|
From Psychoanalytical Notebooks 2, 1999 — The Unconscious THE DREAM: AN INTERPRETATION OF THE SUBJECT Guy Briole
For Freud, there are dreams which ‘really mean what they
say…’.1 This is the case when they have not been distorted
by censorship. Nevertheless, the rule is that the manifest content of the
dream is nothing but a ‘facade’,2 and that, whether in a
dream ‘it shows’3 sometimes to the point of blinding, above
all, a dream is a want-to-say [ ..il veut dire, can also read:
it means]. If there is a want-to-say, it does not say, it is not said.
So, the dream’s latent content is more important for Freud, than the
manifest content.4 The Freudian answer to the dream’s enigma
is that it expresses the fulfillment of an unconscious wish. The dream
would therefore understand an interpretation of desire.
That the dream is a want-to-say, and does not say, raises, in the
transference, the question of the subject’s resistance to saying, as
well as the resistance of an impossible-to-say. In the three types of
dream that Freud reports — wish-fulfillment, anxiety and trauma — it
is especially the latter which explains that wanting-to-say is also
connected to an obscure point,5 as he calls it, which refers to
the real — at the same time to the source of the dream-work and its
interpretation, and the stumbling block to its deciphering. Hence the real
manifests its presence in any dream where it is shown that a statement
only functions in relation to an impossible-to-say.
Besides, ‘it wants-to-say’ remains marked for the subject by
the impossibility of stating what in the dream ‘I’ wants-to-say — as
Lacan makes precise, “the dream-wish is not assumed by the subject who
says ‘I’ in speaking”.6
If the dream were strictly a wish-fulfillment, there would be
nothing left but to continue to dream. Indeed, satisfaction in the dream
is nothing but a satisfaction by substitution: the drive is satisfied in
it by substitution in so far as it is represented in it.
Freud raises the same issue in regard to the symptom, which is also
a substitute satisfaction of an unconscious desire, a compromise
formation. Although he establishes a difference between the dream and the
symptom in relation to the preconscious and the censorship, he emphasises
that they have a common structure which replies to the laws of the
unconscious.7 He will be another parentage for them, this time
causal, in the fantasy.
For Freud, the dream shows that there is a remainder to be
satisfied, therefore, a dissatisfaction. This is really what he calls
‘the unconscious desire’. The
dream, the subject’s interpretation The
dream reactivates that which escapes forgetting and at the same time
brings a work to bear on its elements, a secondary elaboration. As an
effect of this secondary elaboration, “the dreams have already been
interpreted once before being submitted to our waking interpretation”.8
A text results from this, that of the dream, which is, therefore, in
itself an interpretation. Moreover, the dreamer adopts a position in
relation to his dream: he exercises an interpretation of the
interpretation. When Freud says that the dream is ‘the fulfillment of a
wish’,9 he is also making an interpretation of the
interpretation which is the dream itself.
In The Direction of the
Treatment, Lacan emphasises that Freud is proposing ‘the dream as a
metaphor of desire’.10 Something has passed into meaning [sens]
in the dream, and, from this passage, results what Freud has called
desire. But, as Lacan takes it up again: it is about a ‘desire to have
an unsatisfied desire’.11 It is a Wunsch,
a wish, about which Lacan says that there are wishes ‘[…] pious,
nostalgic, contradictory, farcical’.12 The desire that Freud
isolates in the dream reveals the dimension of lack: of the subject’s
want-to-be [manque-à-être] which presents itself as a want-to-enjoy [manque-à-jouir].13 Lacan takes up the well-known dream
of the ‘beautiful butcher’s wife’ in order to show how a desire
refers to another desire, how the dream carries desire to a geometrically
progressive power.14 In this reference of one desire to
another, Lacan distinguishes — in The
Direction of the Treatment and in Radiophonie
— two dimensions to this desire of desire which is ordered according
to the laws which link the signifying chain: metonymic combination
producing displacement and metaphoric substitution with its effect of
condensation.15 Dream
and transference That
there is an effect of meaning in dreams, that their text reveals the
tropes of the structure of language (metaphor, metonymy) does not mean
that the dream is unconscious. Lacan is formal on this point: ‘The dream
is not the unconscious but […] the royal road”.16
This must lead neither to overinvesting the dream nor to making it
a point that cannot be bypassed in the treatment. Freud already insisted
on emphasising — that dreams of convenience only verify that desire is
desire of the Other, for instance, that which the analyst is supposed to
be — that it is the same with ‘accommodating dreams’ or
‘confirming dreams’ which, he says, ‘limp behind the analysis’.17
These dreams can take over and reproduce whatever can be subjectivised of
the analyst’s interpretation. They put into the foreground the question
of suggestion and of transference-love.
This love, if it is an effect of transference, is also, by virtue
of its deceptive dimension, its face of resistance. Lacan underscores this
paradox of transference; and at the same time it is an obstacle to the
work. In other words, it is necessary for interpretation, and it closes
the subject off from the effect of the interpretation.18 This
question is raised especially for the dream in the treatment. Indeed, the
dream, if it is an indicator of resistance, is also revealing of the place
in the treatment given to the analyst by the analysand. In this sense, any
dream in the treatment is a transference dream. What comes from the
unconscious by way of the dream must not be overinvested but, as Lacan
recommends, must be read — by the letter. I am citing from Encore:
“A dream does not introduce any unfathomable experience, any mystery, it
is read in what is said about it, and one could go further by taking its
equivocations in the most anagrammatic sense of the word”.19 The
start of a treatment A
young woman wanted to meet an analyst because she suffered from a
repetition of failures in her relations with men. She has a lot to say
about them, a lot to complain about. She puts so much of herself in these
relationships that the problem must come from them. She knows herself very
well, and it is not for that, for knowing herself, that she is coming, but
to complain about men. This is what she will have me understand. She also
made the possibility of ‘entry into transference’ very doubtful. She
will develop it over several sessions. Should I interrupt her on a
statement [dire] that escaped
her and about which she said ‘dissatisfied’, she becomes uneasy about
her analysis: she does not experience what one says of transference,
namely love for her analyst.
With this dream, she is not sure that it is this one; nevertheless,
she believes that this one says that she is in analysis. On the other
hand, this dream disturbs her. She is ‘embarrassed’ about making a
mistake about the proper name of the author, she says, to which the text
of the dream refers. Besides, this author who appears there is not at all
of her literary taste, and she wants me to know this, for she would not
like me to have such an idea of her, for me to see her in a certain way.
She is at a scene and reciting a text she does not recognise. It says
things about her life in which she recognises herself and other things
that she does not know. Which is more true? Which of these two versions is
she? Persons enter and leave the scene furtively in order to limit, to
correct, to prohibit the expression of her text. It seems to her that
these persons sometimes borrow the faces of her parents.
Nearby, at an angle, a person kept himself sitting. It is thanks
to, and from this person, that the text came to her. To her surprise,
inscribed in neat and distinct letters is the name of the author who, at
the same time, is listening attentively to her recital: ‘sachan
guitry’. Interrupting the session on this point triggers laughter
in her, and she comes up with this interpretation which just appears in
her thoughts: Sachant, Guy trie
[knowing about things, Guy is going to sort them out].
The dream shows that the analysand is here in the work-of-saying,
the work-of-saying which encounters obstacles raised by the subject itself
in the transference relation. It is the very difficulty of free
association. She came for what she called “a repetition
of failures in her relations with men”. As I said, she thought that she knew
herself. Only this one point, although a point
of suffering, is to be tackled, and which appears as a point of
non-knowledge, or rather as question: who is she? From the author in the
dream her own message returned to her in an inverse form from the Other of
transference. There, too, emerges a question for her about knowledge.
There, where she thinks she has entered the analysis because love for the
analyst turned up in her, it is a question about knowledge and supposition
of knowledge which is clearly expressed. On this point, in effect,
transference was established.
A subject which comes to speak to an Other, supposes it has
knowledge, even a know-how concerning its complaint; this is a point that
Jacques-Alain Miller has developed.20 The subject transfers
onto another a knowledge about its question. But, in order to become an
analysable symptom, it is necessary that the symptom as a complaint be put
into a form in the field of the Other, that is, completed with
transference. It is in this operation of transference that the supposition
of knowledge is situated. One can make this point valid for the dream as
well. Dream
and interpretation Lacan
in his summary of the Seminar on Ethics,
indicates clearly what the analyst must formally take into account in the
dream: “Nothing comes from the unconscious by way of the dream but
incoherent meaning that it fabricates in order to clothe what it
articulates like a phrase”.21 That is to say, what comes is
already an interpretation — ‘wild’, Lacan adds. This interpretation
is not worth any more than the reasoned interpretation that the analyst
might substitute for it: “The rebus of the deciphered dream shows a gap
in meaning, and it is in nothing else that it connotes a desire”.22
For Lacan, the desire of the dream is nothing else but the desire to have
meaning. Here, the act of the analyst might find a place. In this way,
then, the dream like the symptom demands to be completed by the analyst.
This is precisely not to interpret the dream. On the contrary, to the
demand for interpretation which the dream is, to the call in the
transference for the analyst to deliver an interpretation, the latter can
only reply as he would to any statement made by the analysand. ‘A dream
is a dream’: with this phrase Lacan exposes in The
Direction of the Treatment the banalisation of the dream, indeed the
contemptuous attitude of some analysts to it.23 On the other
hand, the dream is not a ‘choice morsel’ of the analysis from which
the analyst in excelling himself would deliver the hidden meaning to the
analysand. The cleverness of this type of interpretation only reveals the
analyst’s position of mastery.
The text of the dream as such must be put to work. It does not need
the analyst’s ‘clarifying interpretation’. Any reply to it would add
an external interpretation to the subject, a saying on top of the
analysand’s saying, from meaning to meaning. This orientation ends up in
an effect of suggestion, suggesting to the analysand a meaning to his
dream, a meaning that he can make his own but which locks away for him the
effect of division that the dream might reveal.
To dream, to remember, to comment, to forget, to transform, are
already interpretations of the subject that the analyst by his act is
going to disinterpret. This has
to be understood as what by the analyst’s act is not going to add
meaning to meaning but to produce a new knowledge. Therefore, to disinterpret
supposes interpretation such that one has to understand it on the basis of
the interpretation that Lacan gives us.
If in stating certain dreams the analyst devotes himself to his
silence, this is not what regulates his act exclusively. Here, the
question of scansion is raised, to which Lacan in Function
and Field of Speech and Language attributes the value of
interpretation. The scansion that the act requires has nothing to do with
a predetermined temporality nor with the time that would be necessary to
recount the whole dream or all the dreams of the same night. The analysand
might apply himself to such a recital and show his good will in putting to
work what seems to him to reply to the expectation of the analyst. In this
sense, the moment of scansion is not subordinated to the time of the
narration of the dream, and it does not determine the space of the
session. It does not confine the analyst in a position of not being able
to intervene or of keeping silent.
If the interpretation here is silent, elsewhere it necessitates
that the analyst speak, that he produce a statement. That is how it goes
for the dream when it is a matter of underlining a point, of putting the
elements of the dream into a tension with the analysand’s associations,
of accenting forgetting, of bringing together a part of the dream with
significant moments of the analysand’s life. It is not a matter of
adding up meaning, but, by managing scansion, of adding equivocation to
open the subject up to a questioning in the direction of a desire to know,
a desire to know which pushes the subject beyond the jouissance
of remembering to a construction in analysis. Freud had already noted
this: remembering does not limit repetition. The latter is a return of the
real which insists on returning to the same place on the basis of what has
made a trace of the original trauma. The dream is the support of
remembering as a memory linked to traces.
The act is a cut in relation to the effect’s of meaning. It goes
against what a dream-interpretation might produce: the addition of meaning
to meaning. Thus, the analyst will not oppose to the dream a
‘reasoned’ interpretation but will orient by his act the work of
deciphering the text of the dream. Translated
by Richard Klein 1.
S. Freud, Some
Additional Notes upon Dream-Interpretation as a Whole, 1925, SE XIX:
132. 2.
Ibid. 3.
J. Lacan, The Four
Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, transl. A. Sheridan, Tavistock/Routledge,
1977. 4.
S. Freud, The
Interpretation of Dreams, 1900, SE V. 5.
Ibid. 6.
J. Lacan, The
Direction of Treatment and the Principles of its Power in Ecrits:
A Selection, transl. A. Sheridan, 1977. 7.
S. Freud, The
Interpretation of Dreams, op.
cit. 8.
Ibid. 9.
Ibid. 10.
J. Lacan, The
Direction of Treatment and the Principles of its Power, op.
cit. 11.
Ibid. 12.
Ibid. 13.
Ibid. 14.
Ibid. 15.
J. Lacan, Radiophonie
in Scilicet 2/3, Paris, Seuil,
1970, p.69. 16.
J. Lacan, The
Direction of Treatment and the Principles of its Power, op.
cit. 17.
S. Freud, Remarks on
the Theory and Practice of Dream-Interpretation, 1923, SE XIX. 18.
J. Lacan, The Four
Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, op. cit. 19.
J. Lacan, Seminar XX:
Encore, transl. B. Fink, Norton, 1998, p. 20.
J.-A. Miller, Reflexions
sur l’enveloppe formelle du symptome in Actes
de l’Ecole de la Cause freudienne, No.9, Paris, 1986, pp.67-71. 21.
J. Lacan, Compte rendu
du Seminaire d l’ethique in Ornicar?
No.28, Paris, Navarin, 1984, p.17. 22.
Ibid. 23.
J. Lacan, The
Direction of Treatment and the Principles of its Power, op.
cit. This
text was originally published in La
Cause freudienne No 34, 1996 Copyright © Guy Briole 2003. This text from the website of the London Society of the NLS, at http://www.londonsociety-nls.org.uk. Permission to use material from this site must be sought from the LS-NLS. All rights reserved. Please include this portion of the text in any printed version of this paper. |
|
|