a communication-related perspective. Thuswise, the dream will take the form of a message whose shape is influenced by the sender and the receiver requiremenets, but also set as a (apparently) autonomous product of the unconsciousness. How much legitimacy would then lie in assigning the regulation of the onirical reality to „another” consciousness? Would it be possible for the reality „state” we experience while dreaming to be due to a sort of onirical awareness that arises from an integration-reflex in the moment when the dreamer encounters a world that lacks any kind of antagonistic sensations and so, seemingly, very real? Such faultless integration into the dreamt world through precise reflexes that are just the same as the ones used for appropriately approaching the outside world, seriously moots the problem of an (appearing) autonomy of reactions of the sleeping man – still perfectly awake in the strange light of a new, paradoxical and less approached „vigilance”.
Keywords: communication-pattern, Freudian topics, onirical consciousness, psychical space, autonomous reality of the dream, Ey’s consciousness vs. Freud’s consciousness, the problem of presentations in psychoanalysis and phenomenology.
About how much independecy exists in the dreamt world and the launch of a venturing concept
Now we’ll bring into discussion the dream that is set up as a message only if it succeeds in penetrating the consciousness and we will manage to remember it when being awake. As we already mentioned, unlike other unconscious diffuse messages, the dream has a more or less definite shape and healthy persons seldom, if ever, are unable to make a distinction between dreaming and really living.
We could ask ourselves, in the beginning, if this message has indeed a reality of its own or it’s still difficult to single it out from the (unconscious) reality that gives it off. Another doubt that needs to be clarified could be the following one: is the reality of the dream somehow distinct from the psychic reality? It’s interesting to notice that Laplanche and Pontalis, in their Fantasme originaire. Fantasmes des origines. Origine du fantasme think that there are “trois sortes, donc de phénomènes (ou de réalités au sens le plus large) : la réalité matérielle, la réalité des pensées de liaison ou du psychologique, la réalité du désire inconscient et de son expression la plus vraie (le fantasme) » (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1985, pp. 18, 19, our underlining). The last one is described as establishing a connection between real contents and imaginary contents, which makes it look quite enigmatic. Pontalis though, in his own book Entre le rêve et la douleur (Pontalis, 1977, p. 46), seems ready to discover a whole lot of other psychic spaces (or places?) each of them circumscribing its own reality: we will then have the latency space of the first Freudian topic, a space of presentations, another one dedicated to the memory and a space for the drives (could it be the same one hosting the unconscious wishes in the typology that he created together with Laplanche?); anyways, this particular space has the following features: “avec ses stratifications et ses clivages … traversé d’énergies, où ce sont les opérations plus que les thèmes qui importent; éspace comme réceptacle d’objets internes … avec la bipartition radicale dehors-dedans” (ibid., our underlining). In front of a large pallette of psychical spaces, Pontalis asks: where exactly the dream-conflict will be unfolded?
Before shaping a conclusion, let’s take into account one more perspective: Ey’s; in his very manner, he believes that “imaginary contents are actually parts of the consciousness as experiences of different degrees of unconsciousness” (Ey, the quoted work, p. 91); since the dreamt contents comport a certain kind of unconsciousness, we may assume that it also benefits by its own space of expression chosen from the large number of such unconscious spaces arranged on different unconscious levels. Knowing that the dream exhibits itself, that it basically objectifies a “life” -experience (even though it is one of a “sleeping consciousness” (ibid.), of a consciousness that is not applied to the world, so, that lacks a thetic function), we may assume that, once the message is built and delimited from its sender, it will be also able to uphold its own reality, apart from the sender’s, but still emanating from that one. If need be, we’d say that such “emanation” could be mistaken eventually with the transmission channel leading to the consciousness; we could easily name such channel the “psychic space” or we could choose a more twisted syntagm as Zlate did: “the subjective interiority of an individual” (Zlate, 1999, p. 195).
Let’s make a halt to the reality of the dream that, we suggested, stays for itself, with or without the dream being communicated to the consciousness. At this very level, the debates on the existence or the non-existence of the unconsciousness stagnated quite a while because, in Wundt’s opinion for instance, a presentation that only rests into the unconscious sounds like a contradiction, since “the concept in itself suggests … a person representing a certain something” (Jung, 1994b, p. 16); a presentation that cannot reach the consciousness is, after all, a presentation that nobody “has”.
A possible solution – at least at a formal level – was brought by Jung when he changed the syntagm “unconscious presentations” with another one: “unconscious contents” and thus avoiding stumbling in a term that was already acquired into another theoretical direction. Still, after solving the formal contradiction, he went on with a devastating assertion: “each and every unconscious content is coupled with a certain kind of being-represented, that is a a sort of being-conscious, thuswise, we can seriously raise the problem of an existing unconscious subject” (Jung, 1994b, p. 16, our underlining). A natural question follows (though, its answer is impossible to be naturally brought out): does such unconscious subject memorize, perceive and decide just like a conscious one with the only (possible) difference that the presence-field of the unconscious one remains the psychical reality (of the dream) while the presence-field of the second one is the objective reality? Sleeping or being awake, does the individual resort to the same reflex action of “consciously” integrating himself or herself in a certain reality? Is he or she setting out the same work of transforming the reality (be it an inner or an external one), of de-homogenizing the space through the intervetion of the inner duration that, Bergson says, “introduces succession even among the external objects” (Bergson, 1993, pp. 149, 150) and thuswise, bringing the time even into…the dreams’ world?
The fact that, during dreaming, we proceed to actualize our experience, is quite obvious: “it would be enough … to wake a sleeping person up … for him or her to feel that he or she was teared away from a living experience that is impossible to live again … in other words, it’s a sort of experience that the subject gets in only by leaving the objective reality” (Ey, the quoted work, p. 91).
It’s hard to believe, however, that we could solve a problem as such, but we can still make a distinction between the living-like dreaming experience and the actual living experience: if the last one implies experiencing time, actively organizing the present through systematic moves to the advantage of the individual – when and if possible – (the famous setting up of the presence-field described by Ey), when dreaming we live instantly (“the experience is spontaneoulsy and precariously actualized” (ibid., p. 138)) since there is no occasion for us to be involved in systemizing the reality; moreover, the time is not set up as present so we could only call it an “un-gripped time”, a time that is not able to open itself towards any kind of fulfill-able future. Still, the perspective above is very much subdued to a conscious approach that never really succeeded in getting rid of the obsession of skimping time. Under any other circumstances, we could actually assume that, on the contrary, we never take such a good advantage of time as we do when dreaming, when we are in an immediate contact with our personal past as well as with the species’ past and, in a certain way, with the future.
Ey banks on one consciousness only – for the individual who is integrated into the outside world and for the sleeping or mentally-ill individuals. The mental states of the last two ones are correlated with its “low” degrees, when the consciousness lacks the needed power for systemizing the experience. What Ey could call a “consciousness of the dream” could actually be the very base of the consciousness that “catches” an event that unfolds itself, accidentally, in an imaginary and not in a real zone. Besides, Ey thinks that the consciousness can “fall” under the 0, into a reality, let’s call it, with the “minus” sign – which is the archetypical experience of the consciousness. He, of course, states, with a different occasion, that “the consciousness cannot be separated by the objective world, it’s caught in the real world just as the world is caught by it” (Ey, the quoted work, p. 36); we may correct his assertion this way: the consciousness cannot be separated, it’s true, from a world of objects, but it can be somehow separated from the objective world. Our consciousness cannot stay away from those worlds having a seeming exteriority. We will also add that, as long as our consciousness needs sense, needs space, needs temporality and needs a direction this way making its contribution to the individual’s building and, through this, to the shaping of the world itself, a “consciousness of the dream” tries to require from the dreamt reality the same sense, the same direction, space and temporality – all these on a field that this time tries “to slip” and that fails in aggregating itself into a presence-field. The consciousness always has the duration as an attachment, Bergson says, and so everything that “touches”, becomes temporal. While the unconscious, Freud said it in many occasions, is timeless par excellence. We would assume, without bringing too many details though, that the faint temporal feeling the dreamer has could be due to some kind of involvement of the consciousness in the living-like experience of the dream.
Another interesting issue could be that of the “volitional unconscious” acts: in the moment when I, the dreamer, decide upon a rescue solution in my dream, wouldn’t it mean that my escape plan should be translated through a very good (sometimes amazing) organization of my consciousness? When the possibility of the existence of such volitional unconscious acts is brought into discussion, Jungs seems to give up: “when we do not talk about impulses … but about choices…apparently very well-balanced … then we can do nothing but admiting as necessary the hypothesis of a subject that disposes of himself and that also has certain presentations” (Jung, 1994b, p. 29).
When referring to the unconscious, and especially when focusing on the dream-state, could we, by any chance, bring into discussion a new consciousness, different from the day-time one, that might take over (to a certain extent) its functions through the contribution of the Ego that has access to all levels of the psychic agencies? If such hypothesis would be accepted, then we won’t be surprised anymore by the brilliant choices we make, while dreaming, sometimes even more relevant than those made when being awake; and we’d also cease asking ourselves why the dreamt contents do not come back into the day-time consciousness if it is this consciousness and not another one that also wondered through the unconscious darkness.
In the end, the differences between the two perspectives lie at two levels – structural and conceptual: the first one (Ey’s) implies the existence of a widely integrative consciousness, always present – more or less – everywhere, and the second one, specific to psychoanalysis, talks about the self-direction of the unconscious and, under certain circumstances, about its own “consciousness”: “the unconscious may embody all those that are usually known as being functions of the consciousness” (ibid., p. 131).
As for us, not wanting to expressly join to any of the two approaches, we would prefer to bring into discussion a consciousness (or even better: a-being-conscious-like experience) of the dream only, not of the unconsciousness as a whole. Deciding if the entire unconscious benefits of the same – let’s call it onirical – consciousness, or by another one, or even by the day-time one but in a less structed form, seems to be yet impossible.
The dream, as an autonomous psychical product, could be though granted with an autonomous consciousness, another one, we’d guess, than the day-time consciousness. As we all know from our own onirical experiences, the being-conscious-like feeling seems to be the one integrating us in the dreamt reality that appears in front of our very eyes as a “living” world through its own “unconscious”. To a great extent, the dreamer is aware of himself or herself and this very fact makes the predisposition for promoting the objectivity even more obvious; altogether, the whole affectivity mechanism is released this way: love, hate, empathy or fear towards the dreamt objects – they are all present for giving the impression of plainly living into and for that particular world of our dream.
But being plainly involved into a world (be it an onirical one) cannot be done otherwise, but appealing to sensations, to perceptions and, of course, to a “reservoir” able to inprint them and preserve them even though it would be only for providing a better unfolding of the actual dreamt action/plot. In other words, we would also need a memory that should keep the onirical thread as stretched as possible. Not all the sophisticated functions of the memory would be required, they are all the privilege of the day-time consciousness (see Bergson, 1996, p. 132), the dream would only need a minimal placing in the onirical settlement, a minimal synchronism between the dreamt “thoughts” and the proper onirical action.
Ey eliminates right from the start the possibility of any mnesic traces to exist within a de-structured consciousness: the temporal psychic structure and the memory are both specific to the “fundamental structure of the consciousness” (Ey, the quoted work, p. 8). But Freud finds for the mnesic print a whole different explanation: firstly, the consciousness, as the contact-surface with the outside world (see Freud, 1992a, pp. 37-44), is also the one that might scatter every second; secondly, if the stimulus comes from outside towards inside until reaches a certain “depth”-level (depending on its penetration force) it is to be guessed, Freud says, that the very basis of the memory could be found in the excitation processes at the bottom levels of our psychical apparatus; because of their abysmal positioning, they might keep some lasting traces of the stimulus that once penetrated the surface (of the consciousness), surpassing it and, thuswise, without dealing too much with it except from a certain moment that we might call “present”: “one certain excitation cannot be conscious and having its trace in our memory in the same time” (ibid., p. 39).
In short, our consciousness does not keep any trace of any external stimuli while these traces are of an extreme importance for manufacturing the remembrance and so Freud concludes: “the consciousness is born where the mnesic trace ends” (ibid.).
When Jung settles the bounderies for our unconscious trying to underline a shape of any kind for such an instable reality, he said that “all things I know but I am not thinking about in this very moment, all things that were, at some point, conscious, but now I have completely forgot about; all things I have perceived with my senses but still not consciously paying any attention to them, all that I feel, think, remember, want and do without any intention and completely carelessly, which means unconsciously, all the future things that are right now preparing themselves inside me and will reach my consciousness … all these are parts of my unconscious … and all of these are more or less able to come out at the conscious level” (Jung, 1994b, p. 45).
As we may notice, Jung also settles a sort of unconscious “data base” with sometimes small -sometimes big chances to be brought into consciousness at some future point.
Even though he is much more cautious than Freud, Bergson is not far from the psychoanalyst’s perspective when assuming that the consciousness only has by right what lies in its area at a precise moment, each reality that is attached to our consciousness being necessarily actual; thuswise, he admits the existence of the unconscious psychical processes which, in spite of their nature that doesn’t seem to permit any kind of action (at least not at a perceivable level), they still may help the consciousness in conducting the action and clarifying the choice. Would it be reasonable to explain their fulfilling such duty through the help of the mnesic reservoir they possess (as another possible example of collaboration or communication-pattern between unconscious and consciousness)?
As long as a sort of memory-stock may be assigned to the unconscious, we could also assume that the dream, mainly built from remembrances, has legal rights for using, at its turn, such mnesic reservoir. Still, apart from the obvious connections, there are more affinities to be found between dream and memory in general. The possibility of existance of an (onirical) short-term memory could already outline another theoretical problem, related to that approaching the conditions of onirical sensations and perceptions that are shaping their own onirical reality that becomes manifest in the onirical action (in Bergson’s acception of the term).
The philosophers have put the equality sign between the image and the sensation (or perception) more than once. Sartre (1997), paraphrasing Hume, assumes (still not convincingly) that the image and the perception only differ from one another through intensity; yet, we all sometimes have vivid, full of details dreams that could easily compete with a whole range of day-time perceptions. Taine claims the same thing: the image asserts itself as a sensation (ibid., p. 95, quoted from D’intelligence, 1st t., p. 125), testing this way the faith in its object. Yet, the same Taine insists upon a dissimilitude that must be taken into account between the real image and the “false” image: the first one is a sort of two-step sensing – the 1st step is correlated with a spontaneous sensation confering upon that image an absolute consistency while the 2nd step is consumed through a non-spontaneous sensation that diminishes the effect of the first one, operating a sort of correction (see details in Sartre, the quoted work, p. 96).
When a second moderating sensation is lacking, we “have” in front of our eyes an object that does not exist at all. The typical example is the hallucination: in front of a wall with a library shelf we “see” a threatening man – the perception of the wall with the shelf in front of it doesn’t take place anymore, the whole reality is somehow concentrated into the imaginary man who stands in front of the wall; he is actually the only object spontaneously perceived, in an absolute manner.
We could extend such explanation to our onirical sensations, often very vivid and, of course, lacking the moderation-approach supposed to be fulfilled by an antagonistic sensation (still, it may appear in rare cases of consciously dreaming, when the dreamer knows that he is actually dreaming, but he cannot or he does not want to pull himself out of the onirical experience). Living in an intensely perceived (and thus intensely sensed) world, the dreamer might need a memory to connect the imaginary things through contiguity and similitude. Once the onirical thread is kept intact, the dreamer seems to be more conscious than ever: he/she gets caught into the action, he/she takes decisions, he/she changes his/her mind, he anticipates – and all these with an amazing ability, consuming his/her artistry in a sort of surprise-material that he/she prepares for himself/herself.
Having said that, how natural could be to assign the production of the dream to “another” consciousness? Could the reality-state we all experience when dreaming be due to the involvement of an onirical consciousness born through an integration reflex in the moment when the dreamer is confronted with a world that lacks any antagonistic sensations and thus, seemingly, very real?
The language of our dreams – a code made to measure the receiver?
I was kindly allowed to experience all these, but
Never to talk about them
Saint Bernard
And now we ask for your permission to discuss in short our last issue: the onirical language. What could be more important in a communication process than the agreement upon the code that the sender and the receiver are deciding to use? As it is well-known, only the perfect symmetry between coding and decoding will guarantee the fidelity of transmission (Dinu, the quoted work, p. 38).
Psychoanalysis from Freud to Lacan zealously talked about the language of our dreams. When Ricoeur says that our psychism is rather defined through sense than through consciousness, a decisive importance is confered upon the hermeneutical approach, in unraveling the unconscious, but not only.
An enormous number of works were also written about a specific language of our unconscious. Freud, for instance, does not ascribe verbal presentations to any other psychical agency except the consciousness and pre-consciousness, while thinking through images is generously assigned to our unconscious. The verbal presentation found at the pre-conscious level, he says, are nothing but “mnesic reminiscences that once had the form of perceptions” (Freud, 1992a, p. 106) that may easily come back at the conscious level in whatever moment. From Saussure’s perspective, would be suitable to ask ourselves if the initially estamblished relationship between the signifier and the signified would be indeed intactly maintained until the following actualization will take place. Probably yes. Since the linguistic sign “does not connect a thing and a name, but a concept and its acoustic image” (Saussure, 1998, p. 85) is quite possible for the pre-consciousness not to keep anything apart from the psychical stamp created by the signifier and the signified (which is actually the sign that can be – anytime – identically reproduced).
If the consciousness is, above all, related to language “a field of the language” (Ey, the quoted work, p. 136) ) and to verbal communication, the things don’t look that simple anymore when we try to approach the unconscious – it’s impossible to get an unified view by only writing a short, superficial study. Paraphrasing Waelheus, Ey says that because of all the metaphores and desplacements, the language sets up a dialectics “of absence and presence” (ibid., 323), symbolically playing with things. No one ever pretended that our unconscious would lack a playfulness as such. The significances are always with it. Missing the verbal function, it transfers to the pre-consciousness only the signifiers’ chains through a symbolical makeshift that Lacan widely speculated upon. And so the unconscious, an image-made mosaic, would be constrained to talk: “ because the language, as a form of our being-conscious, actually represents the mediation between – and the stressing of – the conscious and the unconscious agencies” (ibid., p. 26); a logic of the double sense would be then set up, the very matter of hermeneutics (Ricoeur, the quoted work, p. 59). Between this type of logic and the transcendental reflection a certain kind of connection is settled that Ricoeur justifies in a manner that could be favourable to us: “when we look back to the will for power of Nietzsche’s man, or back to the generical human being of Marx, or back to the libido of Freud’s man or when we look forward to the transcendental place of significance that we vaguely defined here as being the sacre, we would notice that the right place for the sense is not the consciousness, but a something else” (ibid., p. 66).
This “something else” that was turned from logic to figuration raised a whole range of problems. That’s why Lacan, after quiting phenomenology and approaching a few readings from Saussure (Roudinesco, 1995, pp. 214-227), set out in interpreting Freudian topographies in the light of linguistics. Thuswise, he lays the foundation of the logic of the signifier (ibid., p. 222). Except that, together with it, the signifier acquires a new prestige: it will become the “letter” always maintained above and never below the signified, as Saussure (Saussure, the quoted work, pp. 85, 86) accustomed us. And besides, Lacan will add, we never deal with only one signifier, but with chains of signifiers because they continuously get born from one another.
Paying a great attention to the proliferation of the signifiers, Lacan efficiently keeps himself away from a deciphering (sign by sign) of the unconscious (and so of the dream) that always proved to be damaging through its focusing on figuration to the prejudice of displacement and condensation, essential stages of the onirical material from latency to its becoming manifest. Jakobson thinks that the displacement process (when the decisive significant facts from the latency period are sliding into „unsignificant” details in the manifest form of the dream)is very similar with the synecdoche (when the whole is represented through its parts), while Lacan, in spite of his being influenced by the linguist, makes his choice for comparing the displacement with the metonymy (replacing of an idea with the other one, while preserving the existent relation between them). But Jakobson invokes the metonymy for refering to the condensation process (the passing of a – generally – vast latent content into a manifest shortened content). Unlike him, Lacan makes a connection between condensation and metaphor as long as the condensation-mechanism seems to be similar with the bag-words.
However, Ricoeur denounces any intemperance in approaching the unconscious through linguistic means as well as hastly reducing its language at the economic features (let’s remember the energy-based theory that Freud took over from Breuer). All the same, it’s quite obvious that the two languages should go together: an unconscious mainly made up of forbidding instincts is yet “correlative to the habitual language” (Ricoeur, the quoted work, p. 422). Even though the repression could be seen as a sort of metaphor, such a comparison could not bring any justification not even for Lacan who tried to suppress the energetic language overbidding the linguistic implications. The linguistic approaches should rather double the energetic one because, for the time being, we are finding ourselves in front of a language circumstance that is still far from being “normal”. Freud compares the process of setting up the dream (the imposing of the censorship, the disguising approach, its final incoherence) with “the effort made by a subordinated for smuggling a few words that he knows would make his boss get upset” (Freud, 1992b, p. 51) and Ricoeur adds that such manner of admitting and keeping away from consciousness certain contents doesn’t have anything essentially linguistic.
As we already said in other occasions, Freud exclusively saves the language acts for pre-consciousness and consciousness; the figurative representation of the instinct as it reaches the pre-consciousness (the gate-keeper) may have the nature of a signifier still, without being a linguistic sign. Though, the fact that Freud sees beyond the language the “force of a signifier” (Ricoeur, the quoted work, p. 424) makes Elisabeth Roudinesco estimate that, to a certain extent, he managed to anticipate the relationship between the signifier and the signified that Saussure later imposed.
As a conclusion, the problem of the language of dreams doesn’t seem to meet the linguistic phenomenon in every possible meeting-point, at least within a Freudian approach. The displacement and condensation phenomena could be seen, of course, as being metonymical and/or metaphorical operations, but at the same time we shouldn’t forget that they only work with images. On the other hand, the image-based operations do not stay away from semiotics, on the contrary.
As for us, we will take Benveniste’s part who sets the dream-mechanisms either at the upstream or at the downstream of the linguistic approaches, with the relevant shade that Ricoeur brings: [these mechanisms] … exhibit the confusion between infra- and supra-linguistic processes” (ibid., p. 425).
We believe that our lenses are now polished enough for allowing us to look – without pretending any details – through the very manner in which the psychical processes give birth, shape, wrap up and deliver one of their most seductive and well-outlined products: the dreams we dream every night.
M1 – the message in its natural form
C1 – the first code
M2 – the message after suffering the dream-work
C2 – the new code, after gate-keeper’s intervention
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