Why Can't We Sleep? by Darian Leader

Author:Darian Leader
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241984444
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2019-02-04T16:00:00+00:00

After The Interpretation of Dreams was published in 1899, all of Freud’s subsequent contributions tended to treat the question not of dream interpretation but of the handling of dreams. He was anxious to temper the zeal for dream interpretation evinced in some of his students, and to collapse what he called ‘the exaggerated respect’ that had been accorded them.75 Although dreams were certainly the vehicle of hidden meanings, analysts had to give up their passion for discovering some blinding revelation if their work was to be conducted properly. A dream, he said, could never be fully interpreted, and just as there were no set rules for reading dreams, there was no lexicon of dream symbols. All would depend on each individual dream within the context of each individual person’s analysis.

There is an important difference here between the meaning and the function of dreams. On this latter question, Freud believed at first that the purpose of the dream is to conserve sleep. It does this by acting on both the external and internal factors that would otherwise keep us awake: problematic aspects of everyday life will form part of the dream, and unconscious trains of thought will connect with them, albeit in hidden and disguised form. Since what is repressed ‘does not obey the wish to sleep’, a complex operation has to occur to stop us from remaining awake. Freud argued that because the internal factors are threatening and pose a risk to us, they undergo the censorship that works to form the dream. This is the process of disguise and encryption that constructs the dream.

A man in analysis woke up from his sleep to remember simply the single pristine image of a lemon.76 Although he had no immediate associations to this strange apparition, and was puzzled by it, several weeks later a recollection came to him: when he was five, he had been present when the son of a domestic in his family home had declared that his girlfriend’s vagina had become unduly stretched due to all the sex they were having, and that he had tried to make it contract by squirting lemon juice inside it, despite her protests. The motifs of scopic, sadistic or masochistic pleasure – whatever they might have been – had been both reduced to and replaced by the spartan dream image.

We should remember that by censorship Freud does not mean a little fellow who sits in your head and decides what can and can’t be allowed into consciousness. It is rather a structural process, like a compression, that results from what can and can’t be thought. What is curious here is how difficult it is not to add a thinker, and hence the idea that someone – a thinker – must judge what can be thought and what can’t. But psychical censorship is very different. In the example above, we might guess that the boy didn’t have the thought ‘I am enjoying watching this act of sexual aggression’ or ‘A woman is being punished

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