By Paul Lippmann, Ph.D.
(This article is adapted from the Bernard Kalinkowitz Memorial Lecture delivered on Novermber 16, 2001.)
From the beginning, dreams and psychoanalysis were made for each other. Freud brought the magic of dreams into the materialism of modern times and rooted his infant science along the royal road to the unconscious. Thus, dreams were born into the 20th Century on the wings of psychoanalysis and to return the favor, psychoanalysis was born into the 20th Century on the wings of dreams.
But, that time of intimate connection is over. As I have written elsewhere, the affair between dreams and psychoanalysis has cooled considerably and both old lovers have gone elsewhere for fulfillment-psychoanalysis to human relations, attachment theory, Lacan, Bion, intersubjectivity, and to the intimate details of the therapeutic relationship; and dreams have drifted away from our couches to enter the preoccupations of New Age healers, of neuroscience, of cognitive psychology and of the study of consciousness.
There is at least one positive result of our manifest disinterest in dreams. Patients and therapists now are more able to talk together about dreams, and when they do, with less of a doctrinaire approach, less driven by theory, with the possibility of quietly attending to the dream itself rather than to proving one or another point of view.
But aside from this one advantage, I believe we have turned away from the study of dreams far too soon-just as a psychology of dreams is becoming relevant to the entire psychology of the modern mind in this new electronic era. Let us begin with the microcosm of dreams. Recent technologically enhanced neuroscience has shown us the material beginnings of the dream process. A tiny dance of movement, resonating until a magic synchronicity takes place leading to the enflamed brain of REM activation and then to the vast and extraordinary inner theater of dreams.
Since about 90% of all dreams are forgotten sometime between dreaming awareness and subsequent morning's waking consciousness, the remarkable microcosm of dream activation resulting in dream is mostly private not only from all others, but also private to ones own self.
Let us imagine together the way we were, once upon a time. Long before we illuminated our night lives with 200 TV channels and the 24 hour everything, before our beepers and answering machines, before we controlled night and stifled nature to suit our nature, before modern life, the dream was the only show in night-town. Can we imagine how singularly powerful were our nightly excursions, for tens of thousands of years, in the absence of any competition and distraction? Many anthropologists believe dreams served as the original inspiration and model for story telling, for drama, for art, for the experiences of god, for walking with the dead, for flying with our ancestors. It is hard for us moderns to imagine the power and enormity of the influence of dreams before science explained everything to us. The dream interpreter of old was a most important figure, a powerful being within whom important knowledge resided along with the twin heavenly gifts of prophesy and healing.
Dreams have played a critical role not only in spiritual philosophy and cosmology but also in the birth and early development of many religions-both world-wide and local—e.g., Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Christian, Muslim. In American Indian, aboriginal, and pre-industrial civilizations around the globe, dreams and their interpretations play a prominent role in origination myths, in religious practices and in the practices of everyday life. The entire world of magic and myth, the ghosts and goblins, the spirits that cause inner and outer events are all conjured of dream experience.
So dreams have been of major significance in olden times not only in the development of central creative and cultural institutions, but also in healing traditions from the beginning of time. And for much of the last century, they were thought to be of some importance in psychological healing-especially in early psychoanalysis. But while they have lost overt influence in modern materialist culture and while they have somewhat disappeared from the preoccupations of most psychoanalytic theorists, the relation between dreams and waking life is more crucial now than ever. While dreams themselves seem to have become less important within our culture metaphorically, dreams have morphed, have alchemized, have been transformed, have gone away only to reappear in new guise—as a product of the material, industrial, commercial, technological world—i.e., as film, TV, computer, internet and virtual reality-a transformation from the centrality of the internal screen and its psychology to the centrality of the external screen and its psychology.
In the 1890s, just at the same time that Freud was giving birth to his favorite writing, in Paris, the Lumiere Brothers, Auguste and Louis, were also giving birth-they consciously and deliberately introduced film as a way of reproducing the dream experience. A century later, we have Spielberg's DreamWorks, and Hollywood as the Dream Factory, along with the remarkable electronic e-world of the external screen-TV, computer, video games, internet—an enormous industry that shapes our world, our minds, all born from dreams. What is the effect on mind of the replacement in importance of dreams by movies,TV, and internet life?
I believe this is an important question for psychoanalysts to engage in because a critical transformation has been taking place involving our primary subject matter, and yet we ourselves have turned away from dreams and from participating in a meaningful discussion of the implications of this monumental cultural shift.
There are many ways to regard this transformation. The world of machines may well have slowly entered our innermost being. It has brought us great benefit, but in addition, it can be seen that our profound reliance upon machines threatens to replace aspects of our ancient inner soul with machine life. In most of the 19th and 20th Century, artists, writers, social philosophers-from Dickens in Great Expectations to Chaplin in Modern Times have reflected, often with great alarm, on our engagement with the machine and of the experience of the human soul in its slow transformation into machine. The electronic era and its emphasis on a world-wide instantaneous exchange of vastly increasing amounts of information accompanied by the increasing disembodiment of such information, the profound reliance upon image manipulation, the loss of traditional sense of privacy-all of this and more characterizes a vast global technological shift.
Our ancient interconnection with the natural world is rapidly being replaced by our engagement with the virtual representation of that natural world-a representation that takes place on an external screen. But now, we see there is a shadow side to the remarkable march of technological progress. Our great victory over nature and our replacement of the natural world by our own designs, of late by our electronic designs, has many ramifications.
The reality principle once anchored our pleasure principle. The secondary process in connection with the external world of nature once anchored the primary process in connection with our inner nature. That which kept us anchored to the real world, that which served as the measure of the limits of our fantasy life—that real tree out there, that real river, that real soil, those real seasons-have been increasingly affected, altered, replaced by our own ability to shape nature to our designs.
Whichever way we think about the alteration in the natural world and its replacement by a world of technological design, living in the real world without nature is akin to dream life. Concepts developed by Freud for the inner world-pleasure principle and reality principle, primary process and secondary process, displacement and condensation—all now have relevance to our dreamy life in the real world-to the extent that we live in a world in which nature is diminished. We used to think the primitives—as we called them—lived in a dream world. And we were considered more realistic, more scientific, and so on. Well it turns out that they lived closer to the realities of nature-the land, rivers, animals, weather-and thus could be confident when they traveled in the land of dreams. We, however, have lost our way in relation to nature. We live in a dream world of our own designs without reality, or at least without the living reality of a natural world, to intercede. Like dreaming, we are cut off from realistic limitations, we can turn our innermost thoughts into achievements-like we can in dreams.
We can fly; we can live under sea; we may be able to conjure our own babies without natural means; we can maintain an illusion of youth; we may be able to live forever; we can image ourselves a war or peace and manipulate images to wag the dog, we can replace god with our own nature, we can replace nature with our own needs, and above all this, the presentation of all of this-i.e., the media-like dreaming of old-instructs, shows, points the way, teaches us how to be and how to think.
It is for these reasons, that I hypothesize the replacement of dreams and of natural life, by the machine and its amazing Technicolor dreamcoat. We are increasingly living the life of dreams and the ways and rules of dreaming, as outlined by Freud have great relevance to our current condition and to the mind that is developing within these current conditions. One sidelight: the contemporary post-modern philosophies of thoroughgoing relativism and hermeneutics along with deconstructionism and the elevation of narrative versions of truth leading to a much applauded pluralism and multideterminism is the fitting psychology for dream life and not for life in a world of reality. The idea that we can no longer speak of reality, but only versions of reality, the idea that all is narrative and not truth, the modern relational proclivity for entirely open systems, the power of indeterminateness-all of this is relevant and basic to a world in which nature is no longer important, rather to a world of dreams and their interpretation. Nature in interplay with the inner world once gave meaning to life. If nature is demoted, then we are in a dream state-our own fantasies predominate, our own versions, our own interpretations. In such a world, what we think about what is out there, is more important than what is actually out there. In a dream, what we think is there is more important than what is there. Our eyes are closed, our muscles paralyzed, our thoughts rein supreme. In a world without nature, all that matters is what is in the mind. In this way, dream and reality have now converged and the psychology of dreams will tell us a great deal about the developing modern mind.
We have enlarged and expanded every human capacity from eyes to muscles to gonads to brain. And so with dreams. With our tools, we grew wings; we grew muscles; we grew better eyes and ears; we grew our brains and now we grow our dreams into an outsized version-bigger than life-of their original size. Have we lost more than we gained? What is the price of growing our dreams technologically while demoting the ancient kind.
We have the opportunity as psychoanalysts to think about these things but also to perform an act of rebellion, a subversive connection to the ancients and to our early psychoanalysts. We can listen to the private dreams of our patients and, with respect, quietly, appreciatively, taking the time in all our harried lives, to listen to the inner nature of the mind alone as it creates its mysterious stories-we can come in touch again with the capacity the mind has to picture the world in its own way, on its own terms, to feel the world, to transform the world in its own image, to create a universe within-and to emerge, like Odysseus, to tell the adventure to a friendly listener who is more interested in good dream conversation than in domination by interpretation.
We can treat dreams with greater respect, for their own sake. Following the images, staying with the images—as Jung and Hillman and the Existentialists and the naturalist-interpersonalists suggest, exploring their effect on the dreamer and the listener, playing with them with no purpose other than to see how things go, allowing the unconscious to lead the way-is the way to go with dreams, rather than imposing our own designs upon them.
So in conclusion, this manifesto points to a return to dreams in our clinical work as an act of rebellion in our HMO world, as a way of reclaiming our interest in the unconscious, and as a way of maintaining a critical separation between dream life and life in the wake state. The ways of contemporary life have resulted in a devastating demotion of nature and with it a deepening confusion between dream life and what was once real life. If we have been living in a dream, psychoanalysis has aided in a confusion between a psychology of dreams and a psychology of waking life with its embrace of the post modern (i.e., post-nature) philosophies and its radical relativism that is more suited to dream life than to real life. We can reinvest in our psychology of dreams and in Freud's brilliant insights in order to examine the evolution of the modern psyche in relation to its ability to shape reality to its own designs.
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