CHAPTER VI. The Dream and Its Analysis in an Organismic Interpretation of the

THE DREAM AND ITS ANALYSIS IN AN ORGANISMIC INTERPRETATION OF THE NEUROSES

The dream of the individual together with the individualistic analysis of the dream presents a most difficult and as yet untried field. There is here required a technique that is as elusive as it is unprecedented. For such a technique must include the unconscious complicity of the analyst in the social or image basis from which he analyzes. For it is only impersonally and confluently that we may understand what is personal and separative in another. To approach the dreamer’s separative attitude of repression and self-defence toward the elements of his dream, in an attitude of our own that is socially no less separative and repressed, is to invite a situation in which we merely exchange the dissociative symbols of the sleep state for analogous symbols in the waking state. It is to replace refraction and distortion as they occur in the individual repression, with its symbolic wish-fulfilment in dreams, for refraction and distortion as they occur in the social repression, with its symbolic wish-fulfilment in “beliefs.” For this reason, having come to view the unconscious in its waking and in its sleeping expression from the point of view of the common, organic mode, I have reached the conviction that the conception of dream-analysis as it has been entertained by us is throughout a misconception, that to speak at all of dream “analysis” from the personal or separative viewpoint is self-delusive. For our so-called dreams of the night are but the unaccepted realities of the day, the so-called realities of our day but the unaccepted dreams of the night. The night’s reaction is individualistic, the day’s reaction is social. Both are identical in their method as in their aim. Both represent the endeavour, through futile recourse to symbolic or “would-be” measures of recommunication, to adjust vicariously and upon a separative basis the organic outrage to life’s inherent unity. It is the self-determined illusion of our societal disaffection. It is the lure of the symbolic in its mock pursuits of the personal and separative. It is the vicious circle of all unconsciousness vainly rotating upon the phantom axis of its own unreality.

In view of the repercussion of consciousness that is the essence of man’s unconsciousness, the attitude that will best liberate us from our infolding tendencies of mentation lies in a conception that regards unconsciousness as a self-reflexive mode throughout. Such an attitude will clearly demarcate our tendency toward the peripheral or social distribution of the mental images comprising our mirrored affects as contrasted with the societal conservation of our real affects in the conscious fulfilment of our common personality. As long as we fail to realize this generic basis we shall continue to suffer from the delusion of our own organic disunity, and there will necessarily persist the vicarious shunting of affect into the distributive expressions of anger, duplicity and antagonism constitutive of resistance. Since our affects are organically common, if we do not permit them expression in universal confluence, they must inevitably seek an expression that is scattered and random. And so we need to recognize that we may not adjust our affective or subjective life through the study of the objective mechanism of the images or dreams that merely reflect it, but only through the subjective (conscious) reabsorption within us of the displaced and socially distributed affects to whose suggestion the dream, by day or by night, is the mirrored reaction.

In an organismic view differentiation is unconsciousness. That is, the dissociated self or the separative element is, by reason of its organic anomalousness, necessarily at odds with self. For this reason there is inevitably entailed the universal conflict of unconsciousness, collective and single, that is man’s disunity, social as well as individualistic, “normal” as well as “neurotic.” Such is the disparity that is reflected in his dreams, sleeping and waking. The diversity of our fabrications, social and individual, is the diversity of our selves. Our complex is our complexity. In very truth “our little life is rounded with a sleep.” We waken only to alter the form of our dream. Throughout the diurnal cycle the dream-state remains unbroken, and all efforts of analysis in our unconscious, separative mode are helpful only in accentuating the powerlessness of consciousness in its present state of differentiation. In the separative mode the elements of the personality are unassembled, and the result is an absence of organic coherence, of an essential unity such as may alone be the basis of a truthful inquiry into the unconscious processes of man’s inversion. In my own case (the only case upon which any of us may occupy himself profitably is one’s own) it has become clear that my attitude toward the night is predetermined by my attitude toward the day. If I have kept personal and repressed my real feeling during the day, the secret of my dissociation will be kept faithfully throughout the night, and upon waking in the morning such camouflage as will successfully hide my separativeness will have been already established by my own order prior to the waking moment.

It would seem that sleep is the beneficent leveller, that mentally as well as physically its function is restorative, that it is the solvent and the dissolvent of our fancied differentiations, of our artificial, fear-begotten defences against one another. It would seem that it is for man the opportunity of organic rehabilitation, that in this period of withdrawal and quiescence after the restless day of self-seeking and antagonism there is a palliative and conciliatory process at work. After all, diplomacy and lying are wearying in their exactions, and in this period marked by an absence of social pretences and of the strain of our separative adjustments, consciousness undoubtedly tends to reassert its common, primal mode with images that promote and do not impede organic function--joyous images, expressive of common need, of organic participation, of concerted, confluent function. After all, our dreams are but the shadows our lives cast behind them when we stand in the light of our own personality.

It is only as we become one with this inherent personality through an acceptance of the unity of life in its entirety that the shadows comprising our dreams, sleeping and waking, may be truly resolved. Since our dreams of the night only tend to restore the equilibrium which the day has destroyed, our dreams are only in so far distorted as our day is distorted. In so far as the day is an evasion of the recognition of the infantile wish, with its corresponding entail of over-compensation and atonement, in so far does the dream reproduce again the identical wish of the day after having recourse to the extravagance and distortion requisite to its disguise. When in our day’s reactions we shall have entered upon an organic, confluent mode of consciousness, our dreams will be one with the organic confluence of the day, furthering in their harmonious imagery the quiet process of the day’s constructiveness. It will then be realized that sleep is but the day’s diastole, that just as the period of diastolic relax following the rhythmic contraction of the heart has a function that is reciprocal and harmonious in relation to the systolic impulse, so in the rhythmic cycle of our day its period of rest is reciprocal and continuous with, not contradictory and opposed to, the constructive function of the day’s activities. The dreams of the separative mode, on the other hand, only occlude and congest the avenues of our sleep-consciousness. These obstructive travesties effect a complete deadlock due to the confluent organism’s ineffectual effort to arrest and clarify these separative trends that are reflections even in sleep of the unlived, fear-ridden, organically discordant experience comprising the day.

With our present habitually tutored day, the very approach of our awaking automatically prompts us to don a costume of disguise before we rise to move again amid the tedious maze of masked players who, like ourselves, have lost the reality of life’s organic meaning. As long as one’s feeling is thus resolutely set against the surrender of his artificial defences, as long as one fears to remove the mask of pretence covering his personality, no amount of intellectualization, of mental analysis, of theoretical “truths” (I have tried them all!) will avail to lift his repression and admit him to the simple reality of his common, organic feeling. It is in vain that we seek the truth. Truth, as it is customarily conceived, is but the theory whereof life, as it may be lived, is the reality. To seek the truth is again to pursue the phantom of our own mental imagery. For reality disappoints all formulation. No symbol may stand for equivalence but only for equivocation. The lesson the psychoanalyst has yet to learn is that reality has no substitutes, that no seeming, however plausible, may replace that which is. It is this lesson--the very lesson we presume to teach our patients--of which all our work is as yet but an empty recitation. Accordingly, no amount of intuitional or theoretical acumen on the part of the analyst can do other than thwart a patient’s need of self-realization. Such intellectualism on the part of the analyst is the substitution that is his neurosis. Recourse to intellectuality is his concession to the socially current repression and substitution which in our collective unconsciousness we credit as normality, never once suspecting, in the strength of our numerical security, that normality is but the collective dream-state of man’s waking life.

Because of the psychological identity between the dream that is our day, with its dramatization in the objective furniture of cubic actuality, and the dream that is our night, with its scenic reproduction in flat, pictorial outline, an individualistic analysis in the sense of an encompassing realization is of its nature precluded. Only as we can come to stand apart from both, and view them in their proper light as symbolic phenomena divorced from life, may they be assessed in their true relation and thus analyzed in the only sense that gives meaning to the term. But this is not a merely mental process. This is to actualize organic life in our daily experience with such sincerity as to realize within ourselves the spuriousness of our habitual, dissociated mode. It is so to include the dream outside the dream, constituted of the separative day with which the separative night is enclosed, that we shall have automatically entered upon the mode of self-unification which is one with a societally unified, confluent consciousness. The essential mark of such a mode of consciousness is that, in its subjective consonance, it regards with an equally objective clarity the vicarious processes of the day and of the night.

Our attitude of the day is amply illustrated by our attitude toward our dramas. As our lives are based upon unconsciousness, our dramas as well as our dreams are also necessarily based upon unconsciousness. Since the logic of the dream is inverted, it is essential to reverse the dream’s unconscious motive in order to understand its fallacious sequences. The drama equally represents the interplay of unconscious motives. Based thus upon the inverse processes of unconsciousness, its logic is also necessarily inverse. And so in order to understand the drama, its motive must likewise be observed in its reverse trend. In other words, the drama and the dream are identical in their essential mechanism. When the psychopathologist is confronted with the drama of actual life--the inverse process represented in the neurosis--his immediate recourse should be to intercept as far as possible the inharmonious development of the patient’s life history and, having completely reversed its underlying motive in the light of conscious perspectives, to unravel its meaning through carefully retracing discoverable inadvertencies of development to their logical source.

In this function the analyst’s attitude toward the human drama presented in the neurosis of his patient becomes identical with his attitude toward the dreams of his patient. One would naturally expect that his attitude toward the drama of the stage would be equally logical. But a societal analysis fails to justify this expectation. For such is the elusive tenacity of the seemingly actual, as it appears in the dissociative recourses of the social mind, that the psychoanalyst, too, continues to regard the bidimensional aspect of life presented in the drama as a conscious form of art. In consequence it comes to pass that a train of unconsciously destructive events which he deplores as an expression of life in the clinic is applauded by him as an expression of art in the theatre. The same untoward sequences, which in clinical retrospect are viewed with compassion, are in the process of their theatrical portrayal experienced with delight.

I do not see how such inconsistencies between our collective and our individual reactions to unconsciousness are separable from the present confusion that exists between the objective and the subjective spheres of consciousness. Because of this confusion, in our dissociation we take pleasure in participating in the dramatic representation of the identical processes of unconsciousness which, subsequently contemplated as actuality, we interpret only as pain. This inconsistency between our subjective and objective reactions accounts also for the many discrepancies in the psychiatrist’s personal attitude toward the dramas of the clinic and the drama within his own home. It explains how it happens that we, who are seemingly competent to trace an individual’s neurosis directly to the influences that have unconsciously surrounded him as a child, will yet unconsciously surround our own children with these selfsame influences. Surely never was the “other fellow” so abused and ourselves so tricked as in our psychiatric clinics when, in our self-conscious formulation of the occasion of his confusion, we deem ourselves less unconscious than he.

As it is the especial métier of the unconscious to convert the actual into the seeming, its subtlest attainment is the conversion of what is most actual into what is most seeming. If of realization itself it may effect a semblance, it is the ultimate achievement in unconscious ventriloquy. If of analysis itself it may make a pseudo-analysis, it has secured its entrenchment through a technical recourse that is wellnigh impregnable. Through such a strategic manœuvre one often attains a quite faultless analysis of a dream, when all the while the realization is but seeming. As the dream is but the reflected image or “negative” of yesterday’s duplicities and introversions, an attempt to capture and “analyze” it from the retrospective standpoint of the replacement and introversion of the day, is but to retain unaltered and unalterable the unconscious embroilment of one’s self-delusive introversion. Yet, with the practised dexterity of our habitual sleight-of-hand methods of analysis, we still pursue the futile industry of our objective dream-trapping, idly endeavouring to drag the travesty of the day’s distortions embodied in the dream into the self-conscious analytic dissecting-room. In truth, the real need is that we surrender the analytic dissecting-room and all its paraphernalia of symbolic technique to the common reality which underlies it, realizing that its artificial displacements constitute the sole function of the dream parody. For set what snare we will, a dream cannot be taken alive. The chasing of dreams is like the chasing of rainbows. One may no more behold his real self in the mirror of the dream than in any other reflecting surface. The image reproduced may be never so lifelike but it is not life. As with birds on the wing, so with our dreams; we cannot capture them except we destroy them. The attempt to do so is to repeat without end our habitual offence against the organic grammar of life constitutive of the double negative of all unconsciousness. Again it is unconsciousness within unconsciousness, personal preference within personal preference, unconsciousness unconscious that is the baffling complicity in our self-dissociation.

This self-involvement of the neurosis, this unconsciousness of the totality of self makes of our individual enfoldment a wellnigh inscrutable situation. In such a situation the individual’s efforts of self-help--the recourses of personal rather than of societal outlooks--become comparable to the efforts of a man who would attempt to lift himself by his own boot-straps. This it is that comprises the dream within the dream of all individuation--of all separateness. Of course, it quite naturally seems to us, in our now differentiated mode, that the attainment of a position of relative inclusiveness is a humanly impossible task. Yet, if we are to attain to a true recognition of our societal dissociation, we may do so only through the acceptance of the basic actuality of our common, organic confluence. Such alone is the essential recourse of a fully awakened consciousness.

Whether we will or no, we are thus brought back again and again to the essential fallacy of our day’s dreams as of our night’s--to the illusion of personal causation or of individual sponsorship that is at the heart of man’s dissociation, both neurotic and normal. In the presumption of his self-determined hypothesis of good and bad, of hope and fear, the individual is assuming unconsciously the supervision of the universe, and the constant endeavour of his thoughts as of his dreams is to keep secret the traces of his personal presumption through the subtle projections of the disguised image. Some call it God, some call it evolution, but no matter what the collective title under which our private prerogative is symbolized, it is in reality but the cheat that is the personal illusion of a central causality resident within ourselves.

I know that in this subjective statement of the disharmony of consciousness there is presented a trend that is wholly unacceptable to the symbolic or absolute logician; but, on the other hand, the objective statements of the absolute logician are with equal validity unacceptable to the relativist. According to the objective logic of the mental absolutist the fact of our very existence is theoretically untenable. In the unconscious determinism of men’s personal prerogative, the postulate, as is generally known, is that the universe in which we have our being was either created by some agency existing outside itself or it was self-creative. Of the two alternatives either is impossible, but the vital fact remains that here we are! The logical untenability of a position that limits itself to these commonly accepted alternatives may some day offer sobering consideration to our unconscious absolutism. For the present there is grave need that our absolute or theoretical logic yield place to the relative logic of a more organismic point of view. In the world of physical phenomena prior to Einstein it was impossible for physicists to proceed with further creative extensions because of the limitation of their underlying conception. So in the sphere of human activities around us, as long as we continue in our present objective fixity of thought, it will not be possible for life to unfold because of the set limitations of unessential attitudes of mind that block all essential creative expression.