THE DREAM AND ITS ANALYSIS IN AN ORGANISMIC INTERPRETATION OF THE
NEUROSES
The dream of the individual together with the individualistic
analysis of the dream presents a most difficult and as yet untried
field. There is here required a technique that is as elusive as it
is unprecedented. For such a technique must include the unconscious
complicity of the analyst in the social or image basis from which he
analyzes. For it is only impersonally and confluently that we may
understand what is personal and separative in another. To approach the
dreamer’s separative attitude of repression and self-defence toward
the elements of his dream, in an attitude of our own that is socially
no less separative and repressed, is to invite a situation in which
we merely exchange the dissociative symbols of the sleep state for
analogous symbols in the waking state. It is to replace refraction
and distortion as they occur in the individual repression, with its
symbolic wish-fulfilment in dreams, for refraction and distortion as
they occur in the social repression, with its symbolic wish-fulfilment
in “beliefs.” For this reason, having come to view the unconscious in
its waking and in its sleeping expression from the point of view of the
common, organic mode, I have reached the conviction that the conception
of dream-analysis as it has been entertained by us is throughout a
misconception, that to speak at all of dream “analysis” from the
personal or separative viewpoint is self-delusive. For our so-called
dreams of the night are but the unaccepted realities of the day, the
so-called realities of our day but the unaccepted dreams of the night.
The night’s reaction is individualistic, the day’s reaction is social.
Both are identical in their method as in their aim. Both represent the
endeavour, through futile recourse to symbolic or “would-be” measures
of recommunication, to adjust vicariously and upon a separative basis
the organic outrage to life’s inherent unity. It is the self-determined
illusion of our societal disaffection. It is the lure of the symbolic
in its mock pursuits of the personal and separative. It is the vicious
circle of all unconsciousness vainly rotating upon the phantom axis of
its own unreality.
In view of the repercussion of consciousness that is the essence of
man’s unconsciousness, the attitude that will best liberate us from our
infolding tendencies of mentation lies in a conception that regards
unconsciousness as a self-reflexive mode throughout. Such an attitude
will clearly demarcate our tendency toward the peripheral or social
distribution of the mental images comprising our _mirrored_ affects
as contrasted with the societal conservation of our _real_ affects
in the conscious fulfilment of our common personality. As long as we
fail to realize this generic basis we shall continue to suffer from
the delusion of our own organic disunity, and there will necessarily
persist the vicarious shunting of affect into the distributive
expressions of anger, duplicity and antagonism constitutive of
resistance. Since our affects are organically common, if we do not
permit them expression in universal confluence, they must inevitably
seek an expression that is scattered and random. And so we need to
recognize that we may not adjust our affective or subjective life
through the study of the objective mechanism of the images or dreams
that merely reflect it, but only through the subjective (conscious)
reabsorption within us of the displaced and socially distributed
affects to whose suggestion the dream, by day or by night, is the
mirrored reaction.[38]
In an organismic view _differentiation is unconsciousness_. That is,
the dissociated self or the separative element is, by reason of its
organic anomalousness, necessarily at odds with self. For this reason
there is inevitably entailed the universal conflict of unconsciousness,
collective and single, that is man’s disunity, social as well as
individualistic, “normal” as well as “neurotic.” Such is the disparity
that is reflected in his dreams, sleeping and waking. The diversity
of our fabrications, social and individual, is the diversity of our
_selves_. Our complex is our complexity. In very truth “_our_ little
life is rounded with a sleep.” We waken only to alter the form of our
dream. Throughout the diurnal cycle the dream-state remains unbroken,
and all efforts of analysis in our unconscious, separative mode are
helpful only in accentuating the powerlessness of consciousness in its
present state of differentiation. In the separative mode the elements
of the personality are unassembled, and the result is an absence of
organic coherence, of an essential unity such as may alone be the
basis of a truthful inquiry into the unconscious processes of man’s
inversion. In my own case (the only case upon which any of us may
occupy himself profitably is one’s own) it has become clear that my
attitude toward the night is predetermined by my attitude toward the
day. If I have kept personal and repressed my real feeling during the
day, the secret of my dissociation will be kept faithfully throughout
the night, and upon waking in the morning such camouflage as will
successfully hide my separativeness will have been already established
by my own order prior to the waking moment.
It would seem that sleep is the beneficent leveller, that mentally as
well as physically its function is restorative, that it is the solvent
and the dissolvent of our fancied differentiations, of our artificial,
fear-begotten defences against one another. It would seem that it is
for man the opportunity of organic rehabilitation, that in this period
of withdrawal and quiescence after the restless day of self-seeking and
antagonism there is a palliative and conciliatory process at work.[39]
After all, diplomacy and lying are wearying in their exactions, and
in this period marked by an absence of social pretences and of the
strain of our separative adjustments, consciousness undoubtedly tends
to reassert its common, primal mode with images that promote and do not
impede organic function--joyous images, expressive of common need, of
organic participation, of concerted, confluent function. After all, our
dreams are but the shadows our lives cast behind them when we stand in
the light of our own personality.
It is only as we become one with this inherent personality through
an acceptance of the unity of life in its entirety that the shadows
comprising our dreams, sleeping and waking, may be truly resolved.
Since our dreams of the night only tend to restore the equilibrium
which the day has destroyed, our dreams are only in so far distorted
as our day is distorted. In so far as the day is an evasion of the
recognition of the infantile wish, with its corresponding entail of
over-compensation and atonement, in so far does the dream reproduce
again the identical wish of the day after having recourse to the
extravagance and distortion requisite to its disguise. When in our
day’s reactions we shall have entered upon an organic, confluent mode
of consciousness, our dreams will be one with the organic confluence
of the day, furthering in their harmonious imagery the quiet process
of the day’s constructiveness. It will then be realized that sleep is
but the day’s diastole, that just as the period of diastolic relax
following the rhythmic contraction of the heart has a function that
is reciprocal and harmonious in relation to the systolic impulse, so
in the rhythmic cycle of our day its period of rest is reciprocal and
continuous with, not contradictory and opposed to, the constructive
function of the day’s activities. The dreams of the separative mode,
on the other hand, only occlude and congest the avenues of our
sleep-consciousness. These obstructive travesties effect a complete
deadlock due to the confluent organism’s ineffectual effort to arrest
and clarify these separative trends that are reflections even in
sleep of the unlived, fear-ridden, organically discordant experience
comprising the day.
With our present habitually tutored day, the very approach of our
awaking automatically prompts us to don a costume of disguise before
we rise to move again amid the tedious maze of masked players who,
like ourselves, have lost the reality of life’s organic meaning. As
long as one’s feeling is thus resolutely set against the surrender of
his artificial defences, as long as one fears to remove the mask of
pretence covering his personality, no amount of intellectualization,
of mental analysis, of theoretical “truths” (I have tried them all!)
will avail to lift his repression and admit him to the simple reality
of his common, organic feeling. It is in vain that we seek the truth.
Truth, as it is customarily conceived, is but the theory whereof life,
as it may be lived, is the reality. To seek the truth is again to
pursue the phantom of our own mental imagery. For reality disappoints
all formulation. No symbol may stand for equivalence but only for
equivocation. The lesson the psychoanalyst has yet to learn is that
reality has no substitutes, that no _seeming_, however plausible, may
replace that which _is_. It is this lesson--the very lesson we presume
to teach our patients--of which all our work is as yet but an empty
recitation. Accordingly, no amount of intuitional or theoretical acumen
on the part of the analyst can do other than thwart a patient’s need of
self-realization. Such intellectualism on the part of the analyst is
the substitution that is _his_ neurosis. Recourse to intellectuality
is his concession to the socially current repression and substitution
which in our collective unconsciousness we credit as normality, never
once suspecting, in the strength of our numerical security, that
_normality is but the collective dream-state of man’s waking life_.
Because of the psychological identity between the dream that is
our day, with its dramatization in the objective furniture of
cubic actuality, and the dream that is our night, with its scenic
reproduction in flat, pictorial outline, an individualistic analysis
in the sense of an encompassing realization is of its nature precluded.
Only as we can come to stand apart from both, and view them in their
proper light as symbolic phenomena divorced from life, may they be
assessed in their true relation and thus analyzed in the only sense
that gives meaning to the term. But this is not a merely mental
process. This is to actualize organic life in our daily experience
with such sincerity as to realize within ourselves the spuriousness
of our habitual, dissociated mode. It is so to include the dream
outside the dream, constituted of the separative day with which the
separative night is enclosed, that we shall have automatically entered
upon the mode of self-unification which is one with a societally
unified, confluent consciousness. The essential mark of such a mode of
consciousness is that, in its subjective consonance, it regards with an
equally objective clarity the vicarious processes of the day and of the
night.
Our attitude of the day is amply illustrated by our attitude toward
our dramas. As our lives are based upon unconsciousness, our dramas as
well as our dreams are also necessarily based upon unconsciousness.
Since the logic of the dream is inverted, it is essential to reverse
the dream’s unconscious motive in order to understand its fallacious
sequences. The drama equally represents the interplay of unconscious
motives. Based thus upon the inverse processes of unconsciousness, its
logic is also necessarily inverse. And so in order to understand the
drama, its motive must likewise be observed in its reverse trend. In
other words, the drama and the dream are identical in their essential
mechanism. When the psychopathologist is confronted with the drama of
_actual life_--the inverse process represented in the neurosis--his
immediate recourse should be to intercept as far as possible the
inharmonious development of the patient’s life history and, having
completely reversed its underlying motive in the light of conscious
perspectives, to unravel its meaning through carefully retracing
discoverable inadvertencies of development to their logical source.
In this function the analyst’s attitude toward the human drama
presented in the neurosis of his patient becomes identical with his
attitude toward the dreams of his patient. One would naturally expect
that his attitude toward the drama of the stage would be equally
logical. But a societal analysis fails to justify this expectation. For
such is the elusive tenacity of the seemingly actual, as it appears in
the dissociative recourses of the social mind, that the psychoanalyst,
too, continues to regard the bidimensional _aspect_ of life presented
in the drama as a conscious form of art. In consequence it comes to
pass that a train of unconsciously destructive events which he deplores
as an expression of life in the clinic is applauded by him as an
expression of art in the theatre. The same untoward sequences, which in
clinical retrospect are _viewed_ with compassion, are in the process of
their theatrical portrayal _experienced_ with delight.
I do not see how such inconsistencies between our collective and our
individual reactions to unconsciousness are separable from the present
confusion that exists between the objective and the subjective spheres
of consciousness. Because of this confusion, in our dissociation we
take pleasure in participating in the dramatic representation of the
identical processes of unconsciousness which, subsequently contemplated
as actuality, we interpret only as pain. This inconsistency between
our subjective and objective reactions accounts also for the many
discrepancies in the psychiatrist’s personal attitude toward the dramas
of the clinic and the drama within his own home. It explains how it
happens that we, who are seemingly competent to trace an individual’s
neurosis directly to the influences that have unconsciously surrounded
him as a child, will yet unconsciously surround our own children with
these selfsame influences. Surely never was the “other fellow” so
abused and ourselves so tricked as in our psychiatric clinics when, in
our self-conscious formulation of the occasion of his confusion, we
deem ourselves less unconscious than he.
As it is the especial métier of the unconscious to convert the actual
into the seeming, its subtlest attainment is the conversion of what
is most actual into what is most seeming. If of realization itself it
may effect a semblance, it is the ultimate achievement in unconscious
ventriloquy. If of analysis itself it may make a pseudo-analysis, it
has secured its entrenchment through a technical recourse that is
wellnigh impregnable. Through such a strategic manœuvre one often
attains a quite faultless analysis of a dream, when all the while
the realization is but seeming. As the dream is but the reflected
image or “negative” of yesterday’s duplicities and introversions, an
attempt to capture and “analyze” it from the retrospective standpoint
of the replacement and introversion of the day, is but to retain
unaltered and unalterable the unconscious embroilment of one’s
self-delusive introversion. Yet, with the practised dexterity of our
habitual sleight-of-hand methods of analysis, we still pursue the
futile industry of our objective dream-trapping, idly endeavouring
to drag the travesty of the day’s distortions embodied in the dream
into the self-conscious analytic dissecting-room. In truth, the
real need is that we surrender the analytic dissecting-room and all
its paraphernalia of symbolic technique to the common reality which
underlies it, realizing that its artificial displacements constitute
the sole function of the dream parody. For set what snare we will, a
dream cannot be taken alive. The chasing of dreams is like the chasing
of rainbows. One may no more behold his _real_ self in the mirror of
the dream than in any other reflecting surface. The image reproduced
may be never so lifelike but it is not life. As with birds on the wing,
so with our dreams; we cannot capture them except we destroy them. The
attempt to do so is to repeat without end our habitual offence against
the organic grammar of life constitutive of the double negative of all
unconsciousness. Again it is unconsciousness within unconsciousness,
personal preference within personal preference, unconsciousness
_unconscious_ that is the baffling complicity in our self-dissociation.
This self-involvement of the neurosis, this _unconsciousness of the
totality of self_ makes of our individual enfoldment a wellnigh
inscrutable situation. In such a situation the individual’s efforts
of self-help--the recourses of personal rather than of societal
outlooks--become comparable to the efforts of a man who would attempt
to lift himself by his own boot-straps. This it is that comprises the
dream within the dream of all individuation--of all separateness. Of
course, it quite naturally seems to us, in our now differentiated
mode, that the attainment of a position of relative inclusiveness is a
humanly impossible task. Yet, if we are to attain to a true recognition
of our _societal dissociation_, we may do so only through the
acceptance of the basic actuality of our common, organic confluence.
Such alone is the essential recourse of a fully awakened consciousness.
Whether we will or no, we are thus brought back again and again to
the essential fallacy of our day’s dreams as of our night’s--to the
illusion of personal causation or of individual sponsorship that is
at the heart of man’s dissociation, both neurotic and normal. In the
presumption of his self-determined hypothesis of good and bad, of hope
and fear, the individual is assuming unconsciously the supervision of
the universe, and the constant endeavour of his thoughts as of his
dreams is to keep secret the traces of his personal presumption through
the subtle projections of the disguised image. Some call it God, some
call it evolution, but no matter what the collective title under which
our private prerogative is symbolized, it is in reality but the cheat
that is the personal illusion of a central causality resident within
ourselves.
I know that in this subjective statement of the disharmony of
consciousness there is presented a trend that is wholly unacceptable
to the symbolic or absolute logician; but, on the other hand,
the objective statements of the absolute logician are with equal
validity unacceptable to the relativist. According to the objective
logic of the mental absolutist the fact of our very existence is
theoretically untenable. In the unconscious determinism of men’s
personal prerogative, the postulate, as is generally known, is that
the universe in which we have our being was either created by some
agency existing outside itself or it was self-creative. Of the two
alternatives either is impossible, but the vital fact remains that
here we are! The logical untenability of a position that limits itself
to these commonly accepted alternatives may some day offer sobering
consideration to our unconscious absolutism. For the present there is
grave need that our absolute or theoretical logic yield place to the
relative logic of a more organismic point of view. In the world of
physical phenomena prior to Einstein it was impossible for physicists
to proceed with further creative extensions because of the limitation
of their underlying conception. So in the sphere of human activities
around us, as long as we continue in our present objective fixity of
thought, it will not be possible for life to unfold because of the set
limitations of unessential attitudes of mind that block all essential
creative expression.