The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis by Richard Gipps & Michael Lacewing

Author:Richard Gipps & Michael Lacewing [Gipps, Richard & Lacewing, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192506870
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2019-02-16T00:00:00+00:00

Dreaming Consciousness and the Reduction of Emotional Complexity

This account integrates the reduction of FE (as complexity) in sleep with observations about the large-scale neurological phenomena of SWS, REM, and synaptic homeostasis, downscaling, and pruning. The role it assigns to the generative model—as reducing the aversive complexity of emotional memory via the imaginary accuracy of the fictive experiences of dreaming—explicates the significance of dreams in a way that accords with Freud’s as well as many other depth-psychological descriptions. For on this account the significance we assign to dreams derives from their role in unifying the emotional meaning of the past and the present in preparation for the future, a task they accomplish by adjusting emotional significances over the fields of memory in which experiential learning is embodied.

We can readily trace this hypothesized adjustment of emotional significance in the examples in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams as well as later psychoanalytic writings. For in Freud’s work as well as that of other analysts, the analysis of a dream can be divided into three parts, which are related by association, memory, and emotion. These are:

i. The manifest content of the dream, the series of fictive conscious experiences that the dreamer reports as making up the dream. Elements of this are related by free association (and memory and emotion) to

ii. Memories and feelings from the day before the dream, whose contents indicate that they played a causal role in the formation of the dream. These in turn are related by memory, emotion, and association, to

iii. Memories from the more remote past, together with deeper and more traumatic and conflicted emotions. The contents of these indicate that they were unconsciously activated together with (ii) the conscious memories and feelings from the day; and these contents can be seen as transformed in (i), the manifest content. So Freud describes these as the latent content of the dream.

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