Traumdeutung et Famille Sur la psychologie des processus oniriques de la famille

Traumdeutung and Family
On the psychology of the family oneiric processes

JOSE PEDRO SEQUEIRA^[1]

I

In Traumdeutung, Freud states that dreams have a meaning and, simultaneously, are fulfilment of desires. As psychic phenomena, dreams are productions and communications of the dreamer, and it is through his recount that we become aware of those dreams. The subject of psychoanalytical interpretation is not the dream but its account. The interpretative work is performed at the level of language and not at the level of the oneiric images recalled by the patient. The exact function of the interpretation is to lend intelligibility to the hidden meaning. This is the point where psychoanalysis articulates with language and breaks definitively with the neurological benchmark of the scientific psychology Project.

Freud described the dream mechanisms at an individual level. How can we describe the dream recounted in a couple, family or group setting? This question carries far-reaching epistemological problems for the psychoanalytic theory and practice.

The family setting is one working tool that points to the production of different meanings, as it offers the opportunity of meeting the intersubjectivity other, challenging thus the traditional models of understanding the psyche, i. e., the individual model.

When recounted during a vincular session, the dream ceases to have a strictly individual character. And, when recounted and interpreted, it affects other(s), as it provides signs of the functioning of the Unconscious Family Structure and of the treatment process.

There was an initial period of great creativity of many psychoanalysts (that I’ll not refer here but were mainly French, Argentine, Italian and English). They who were willing to boldly venture down new avenues in the Master’s footsteps (the same way an elephant opens a path into the forest). And after them, we have been witnessing a theoretical concept gradually introducing new concepts into the psychoanalysis; this needs to be defined, conceptualized and integrated into a coherent body of theory.

The present paper had its start point in the dream processes psychology enunciated by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams. It seeks to establish connections between concepts coming from psychoanalysis with the symptoms directly related to family problems that gave rise to what came to be called vincular clinic or various settings clinic (group, family, couples, etc.)

Among the myriad of questions that we could ask about the dream in psychoanalytic interventions with the couple and the family, I will focus on just a few that caught my attention.

The aim is to look at the oneiric activity phenomenon in couples and family, posing the central question of the psychic inheritance in the psychoanalytic clinic (under the form of transgenerational and intergenerational phenomena that interfere with emotional development, banning the psyche or promoting maddening even before the madness of folly set in definitely).

As Alberto Eiguer referred, the psychoanalytic model is largely inspired by the dream; the dream is the model of the psyche itself.

The dream of every dreamer can be recognized as his own production, but also as joint production, shared with a(n)other, and much more than a(n)other as R. Kaës pointed sharply, when referring to the intersubjective issues at stake. What are dreams in an intersubjective perspective? Kaës suggests that the common and shared dream experience, is ruled by a suitable work setting, allows the inscription of the missing origin marks and results in the restoration of the pre -conscious.

These questions arise from certain observations such as the failures in the oneiric function that we often find in the clinic and, among other theories, they make us think about the generational transmission processes.

In this endeavour we owe much to several authors who offered the privilege of learning and sharing knowledge with them, making that experience fruitful and a fascinating intellectual challenge.

The themes of dream and family are essentially connected. Freud concludes the interpretation of dreams precisely with a clinical example we can revisit to illustrate how dreams are invaded by what belongs to the subject and to others, family or not.

I quote: « Another example: I began the psycho-analytic treatment of a boy fourteen who was suffering from tic convulsif, hysterical vomiting, headache, etc., by assuring him that after closing his eyes he would see pictures or that ideas would occur to him, which he was to communicate to me. He replied by describing pictures. The last impression he had received before coming to me was revived visually in his memory. He had been playing a game of checkers with his uncle, and now he saw the checkerboard before him. He commented on various positions that were favourable or unfavourable, on moves that were not safe to make. He then saw a dagger lying on the checker-board- an object belonging to his father, but which his phantasy laid on the checker-board. Then a sickle was lying on the board; a scythe was added; and finally, he saw the image of an old peasant mowing the grass in front of his father’s house far away. A few days later I discovered the meaning of this series of pictures. Disagreeable family circumstances had made the boy excited and nervous. Here was a case of a harsh, irascible father, who had lived unhappily with the boy’s mother, and whose educational methods consisted of threats; he had divorced his gentle and delicate wife, and remarried; one day he brought home a young woman as the boy’s new mother. The illness of the fourteen-year-old boy developed a few days later. It was the suppressed rage against his father that had combined these images into intelligible allusions. The material was furnished by a mythological reminiscence. The sickle was that with which Zeus castrated his father; the scythe and the image of the peasant represented Kronos, the violent old man who devours his children, and upon whom Zeus wreaks his vengeance in so unfilial a manner. The father’s marriage gave the boy an opportunity of returning the reproaches and threats which the child had once heard his father utter because he played with his genitals (the draughtboard; the prohibited moves; the dagger with which one could kill). We have here long-impressed memories and their unconscious derivatives which, under the guise of meaningless pictures, have slipped into consciousness by the devious paths opened to them. »

How can we not think about the mother and child, about the early rhythms of sleep and waking? about the mother as the first guardian of sleep? about the protection of the voice, the stories, the lullaby, the way the mother lives her rhythms together with the baby’s rhythms? about this relationship of early union before the formation and constitution of an «I», and before the relationship with the father and the paternal function? The whole family intimacy plays in the rhythms that every family member establishes with the others: the rhythms of the mother, of the father, of the mother with the father and of the parents with the children.

In his interpretation of dreams, Freud refers to tumultuous family life of the teenage boy. Yet, he didn’t explore that tumultuous life taking into account the importance of the unconscious bonds present in the family relationship. As we have been seeing in some patients, the parental inheritance creates difficulties instead of contributing to the creation of a psyche.

M. Klein illustrates this game through the psychic actions that organize the relationships between the several objects-characters formed in the inner space (through the mechanisms of projective and introjective identification). This inner space is in close relationship with the psychic space of the other, from which it has a late and precarious differentiation. The concept of internal objects provoked a crisis in the Freudian concept of repression and, with it, in the concept of desire as the sole drive for the dream. It changed the observing point of the oneiric process from the repressed to the relationship (Mancia ). The internal objects become the only characters in the drama focused in the inner world and in the images of the parents deposited in it: the gods and devils of our mental universe.

A family on the couch, according to the adequate title of Eiguer Alberto, is a family that can talk of dreams, a associates in group after the report of a family member. We would say: a neurotic family.

But the family setting, the one prepared to welcome the pain and suffering that goes beyond the individual pain of each one, a pain that is shared by all the family group, brings us to the psychopathology of bonds. That, in turn, highlights serious problems in the chain of transmission that is our human condition. It evokes trauma, regressions, anxieties that interfere deeply with the associations and with the thinking, working through and dreaming activity of one and several family members.

In psychosomatic disorders, the research on oneiric life has been of great importance. When the dream appears, it often presents small associative potential, little capability to reach different times and spaces that can intersect and communicate in the background, in short, little oneiric elaboration. In this sense, it’s not much the coloured mobility but the failures of the dream function (such as nightmares, ghosts, night terrors, thinking difficulties, major anxieties, insomnia, the white and the black) that could shed light on the dream. So, it’s the sleep, dreaming and thinking disorders that characterize and accompany this clinic and the daily life of many families. It is here that the vincular analytical work has been operating: on the mechanisms that prevent the processes of subjectiveness.

How can we think the fate of the symbolization processes if we don’t integrate, in the theory, the effect of significant predispositions that the subject meets, or not, in the symbolizing activity of the other and in the respective oneiric activity?

On one hand, there are the subject own intrapsychic defences that can be analysed in individual psychoanalysis, on the other, there are linked with his common constitutive environment. It is the historical problem of reality. A patient, whose husband died six months ago, says in a recent session, referring to the pain of grief – I only feel well lying down and with closed eyes, dreaming that this is not reality.

For Bernard Penot (1999), the problem of the rejection of reality, in its various clinical modalities, seems to have its roots in an inherited difficulty of making sense, combined with the past, an « anteriority » in any individual story. The real would not be understandable by each one, and could not represent anything, except through the first parental figures and the « speech » of which they are the first support. The ontogenesis of every human being requires the a prior matrix speech, a meaning system that initiates the birth of a personal destiny. It was precisely the notion of phylogenies proposed by Freud that represents the supposed place of such a precedence.

Refusal/denial is never an act exclusive to the subject – this is a fundamental point. It is a joint/collective production that takes place in the subject and that act prevents the subject of becoming a subject.

Thomas Ogden, the poetic psychoanalyst, tried to capture the elusive subjective and intersubjective phantoms of his practice in an article entitled Three Forms of Thinking: Magical Thinking, Dream Thinking and Transformative Thinking. He states that contemporary psychoanalysis has moved its emphasis from understanding the symbolic value of dreams, play and associations, to the exploration of the thought, dreaming and playing processes.

This author sees the magical thinking as a form that subverts the original thought and psychological growth, creating an invented psychic reality and disrupting the relationship with the external reality. By contrast, the dream thinking, our deepest form of thinking, involves observing emotional experiences, simultaneously, from multiple perspectives: for example, primary process and secondary process thinking. In the transformative thinking, one creates a new way of ordering experience that will generate different feelings, and modes of relation between objects and qualities of life that were unimaginable before.

II

In psychoanalysis, there were and there have been several authors (Ruffiot, Anzieu, Kaës, and Eiguer) who have been straining to give a greater emphasis to the dreams in different than individual settings.

In the dream, what belongs to the subject and what belongs to others? This distinction is surely very hard to make, because there is an amalgam of the others in the process of identification.

Nevertheless, Freud never stopped wondering about the transmission of psychic material in the centre of an intimate activity as the dream is. In The Interpretation of Dreams, he refers to the dream as a return and a gateway to traits inherited from the ancestors.

Opening a phylogenetic perspective, Freud leads us to suppose a first moment in the dream – extra-subjective – whose purpose and meaning are produced during a second moment – subjective – based on these traits.

It’s the cultural dimension present in what the parents pass on to their children, which, in turn, goes from the grandparents to the dawn of time in human history. Ultimately, the dream of the man who first dreamed is present in the dream of each of us.

From this point of view, as Kaës points out, the dream would be the returning to the subject of what stayed in stasis at the time of the subject’s first constitution. In this sense, the dream belongs to him, because it is contained in the « mass psyche »: the subject is woven in « a factory » of dreams. Freud conceives the subject precisely so: the heir of the dreams of the unfulfilled parents’ desires, who forms over the traits and substitutive formations that run along the intergenerational chain and in the settings, in the « group psyche ». Inscribing itself in the temporality of the genealogical chain and of the single subject, at the meeting point of the unconscious, the dream is one element of the interpreting-signifying apparatus. Freud’s speculative developments raise several questions that deserve some prominence. Who and what dreams the dreamer? Can the traces of the past (that belonged to previous generations) inscribe in the psyche of their descendants without their awareness, as if they had become their depositaries and, perhaps, the links of a sense that couldn’t be clearly transmitted?

Thus, the point is to clinically reconstruct a past story that we have not been given (more precisely, over which the historicizing processes didn’t work); so, we have to deal with elements that acquire the status of enigmatic objects. Undoubtedly, these objects are at the centre of malaise and repetitions, whose meaning is so much darker as its painful effects are more intense (Kaës). The impossibility of an « open » transmission (always problematic), could dreams be considered the coded messages of that transmission?

In this case, does the dreamer fulfil the desire (his) to be the dreamer of a desire of a(n)other, which fundamentally concerns his existence? As Kaes points out, the dreamer could be the spokesman for the dreams of one other, a group of others, as it happens in groups, in the families and institutions, spokesman, symptoms-bearer, sacrificial lamb and several other functions, as mentioned. It is also necessary that someone would assume to be the dream recipient; and the question is to understand what is the meaning of receiving a dream, or being, as A. Missenard (1987) writes, the listener of a « message intended for good listeners », meaning « those who listen with the antennas of their unconscious desire ». As Anzieu also mentioned, the dreamer speaks for those who can hear him.

In the same line, and referring to the subject of the inheritance, Kaes wonders how to establish the extent and rhythm of this tension between what is divided internal (therefore constitutive of psychic reality), and what manifests itself in the intersubjective production of the psyche (decisive condition of its formation)? Said in another way: how to conceive and treat the subject as « an end in himself » (according to Freud’s formulation) and heir?

 III.

When we look at the genesis and constitution of the psychic phenomena, and the importance of the factors that are decisive in creating the base for psychological development and maintenance of mental health, we must mention the emotional result of the identifications with the primary objects that allow the subject to relate to reality and to signify it.

The psyche’s genealogy is based on the experience of the body (biology) and the intersubjective experience. We can say that there is biological genetics that we call heredity, and psychological genetics there we call psychic transmission. As René Kaës rightly pointed out, it’s how we came into the world: by the body and the group, and the world is body and group.

The subject of inheritance is divided, as the subject of the unconscious, between the need « to be an end to itself” and the need to be « a link of a chain to which is submit without his wilful participation » but which he must serve and from which he can expect benefits.

Opposing the subject’s narcissistic condition to the subject’s intersubjectivity, Freud links and articulates this precise point of difficulty: the support of narcissism on the previous generation over the transmission of the « dreams of the parents’ unfulfilled desires » to the infans (without speech, being created). This view leads us to consider the subject of the Unconscious as the subject of inheritance and, as Kaës stated, as subject of the group.

In psychoanalytic terms, what is at stake in the question of transmission is the formation of the Unconscious and the effects of subjectivity that, produced in the intersubjectivity, derive from it.

Surely, the fundamental propositions of psychoanalysis don’t become obsolete if the characteristic functioning of the Unconscious is conceived as in the intrapsychic space. However, to remain valid, they must be confronted with the data obtained when we consider a second source of determination: the demands on the psychic work due to its link with the intersubjective, due to its subordination to the subject’s settings of origin: family, groups, institutions, masses. It is very likely that, in these circumstances, the Unconscious formations are transmitted by the chain of generations and contemporaries. As we have been underlying, nowadays we can presume that part of the repressive function rests on certain modalities of psychic transmission, namely, according to the modalities determined by the unconscious alliances, pacts and contracts. The consequence will be the characteristic traits of the neurotic, borderline or psychotic organizations. Thus, the encryption process, the formation of the Superego and of the functions of the Ideal, follow this intersubjective determination.

All transmission process demands a psychological work which makes the subject the heir of multiple ancestral experiences. These enrich him, but they can also can make him a prisoner of a story that is not his. When the legacy is just followed without elaboration, without connection, we are in the field of repetition compulsion, alienation. The legacy becomes, thus, a destiny to fulfil. When we speak of transgenerational transmission, we speak of what ensures the narcissistic continuity and maintenance of ties, and corresponds to the transmission of structuring forms. But we are also talking about forms of destabilizing transmission, which Eiguer Alberto (1998) called the cursed share of the inheritance.

IV

These are the dimensions that characterize dreams and symptoms as expressions of the same commitment.

As we noted earlier, symptoms like violence, trauma, grief, secrets, anguishes, separations, conflicts, ruptures, invasions, perversions, confusions, manipulations, in short, the traumatic real, have characterized an important part of the clinic.

Pierre Benghozi referred to the bait as a symptom of genealogical containers full of holes, and stated that the pathologies of the container prevent the processes of psychic transformation. This author speaks of the psychic pathologies of the container versus the pathologies of psychic content (that would be neuroses and mose suitable for intrapsychic and classical psychoanalysis models).

The family group container is compromised and the oneiric processes are disturbed in the majority of symptoms presented in many contexts, in the many cases sent to us in need of vincular clinic, and others as addictive behaviours, psychosomatic disorders, psychosis, narcissistic borderline personality disorders.

Oneiric activity disorder in the vincular clinic

I’m going to present two brief examples of my current clinic with symptoms of sleep disorders.

Father and mother, both fifty and two children, Maurício and Leonel, seventeen and fifteen. I met Leonel, the oldest, for the first time, after a period of more than a year only with his parents and brother, as he was away in a reformatory. And, what caught my attention in that first time was precisely his sleeping difficulties. Early in the session, I realize that, from a certain point of view, it was as if he had come sleeping-dreaming to the session. His hypervigilant parents also don’t dream at night because they don’t sleep. They hammer more anguish into the full of anguish head of son. Now you have to do more this and more that. When I ask Pedro, the father, about his sleep and what bothers him, he recalls and tells an episode many years ago, even before they were born in the family: an holiday trip to a tourism destination, the terror/horror that accompanied him for some days after his plane had to have be evacuated due to a fire. His wife, Isilda, present in the consultation, laughed as the recalled story was something strange, absurd to be remembered at the moment, as if it was something that shouldn’t be brought there, inopportune – why do you remember such a thing, now, in this moment, I’m astonished. To Isilda, what matters is present reality, more concrete things. However Leonel seems oblivious of the parents’ conversation, away from what the parents had said. I ask: did you know this episode in the life of your parents? Coming from I don’t know where, he says: yes, I have heard.

Then I say to Leonel – your dad spoke of an explosive episode. How have been your engines? – in reference to the engines of the plane evoked by the father. He answers me at once – smoking. I say: I see. Leonel sleeps and dreams and his father talks about concrete things: that you have to go to bed early, that grown-ups can’t behave like this, that you have to find courses to attend, and that he is cutting the internet from midnight. And I dream with Leonel the dream that he is failing to dream, and the father bothers me, at the same time that I understand his discomfort with his children: the difficulties in organizing themselves have been frequent. It is the problem of idealization that imprisons the subject.

I conclude the session by pointing out that it might be worth going a little slower. That they sleep and dream. The sessions that can’t be dreamed outside must be dreamed within the session.

Mythology, literature and psychoanalysis can be found in many places because it is in man that the dream become flesh.

As a mere demonstration, I’ll speak of Natércia, 9 years, brought to the consultation by the maternal grandmother for extreme difficulties in sleeping, in addition to other symptoms such as great lack of attention in school, isolation, and bulimic and mythomaniac behaviours.

Grandmother says that very difficult for Natércia to sleep. At two, three, four o’clock in the morning, she is still awake.

According to the grandmother, Natércia’s mother, Dina, starts an agitated life as soon as she becomes adolescent. We couldn’t talk, was very difficult at home.

Dina gets pregnant at 16 and manages to hide it until 6 months of pregnancy. Still living with her parents at 20, she gets pregnant again and repeats the story: once more, it’s only at 6 months that her parents realize that their daughter is pregnant. Around 2 years later, she becomes pregnant one more time.

Neither Natércia nor the second daughter, Emília, live with their mother. Only Maria, 2 years now, is living with her.

Natércia was always raised by her grandmother. Only for a short period between 6 and 7 years did she stay with her mother, but came almost always to grandma’s house on weekends and vacations.

Emília lives with uncles in France, since she was a baby.

We may ask what is the relationship between Natércia’s insomnia with the unconscious of her parents? Could her difficulty in falling asleep be inhabited by the mind of her parents, getting imprisoned by the ancestral ghosts that circulate in the family unconscious and torment her?

When the analyst understands the symptoms, the gaps and the impediments with origin in the transgenerational element, he assumes a position in relation to the other: a position of a(n)other, someone who is the product of a history and who carries that story (Maria Cecilia Pereira da Silva).

The tremendous anguish lived by Natércia doesn’t allow her to sleep. She can’t rest. How to repair, to soothe Natércia’s agitation? The idea one gets is of the need for a lullaby. Natércia resists entering the sleep-dream. The ghosts that she faces are so great that the alert state is permanent. She flees from itself. She can’t be herself. She has to live in the lie that is more bearable than the truth.

The affective intensity is such that the work of displacement and condensation of the preconscious censorship are not enough to maintain the resting state. The compromise formation (oneiric elaboration) becomes so unbearable to the ego that the ego uses awakening as a defensive mechanism of her fragile narcissistic organization.

V

Dreams as attempts of traumatic elaboration

The oneiric activity and its failures may be attempts of traumatic elaboration. It was because of the traumatic brutality that Adorno stated that, after Auschwitz, no poetry would be possible.

The individual or collective trauma resends us to the difficulties of the elaboration necessary to a minimally acceptable functioning of our lives. Mental sufferings produced by traumatic dimension are often translated into psychosomatic symptoms, with traces of experiences of such unbearable reality that disrupt and deconstruct the intrapsychic world and the intersubjective bonds. Difficulties in their metabolization often mark the following generations, and have the corollary and the expression of failures in transgenerational psychic transmission. One example: the trauma resonances in the families of the deported during the Nazi period, or many other wars and disasters, that cross several generations,.

Another example, that we have not referred, is of trauma related to sexual abuse, incest and other type of violence; it is illustrated by Renata who can’t sleep and has strange behaviours. She lives with father, mother, father’s new companion, the son from a former relationship of this woman, a half brother born from her father present relationship, a brother thought to be fruit of the first relationship of her mother and a future brother is on his way. Here, the «incestual» mentioned by André Ruffiot is also present. How can one dream in a place like this? The family group is imprisoned in itself by the traumatic effects and family secrets of several generations. Their effects on subjectivity are extensive, interfering with psychic reality, producing feelings of guilt and shame that cross its various bonds.

In a Winnicottian language, we face a failure of the transitional object function, where can be no room for the human magic (through which the object can be the « bridge », the « string », half connection and separation between the I and the Other, half creation of the self and of the perception of the world, the instrument through which the I can move around in the world of things and the things can potentially provide material for the dreams).

In several family consultations, we find that this process of the family setting individuation is not done, the individual spaces are mixed with the family space in a tremendously confusional way. The work of elaboration of the separation between generations needs to be reached and mastered. The individual and family psychic elaboration becomes crucial and necessary, since we often face a family repetition compulsion where the family communication gets disturbed.

Decio Gurfinkel introduced the collapse of dreaming expression to describe a state in which there is a fault, a break, a fracture or a crack in the psychic structure or in the organization of I of an individual that puts that individual in a clinical field different from the psychoneurosis. This collapse refers to the dissociation clinic in contrast with the repression clinic.

These are the strange, distressing dreams, the horrible ghosts, the horror movies, and not the identification of the most recognizable aspects of the dream, with what we all more or less identify most of the times. Similar to day residues, childhood, symbology and desires.

The universal ability of dreaming, so well described by Freud, had to be rewritten in view of these new issues of the clinic.

According Anzieu, these formations form a group communitarian psychic envelope that supports the subjective and sociocultural living conditions (laws, values, norms, etc.) These are compromised in psychic disaster situations (internal and external).

In traumatic disaster situations, the social context becomes incoherent and incomprehensible. This interferes with the search of meaning in the everyday of the family groups and various institutions.

It is the sense of confusion (word that I often use in consultation) that invades the therapeutic space, inside and outside the session. The barriers between internal and external fade gradually, and produce the eruption of a overwhelming malaise. There is a break on increasingly fragile border between the intrapsychic world and the sociocultural reality. Trauma is not only linked to a psychosexual origin but also psychosocial.

Since the dawn of psychoanalysis, the theory of trauma, and its expression in the seduction theory, raised the still unanswered question of the category of reality. Is the environment surrounding the formation of the psychic reality only limited to the family intersubjectivity?

As Olga Ruiz Correa puts it, the belonging groups disorganize with fear and the level of defensive cohesion against what is happening increases, stated in phrases like « we know nothing of what is happening or don’t understand. » There is a blockage of the ability to think or symbolize in the different institutional contexts (family or labour, health education or other organizations).

We have to ask whether there are dreaming possibilities for the patients who are still at the stage prior to the use of the object, in Winnicottian terminology, i.e., those who take the analyst as an extension of himself. Are there limitations of access in this area to the dreams of patients with borderline psychic structure or even psychotic? Relating to the objects in the area of omnipotence, do these people have the basic conditions for dreaming? Winnicott asked this question to Bion:

«Dear Bion… I enjoyed the challenge contained in your work last night [refers to the theory of functions]. The question I wanted to ask is: psychotics in whom you base your ideas are people that in you view had the ability to dream and lost it? [… ] what in your analysis can enable the patient who can’t dream, and can’t even sleep or stay awake, to finally conquer the dream. London, November 17th, 1960. »

Bion suggested thinking the dream as a generating matrix of psychic reality when he said that it is not the unconscious that produces the dream but, when the dream forms, it is the dream that produces the unconscious. The Freudian logic is reversed, because, in this perspective, the oneiric material becomes an operation of constitution of meaning, regulated by a contact barrier. This reversal becomes necessary since the dream, unlike a highly elaborate construction, is linked to primitive operations of thinking. In this Bionian sense, the dream does not use symbols because he, himself, is already a particular and basic form of symbolic function, i.e., the first stage of thought. (Godoy Moreira, 1996)

Bion believes that the psychotic does not dream symbolically; he lacks the psychotic introjection of the mother’s alpha function. According to Zimerman, this function allows the perception of the object absence and to think that absence (in order to make possible the ability to symbolize, and thus, to dream).

According to this view, the session begins to function as a place of oneiric quality, and the analyst becoming a provider of alfa thoughts that act as transformers of the sensory experiences into dream thoughts, and generating meanings through these manifestations for the experiences of depersonalization and derealisation common in those patients.

VI

The interpretation of a dream in a family will always be the interpretation of the meaning of the narrative, in what it points out the revelation of the family functioning. Thus, the statements are replaced by the analyst by other more primitive and hidden, that would be the expression of the family desire.

When recounted during a vincular session, the dream ceases to have a strictly individual character. And, when recounted and interpreted, it affects other(s), as it provides signs of the functioning of the Unconscious Family Structure and of the treatment process.

In clinical practice, I often have the feeling that the family sessions feel like dreams. Often, the only way to tolerate the familiar reality is to dream what cannot be thought and dreamed in the family.

The verbalized contents present symptoms that imply oneiric work, given the confusion, mixtures, misunderstandings, differences, conflicts, show in the family life and staged in the consultation.

There is, at least, a part in any dream that is as unfathomable as a navel, as it were, which is a point of contact with the unknown (Freud).

It is an opening to a permanent building, always unfinished, in order to create the conditions for an endless psychotherapeutic work and that leads us to forever repair the fault that is our human condition. The psychological work is precisely this endless task that always points to the past while equally considering the future.

We conclude with T. W. Adorno when he states that:

«Perhaps, only a liberated and reconciled mankind will one day commit to the art of the past without insult, without the wicked grudge against contemporary art, as a reparation to the dead».

 

---

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

Anzieu, D. et al. (1987). Las Envolturas psíquicas. Buenos Aires. Amorrortu. Benghozi, P. (2010). Malhagem, Filiação e Afiliação. Psicanálise dos vínculos: casal, família, grupo, instituição e campo social. São Paulo. Vetor Editora.

Bion, W. (1962). Learning with the experience. Aprendendo com a experiência. Rio de Janeiro. Imago.

Correa, O. R. (Org.). Os avatares da transmissão psíquica geracional. São Paulo. Escuta, 2000.

Darchis, E. (2012). Rêves, cauchemars et mythes en famille. Le Divan familial. Revue de thérapie familiale psychanalytique, 29/Automne 2012.

Eiguer, A. (1983). Um divã para a família. Do modelo grupal à terapia familiar psicanalítica. Porto Alegre. Artes Médicas. 1985.

___ (1987). O Parentesco fantasmático. São Paulo. Casa do Psicólogo. ___ (1998). A transmissão do psiquismo entre gerações. Enfoque em terapia familiar psicanalítica. São Paulo. Unimarco.

Freud, S. (1900). The Interpretation of dreams. A Interpretação dos Sonhos.

Rio de Janeiro. Imago

Ganhito, N. C. P. (2001). Distúrbios do sono. São Paulo. Casa do Psicólogo.

Gurfinkel, D. (2001). Do sonho ao trauma. Psicossoma e adicções. São Paulo. Cada do Psicólogo.

Kaës, R. (1997). O grupo e o sujeito do grupo. Elementos para uma teoria psicanalítica do grupo. São Paulo. Casa do Psicólogo.

___ (1993). Transmissão da vida psíquica entre gerações. São Paulo. Casa do Psicólogo. 2001.

___ (2002). A polifonia do sonho. São Paulo. Ideias & Letras. 2004.

Klein, M. (1930). Contribuições à psicanálise. São Paulo. Mestre Jou, 1981.

Mancia, M. (1989). O sonho como religião da mente. Lisboa, Esher, 1991.

Missenard, A. (1987). La envoltura del sueño y el fantasma de la “psique común”. Em Anzieu, D. et al. Las Envolturas psíquicas. Buenos Aires. Amorrortu.

Moreira Godoy, M. S. (1996). A tessitura do sonho. Revista de Psicanálise da SPPA. São Paulo, V. 3, nº 3

Ogden, T. (2010) On three forms of thinking: Magical thinking, Dream thinking, and Transformative thinking. Psychoanal. Quart., vol LXXIX, nº. 2.

Penot, B. (1989). Figuras da recusa. Artes Médicas. Porto Alegre, 1992.

Ruffiot, A. et al (1981). La thérapie familiale psychanalytique. Paris, Dunod.

Severo, A. F. (2007). Sonhos e vincularidade: Uma comunicação preliminar. Contemporânea – Psicanálise e Transdisciplinaridade. Porto Alegre.

Silva, M. C. P. (2003). A herança psíquica na clínica psicanalítica. Casa do Psicólogo. São Paulo.

Winnicott, D. (1994). Explorações psicanalíticas. Porto Alegre. Artes Médicas.

---

[1] José Pedro Sequeira

Clinic Psychologist/Psychologue clinicienne/ Psychanalyste candidate de la Societé

Psycanalytique Portuguese/ Membre de Poiesis- Associacion Portuguese de Psycotherapie

Psycanalytique de Couple et famille pedro-sequeira@netcabo.pt