Dreaming the Reality Of The Pleasure Principle

In his 2009 article entitled Dreaming as a ‘curtain of illusion’: Revisiting ‘the royal road’ with Bion as our guide, James Grotstein argues that Bion views dreaming as an “ever-present, invisible filter that overlays much of our mental life, including perception, as well as attention itself.”

Dreaming and waking consciousness are not so clearly delineated from one another as we like to think. Extended to a therapeutic context, it is also the analyst who dreams as he or she listens and interprets and the analysand who dreams while he or she freely associates.

By contrast, Freud’s understanding of dreams was much less fuzzy around the edges: “Freud’s theory of dreaming postulates that dreaming occurs during sleep and that its motive is to employ the pleasure principle exclusively to create wish-fulfilment narratives to alter the day residue,” says Grotstein.

Bion (1992) extended Freud’s ideas with the idea that our dreams are more functional, more essential, that dreaming allows us to develop sense impressions of emotional experience in their transmutation from beta to alpha content. In other words, dreaming serves a function of affect management.

In Bion’s words, significant events are “having something done to them mentally, and that which is being done to them I call being dreamed...’’ (Bion, 1992).

Grotstein summarises Bion’s view of dreaming, saying that it transforms unmentalized sense-impressions of emotional experience into mentalizable alpha-elements (beta elements, said Bion, are the unmetabolised and unprocessed physical and emotional experiences that, once transformed by alpha processes, become alpha elements that are amenable to conscious manipulation).

Dreaming is, for Bion, a form of thinking that normally involves the collaborative yet oppositional activity of the reality and pleasure principles, which are, respectively, the purview of the unconscious and the conscious.

Dreaming crosses the line between wakefulness and sleep, across the lines delineating conscious and unconscious, in the interface between beta and alpha processes. Crucially, it serves as a contact barrier between the various psychic structures postulated by Bion that are central to healthy emotional functioning. Take away the dream and you take away the “other reality” that is the essential foil for the alleged reality of consensual, conscious existence.

In this interview, Grotstein elaborates on dreaming, as understood by Bion, and reflects on why dreams are vital, perhaps even more than ever, in the age of the brain.

New Therapist: In 1979 you wrote Who is the Dreamer who Dreams the Dream. At this point in your career and thinking as a psychoanalyst and thought leader in Bion's thinking and theories, do you think the enquiry into dreams is still a worthwhile endeavor in psychoanalytic thinking where the impact of neuroscience and neurobiology might tempt to take some of the mystery away from dreaming?

James Grotstein: Yes, I do think the enquiry into dreams is still a worthwhile endeavor in psychoanalytic thinking despite the advances of neuroscience and neurobiology. The mystery of dreams still remains. The work of Wilfred Bion has been very decisive in my thinking about dreams and is making a very big impact on the whole analytic and mental health fields. I wrote a paper comparing Freud’s and Bion’s theories of dreaming in which I posit that Bion radically extended and altered Freud’s theories [see Grotstein in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2009]. You will be able to see why dreaming, what Bion calls the “Curtain of Illusion”, is of so much importance.

NT: You say that dreaming and enquiry into dreams is as important and fruitful as ever in our enquiry into how minds work. On reading your article, what is very captivating is the notion that therapy can be seen as a dream space. How would this influence technical issues in psychoanalysis or does it make it now even more impermeable?

JG: Yes, dreaming following Bion's innovative thinking about it, is put in a new light—as a new start of psychoanalysis—far more important than people thought. From Bion's point of view, it is fundamental not just for the processing of emotions, but to thinking itself. One may think of it as one of the components of the Caesura between consciousness and unconsciousness, which processes the transit and transformation of feelings with thoughts from each area to the other. It's like a glorified passport control using a selectively-permeable membrane (not semi-permeable, but selectively permeable) to handle this mental/emotional traffic. One may think of it as a numen, a preternatural deity.

You are quite right that I believe—and that Bion believed— that psychoanalysis constituted a "dream space." Upgrading the importance of dreaming is hard to gauge, but you are right it makes a difference in many ways, mainly how we conceive of the psychoanalytic process. For instance, psychopathology is due, for this point of view, to defective or incomplete dreaming. One of the principle tasks of analysis is to complete the dreaming which was incomplete or defective originally.

NT: One might say, among other important contributions, that the work of Bion has beckoned us into the importance of thinking and we can see how this has permeated newer perspectives in psychoanalysis. Why do you think it took so long, and what are your thoughts on the timing of this?

JG: In terms of your question about why it took so much time for Bion's ideas to become known had a lot to do with the origins of psychoanalysis. Actually it began in the 19th century with the proliferation in fiction with regards to the alter ego, the double self, which also was noted in Hysteria by Charcot, and by Breuer and Freud. Freud rotated the axis of the splitting of the personalities from the vertical to the horizontal and thus eliminated the second personality. What was left was consciousness repressing the unconscious. This, in addition to Freud's need to get scientific validation for his new discovery, led him into an unfortunate side road, the plea for scientific validation rather than seeing psychoanalysis as a specific entity within the field of literature and drama—i.e., aesthetics.

NT: Do you think that Bion's ideas on thinking offer the solution to the perennial problem in psychoanalysis of the interface between phantasy and reality?

JG: In terms of the interface between fantasy and reality, most people would read the content of your question to imply that fantasy is less important than reality, and that achievement of the respect for reality is the goal of analysis, which would mean the conquest or subordination of fantasy. I think this is far from the case. Fantasy is simply another reality, which is just as important as what we call reality. Bion, like Lacan, as a matter of fact, nominated O as the true Reality, whereas what analysts customarily and traditionally called reality is really a substituted reality—substituted by representations or symbols. We come now to an inescapable probability that the mind is normally multiple and exists as a hologram. The unconscious is conscious within its own domain. As a matter of fact, it is conscious of us all the while we are unconscious of it. Lacan expressed it very well when he said, "All the while the ego speaks it fails to realize it has been spoken by the Other."

NT: The capacity to think another person separately from the processes of our own phantasy underpin the recent work in mentalization. This seems to suggest a move in psychoanalytic thinking from the importance of whole object relating to the importance of subjectivity. If you agree with this, and given that you have been in the field a long time, why do you think this has happened and what importance does it have for the human project?

JG: I like your question about the relationship between the traditional interest in the object as opposed to the new interest in the subject and inter-subjectivity. I think it has to do with the reification following the use of the names of concepts. Object defined drive at one time. Then as psychoanalytic theory advanced, people failed to realize that objects can't function except as targets for the drives. The concept of a whole object really makes no sense. What was once called a whole object really constitutes the infant's developmental awareness that mother is a subject unto herself, only partially known by him, by mysterious and ineffable in her won right with her own unknowable sense of self. The mind is much more mysterious than analysts ever thought.

Further reading

Bion WR (1992). Cogitations. London:Karnac

Grotstein, J S (2009) Dreaming as a ‘curtain of illusion’: Revisiting the ‘royal road’ with Bion as our guide. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 90: 733-752.

About the interviewee

James S. Grotstein, M.D. is Professor of Psychiatry, U.C.L.A School of Medicine, and a training and supervising analyst at the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute and at The Psychoanalytic Centre of California.

About the Interviewers

Terri Broll is a clinical psychologist. She lives in Hilton, Kwa Zulu Natal where she offers individual and group supervision in psychodynamically oriented therapies. She is also a professional artist combining her interest in psychology and art to assist and mentor working artists.

Sue Spencer, the features editor of New Therapist, is a psychologist working in private and hospital practice in Pietermaritzburg.