Freud and the History of Psychoanalysis by Gelfand Toby;Kerr John; & Toby Gelfand & John Kerr

Author:Gelfand, Toby;Kerr, John; & Toby Gelfand & John Kerr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

THE FAILURE OF DREAM REDUCTION IN LONG-TERM ANALYSANDS

My argument relies, in an essential way, on the import of Freud's theoretical assimilation of manifest dream contents to neurotic symptoms. Therefore, it is important that I be quite clear, at the outset, on the etiologic, explanatory, and investigative dimensions of that assimilation.

In the first instance, Freud postulated that manifest dream contents and neurotic symptoms are etiologically homologous by being constructed in the same manner. They are both alike compromise formations, inasmuch as the dream work, no less than neurosogenesis, features the defensive operations of repression and censorious distortion in the service of disguise: “It will now be seen that dreams are constructed like a neurotic symptom: they are compromises between the demands of a repressed impulse and the resistance of a censoring force in the ego. Since they have a similar origin they are equally unintelligible and stand in equal need of interpretation” (Freud, 1925, p. 45) Having assimilated the construction of dreams to the constitution of neurotic symptoms, Freud (1900) spelled out that, in regard to the role of “causal overdetermination,” dreams are “like all other psychopathological structures” (p. 149).

Freudians, no less than the rest of us, are aware of the obvious differences between the hallucinatory nature of the (visual) manifest dream scenarios and the actual displays of neurotic symptoms in the real actions of waking life. But, in the context of psychoanalytic theory, Rycroft (1973) rightly stressed their deep-seated etiologic homology: “Freud's interest in dreams derived from the fact that they are normal processes with which everyone is familiar, but which nonetheless exemplify the processes at work in the formation of neurotic symptoms (p. 37; italics added).”

In Freud's view, repressions are causally necessary for dream disguises no less than for neurosogenesis. In the case of a dream, a repressed wishful impulse “is the actual constructor of the dream: it provides the energy for its production and makes use of the day's residues as material” (Freud, 1925, p. 44); moreover, “a wish which is represented in a dream must be an infantile one” (Freud, 1900, p. 553). As for neurosogenesis, the crucial pathogen is a sexual repression of some sort. Freud drew an unclear distinction between “primal repression,” a first phase of denying the psychical representative of an instinct entry into consciousness, and “repression proper,” a second stage, or “after-repression,” which banishes “mental derivatives of the repressed representative” (Freud, 1915, p. 148, n. 2). But there is no textual evidence for supposing that he took the respective roles of the two phases of repression to differ at all as between dream formation and symptom formation. Furthermore, as shown by the function attributed to primal fantasy in the etiology of the Wolf Man's obsessions (Freud, 1918), such fantasies cannot be claimed to be more relevant to dream production than to neurosogenesis (ch. VIII).

Indeed, Freud did stress the etiologic homology between dreams and neurotic symptoms once again, when he developed its momentous investigative corollary for the causal interpretation of dreams:

My patients were pledged

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