REVIEW N° 7 | YEAR 2010 / 1
Summary
The dream as a bridge between levels of functioning in both the family and the couple
The author illustrates various therapeutic uses of the dream within the framework of the family and the couple. She doesn’t only examine the specific detail of interpretation within these frameworks but also how the dreams of each family member may work inside themselves as powerful inducers of change both in the other members and in the family as a whole.
She observes the various shapes that one of the family member’s dreams may take within the framework of the couple or family, (for example, it may happen that one of the partners may dream in place of the other, or when trying to explain the actions of the other. Sometimes there are dreams that are told by both members of a couple during a session which show complementary aspects or the level of link that has been co-constructed between the two partners). The author discusses how a dream can and must be read, both on an individual level and as an expression of the functioning of the family and link that unites the couple, and thus, at an intra-psychic level and interpersonal level.
However, the dream that breaks into a family space is a powerful attracter and is often an inducer of other dreams in other members, as if all the other forces of the family or couple could syntonise themselves more or less at the same time onto a new phenomena which is unpredictable, and which suddenly pushes all the members into another dimension.
Even the existance of a dream is a powerful inducer for a new level of affective functioning and relationships as is the possibility of thought and the opening up to the contents of split or inhibited families.
Keywords: Dream, link, dissociation, inhibition, level of family functioning.
Resumen
El sueño como puente entre los diferentes niveles de funcionamiento de la familia y de la pareja.
La autora ilustra los diferentes empleos terapéuticos del sueño en el tratamiento familiar y de la pareja. Considera que no solamente es importante la interpretación en estos tratamientos, sino también que el sueño de cada uno de sus integrantes puede funcionar, en sí mismo, como un inductor potente del cambio en los otros miembros y en la familia como conjunto.
La autora considera las diversas configuraciones que el sueño de un miembro puede desarrollar en el tratamiento psicoanalítico familiar o de pareja (por ejemplo, puede ocurrir que uno de los partenaires sueñe en lugar del otro miembro o explique las acciones del otro; a veces hay sueños que son contados por los dos miembros de la pareja en una sesión los cuales muestran aspectos complementarios o de niveles del vínculo co-construidos entre ambos). También explica de qué manera el sueño puede y debe ser analizado tanto a nivel individual como también ser analizado como la expresión del funcionamiento de la familia o del vínculo que une a los miembros de la pareja considerados tanto a nivel intrapsíquico como a nivel interpersonal. El sueño que hace irrupción en el espacio familiar es un poderoso imán y a menudo inductor de sueños en los otros miembros de la familia o de la pareja: es como si todos los espíritus de la familia o de la pareja pueden al mismo tiempo entrar en sintonía, más o menos, sobre un fenómeno nuevo imprevisible que impulsará a todos los miembros instantáneamente a otra dimensión. La existencia misma del sueño es un potente inductor para un nuevo nivel de funcionamiento afectivo y de las relaciones, como así también de la posibilidad de pensar, y además posibilitar la apertura de los contenidos reprimidos o clivados de la familia.
Palabras clave: sueño, vinculo, disociación, represión, niveles de funcionamiento de la familia.
Résumé
Le rêve comme inducteur du changement dans la famille et dans le couple.
L’auteur illustre les différents emplois thérapeutiques du rêve dans le cadre familial et du couple. Elle ne considère pas seulement la spécificité de l’interprétation dans ces cadres, mais aussi que le rêve de chacun de membres peut fonctionner en soi comme un inducteur puissant du changement dans les autres membres et dans la famille entière.
L’auteur observe les diverses configurations que le rêve d’un membre peut prendre dans le cadre du couple ou de famille (par exemple, il peut arriver que l’un des partenaires rêve à la place de l’autre ou en expliquant les actions de l’autre ; ou parfois il y a des rêves que sont racontés par les deux membres d’un couple dans une session et ils montrent des aspects complémentaires ou des niveaux de lien coconstruit entre les partenaires).
L’auteur discute comment le rêve peut et doit être lu, soit au niveau de l’individu et soit comme l’expression du fonctionnement de la famille et du lien qui unit les membres du couple et donc soit au niveau intra psychique soit au niveau interpersonnel.
Mais le rêve qui fait irruption dans l’espace familial est un attracteur puissant et souvent il est inducteur d’autres rêves dans les autres membres: comme si tous les esprits de la famille ou du couple pouvaient dans le même temps entrer en syntonie, plus ou moins, sur un phénomène nouveau, imprévisible qui poussera tous les membres en un instant dans une autre dimension.
L’existence même du rêve est un puissant inducteur pour un nouveau niveau de fonctionnement affectif et des relations comme la possibilité de la pensée et l’ouverture aux contenus de la famille clivés ou refoulés.
Mots-clé: Rêve, lien, dissociation, refoulement, niveaux de fonctionnement de la famille.
ARTICLE
The dream as a bridge between levels of functioning in both the family and the couple[1]
Anna Maria Nicoló [2]
My clinical experience with couples, families and serious patients has taught me that various types of dream and various types of levels of dreaming exist.
Perhaps the most important aspect of a dream is its polisemic aspect that may show different levels, not only as the internal functioning in a subject, but for example, at an Oedipus or pre-Oedipus level etc., but also as a contemporary expression of different levels of family functioning that sometimes finds traces of trans-generational elements inside it that have not been worked through that each one of us unknowingly keeps inside (Nicolò and Ricciotti, 1999).
More recently Kaës (1993, 2002) described something similar when speaking about a “double umbilical” of the dream and went on to say that the second umbilical would be made up of our “darkest intrapsychic links,” those that bare witness to the shared psychic space of several dreamers.
I believe that a dream of one family member or member of a couple not only indicates a strength of working through that a person or group is making but it also allows us to make out the ways and the defences of the links of the family or the couple, showing how each member responds in a different way when faced with the same conflict, same trauma, same anguish, according both to each members’ capacity of working through and to the circumstances. Some members express more evolved levels of their own functioning, tuning into the highest evolved levels of family functioning whilst others tune into more primitive levels, as it seems happened in the clinical case that I am going to speak about.
One interesting clinical example is proven by a clinical sequence of a couple who are undergoing therapy and were sent to me by the woman’s analyst. She had shown symptoms of depression after the death of her father a year before. The therapeutic work had allowed the fantasy of a conjugal separation to emerge. Following a period of treatment, the sudden discovery of the wife’s decision to separate had left the husband in a situation of alarm. He who had never before dreamed and who had always maintained an iron grip over all his emotions, entered a crisis and told me about a dream with which he opened the first session after the announcement, “I became aware of the sudden and successive loss of pieces of my body. I lost a
hand, I re-attached it, I lost the other and so on with my legs, my genitals, my eyes and at the end, my heart”. I woke up suddenly in a state of anguish and didn’t know where I was. This dream of the husband’s was followed by another account of a dream of the wife’s almost at the end of the session: “She left home looking for a handsome man, a type of prince in shining armour, after having decided to leave her ill and dying father inside the home. However, once outside, she got lost in the crowd and couldn’t see this handsome young prince and became confused, not knowing where to go”.
It was quiet easy and obvious to connect the loss of these parts of the body, the threatening break up of her own integrity, the anxiety of breaking apart that characterised the patient’s dream and experiences with the anxiety of separation from the husband, and what’s more, it was the husband himself who did it.
But even the wife’s dream about getting lost in the crowd, once outside her house, showed a similar content even though it was different at the level of maturation. For her, the separation led to a moment of confusion, the feeling of losing her points of reference that had characterised her life up until that point. The death of her father had, in a certain sense, freed this woman, allowing her another posttraumatic working through of her Oedipus that had kept her chained, at first, to her father and then to her husband. For her too, the separation led to her overcoming of her identity anxieties, cutting free, in a certain sense, from a never – ending adolescence that she hadn’t been able to overcome previously.
In the members of this couple we can see how each person reacts to the same traumatic stimulus by showing different levels of defence of the personal functioning, which, to my interpreting, was also an expression of the functioning of the link in the couple. A link that was very profound that both parties had built up and which satisfied the melding aspects of one and the Oedipus needs of the other.
The usefulness of the dream in the setting of the family and the couple thus doesn’t only consist of its production, or only in the meaning that we may attribute to it, but also of the fact that it connects different levels of family functioning and different ways of such that are present in different members, as I have tried to show.
This is a natural expression of a family’s mental organisation. Before one differentiates one’s own individual psyche, each individual is part of a collective relational structure, and, in my opinion, such underlying structure remains, not so much evident but operational in each family. I have always been convinced (Nicolò, 1988; 1994) that contemporary levels of simultaneous functioning exist. At a more primitive level, the distinction between the self and the other is very weak and the mental states of one merge and move into the mental or somatic states of the other, as we may observe in the dynamic of the mother-fathernewborn baby relationship (Nicolò, 1990). These more primitive levels[3], that are always present in family life, are reactivated in special circumstances, as in situations of stress, and are characterised by sensorial levels, by non-represented somatic states and by those who suffer. A dream may sometimes bring them to light, thus showing these aspects both at a personal level and at a group level.
The dream as a bridge
In some previous pieces of work, I have discussed various formats that a dream may take on in one of the members inside a family or couple setting.
In these works I underlined that one partner may dream in the place of the other, and in an iconic way, illustrate that which the other shows in a suffering form as we can see in Schnitzler’s novel and that we all recognise in the Kubrik film “Eyes Wide Shut.” Schnitzler’s novel speaks about a particular couple relationship where, upon the husband’s perverse suffering, the wife’s dream, which presents the same contents but are then dreamed and worked through, corresponds to this in a transformed kind of way.
Both dream and sufferance or from the other part, dream and somatisation are sometimes the couple of opposites that we can observe in members of a family or couple where each member is the bearer of a similar content, which according to the level of functioning is expressed now in one, then in the other and that however, I believe, communicates different levels of functioning of the link in the couple that finds different expression in its various members.
I would now like to show that a partner’s dream or a family member’s dream may also reawaken some unknown content of the other member that the dreamer themselves doesn’t know about. So, we may see severed, rejected and dissociated contents of the other appear in the dream, for example traumatic contents, that the other had severed or rejected and which the other is completely oblivious to. In psychotic families or couples where one of the members has endured strong infant traumas, it is quite likely that we may see this phenomenon.
In a family treatment that was carried out in a therapeutic community, the admitted daughter had a repeated nightmare where one of her parents tried to kill or rape her using a particular technique. The work with the parental couple brought to light not only the grandmother’s daughter-killing fantasies, on the father’s side, towards the newborn father but also how he himself was abused when he was young and then afterwards became violent inside the institutional organisation where he had grown up because his family had placed him into care as they were too poor to keep him at home.
This second piece of information had always been kept secret whilst the first was not aware of the fact and had been rejected or severed. The daughter’s dreams, especially the one which referred to being raped, at first caused discomfort in the parents, but afterwards allowed the father to return with his memory to stories regarding his adolescence, stories that he would have liked to forget and which he had partly forgotten, at least knowingly, and which his wife ignored. These sessions marked the beginning of a change.
Rejection, dissociation,
The dreams then could throw some light on the rejected, dissociated or severed aspects that had not only been removed, both by the dreamer and the partner and the link that united them. In this sense couple and family therapy may turn out to be much more useful in treating particular clinical cases, such as for example, forms of psychosis, perversion or serious traumatic situations given that as much that is rejected or dissociated in one may be usefully present and worked through in the dream of the other partner as we can see in Schnitzler’s novel or in the above mentioned clinical case… As the Italian psychoanalyst Riolo shows us, Freud, in his “Studies on Hysteria” had spoken about “thoughts that have never been formulated and for which he gave the possibility of existing as only virtual. For these things, therapy would consist of the completion of a psychic act that had previously been incomplete”, (Freud, 1895, 1, 435). In such settings, the incomplete psychic act finds completion in the dream of the other.
So, we are not speaking about the recovery of removed memories, but instead of contacting feelings and emotions that have been rejected by the subject, affects and impulses that have not been recognised nor thought about,” unfinished, because they have not been formulated into thoughts” (Riolo, 1983) and in which the mechanism of “rejection” functions (Verwerfung[4]) (Freud, 1894).
These affects and feelings that are rejected or sometimes dissociated may be usefully present in the dream of the other and thus open the way to their working through by passing through a sort of “recovery in the other,” this is a typical aspect of these settings of couple and family.
The shared oneiric process
In the narrating of dreams, each member of a family or couple also carries out a therapeutic function, and even an interpreting function with different associations, with memories and reflections that arise in the setting. It is better if amplified by the analyst’s requests to make free associations about the dream or its various parts. The dream and its contents will circulate around the family space and induce new associations in a dream of each member. In this way a very particular climate is created, as if each member of the family were to tune into the levels proposed by the dream, thus looking inside oneself both how much the dream evokes on the personal level and the possible suggestions that could be offered to the other for the comprehension or expansion of those themes that are contained in the narration or the dream. This extraordinary operation makes the production and the narration of the dream transformative which is unique of its kind, given that it allows, much more and better than other experiences, one to work and explore both the intra-psychic level and the inter-subjective one at the same time, and, in the latter, the different regressive levels and those less regressive that characterise a family world. The bursting in of the dream illustrates the first transformation in the dreamer’s mind and in the functioning of the family[5]. For example, the dream in its production shows the existence of limits[6] that allow the dreamer to dream…
However, all family therapists are able to observe one phenomenon in particular, the dream that bursts into the family space has a powerful attraction effect upon everyone and often an induction effect on other dreams in the other members, as we can see in the reported case. After a member narrates a dream, a particular climate is created. It’s as if all the brains in the family group or couple tune in together at a particular moment, some more, some less, to a new phenomenon, one that is unpredictable and that transfers us into another dimension immediately. Often, after the first dream of a member, the others also narrate their own dreams, either in the same session or in successive ones[7].
The production of the dream- chain in family or couple sessions, common experiences with many analysts who work in these settings, makes us understand that an unconscious tuning-in between the minds who were present in the session exists and that the dream, with its huge transformation potential, thanks to this communication from unconscious to unconscious “which dodges the conscience (Freud), is a powerful inducer of these levels of communication and therefore one of potential change.
If the analyst is able to defend this magic moment from the inevitable attacks that the non-thinking part of the family participate in, then the dream will allow us not only to discover new characteristics of that particular family and its history, but above all, it will open up new transformation possibilities.
Its very existence in itself is a powerful inducer of new functioning, for example, the possibility of thought, because I hypothesise that it carries out a bridge function between the levels of functioning of a family and between the level shown by a member and that of the other.
Indeed, it is this shared oneiric process that is the real transforming agent in the process, shared in its successive production during various sessions and shared in the associative and interpretive work that characterises it.
I believe that Ruffiot8 (1990) described something similar when he spoke of the family oneiric holding, an emerging way in therapy with families and couples, that is characterised by the oneiric response of a family member to the dream that is narrated by the other. According to the French psychoanalyst, a regressive process occurs thanks to which the psyche of family members “reverses without barriers in the psyche of the others.” According to Ruffiot, this holding is particularly effective in psychotic families given that using this instrument, the members of the family present their oneiric capability and their Alpha function to the psychotic member in a way that might symbolise its “terrible Beta body experiences” “supporting the psychotic patient’s defective mentalisation and making it re-arise in a group matrix, unconscious as for all the members of the family.” It is as if the dream supplied “a border whilst at the same time with its contents protected, the dream-screen, and in a certain sense, gives back the deficit of the weak function or pre-conscious deficit” (Nicolò, 2000; Sommantico, 2009).
However, it is just as evident that such content which is communicated by the other during a session, re-awakens shock and anguish in those who have rejected, severed or dissociated them in principle. With great care, the analyst may be able to use them in order to work on and develop the blocked dynamics that are inside.
“The sequences of the dream images may, therefore, be considered as significant production and not only just as vehicles of meanings that have already been provided,” as Riolo (1983) spoke about. Significant production that acquires a sense according to the meeting between ourselves and the other outside ourselves, if and how we correlate them with the sequence with which they arise, with the structure of the dream, with the patient’s associations and the other members. As the work unfolds, they will even take on new meanings in the light of successive production by the members of the family, even after many sessions.
Thus, in this way, one creates a chain-operation. The production of a dream shows the working through or the attempt at working through of a certain level of functioning.
The understanding of one pushes the comprehension to various levels of the others and so the better acquired differentiation of one is a powerful stimulus for the differentiation of the others and is also a reduction of reciprocal projective identification (Nicolò, 2000; 2001; Nicolò, Cardinali, Guidi, 1984; Nicolò, Norsa, Carratelli, 2003; Sommantico, 2009).
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[1] The Spanish translation of this article (trasleted by Dr. Ezequiel A. Jaroslavsky) has been published in the Chilean review “Gradiva”, http://www.ichpa.cl/revistagradiva.php
[2] MD., psychyatrist, training psychoanalyst at the SPI (Società Psicoanalitica Italiana) and at the IPA (Intrnational Psychoanalytical Association), scientific director of the International Review of Psychoanalysis of Couple and Family
[3] At a more primitive level that some call group self, one may find, as Hautmann states, the first elementary form of a thought. For Ruffiot too, (1990) “the group thought is the matrix of individual thought. That extra territorial part of the ego that is available for group experiences is formed”.
[4] Rejection is, as Freud ( 1894) said “a form of defence, more energetic and efficient (than removal), that consists in the fact that the Ego rejects (verwirft) the incompatible united representation from its affect and behaves as though the representation had never arrived at the Ego (…)”
[5] As long as a dream is produced, if it is a “good dream” and not an emptying dream, the individual patient, the family or the couple have to have carried out quite significant work, work of primary working through of affects, emotions and fantasies – terrible elements that in that moment are able to find the possibility of making themselves visible. If I had to express things in a simple way, in order to have a simple and efficient starting description, in accordance with Bion (1965; 1994), I would say: “Something that before had been suffered or somatised might, at a later moment, be thought and spoken about”.
[6] In families with psychotic or psychosomatic functioning, dreams may be very rare both for concrete and sufferance functioning that characterises them and because each person reacts with somatic states or with experience and emotional suffering of both one’s own and of others that each member of the family is not able to contain within the limits of the Self, thus emptying them defensively into the other.
[7] I believe that we are dealing with a sort of unconscious resonance that the narrated dream is able to induce in the other and in the context, of a reciprocal tuning-in of the unconscious of the members of the family or couple at this level of functioning. Thus, generating that phenomenon of influencing that Freud sometimes described in patients who shared the same context (as in Freud’s example, the young girls in a boarding-school), or also that phenomenon for which unconscious contents of one cross-over into that of the other, dodging the conscious. In such a way, real progressive oneiric work is generated in the family that even in successive sessions dreams that are linked to crucial ideas or ideas that have appeared in previous dreams may be retold. The way through dreams becomes a very important level of the work that is articulated with associations, with the narrated story and with the family myth.
[8] For Ruffiot (1990), the same psychic family apparatus is of the oneiric type, and such primitive, unconscious communication is based upon the idea that a pure psyche exists before the primitive attachment to the body. This conception of onirism is, in my opinion, also connected to a conception of the dream as an element that belongs to the most primitive and unconscious part of the mind.