After Lacan: Clinical Practice and the Subject of the Unconscious

5. From Delusion to Dream

Chapter 5 From Delusion to Dream LUCIE CANTIN It is tempting, at first sight, to emphasize the similarity of form that exists between dream and delusion. In dreams, as in delusions, one often finds a content that seems bizarre or impossible to common sense. Moreover, the narrative of the dream, like that of the delusion, is full of logical gaps that barely disguise where the cuts—the signs of something missing—show through, as if the dream or delusion were a crudely censored movie. As a child reveals the place of the object that he or she wants to hide by standing in front of it, in a dream, logical gaps and nonsensical elements signal where the dream-formation has failed. Similarly, in a delusion, the “hiccups” direct us to its governing principle. But while both dream and delusion try to treat the real with signifiers, with representation, they nevertheless bear fundamental differences in the way that treatment of the real is achieved. Indeed their difference in this regard is so great, that to bring a psychotic subject to dream implies a breach of that knowledge, that “savoir,” that the psychotic is developing in the delusion. In other words, dream-formation sets up a logic that is different from—or even counter to—the logic that rules the consolidation of delusion.We shall examine here the clinical consequences of the passage from delusion to dream in the psychotic. DreamsTreat the Real with Something Symbolic In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud lays out two essential aspects of his dream theory in describing the principles that govern the elaboration 87 This chapter was presented, in different form, at a workshop entitled “Lacanian Psychoanalysis :The Process of WorkingThrough and Dreams,” at the Center for Psychoanalytic Study in Chicago, February 1993. of the dream, and in showing that the fundamental aim of the dream is the fulfillment of an unconscious wish. At that time (1900), Freud saw the psychic apparatus as composed of three systems: the Conscious, the Preconscious and the Unconscious—a conception that has been referred to as the FirstTopography. Because Freud took the unconscious system as the starting point for dream-formation, that is, that “the motive force for producing dreams is supplied by the unconscious,”1 it would seem important to recall how, precisely, Freud considered the Unconscious and how, then, we might describe the function of dreams. When Freud describes the unconscious system, the dream’s “entrepreneur ,” as he puts it, that is responsible for the elaboration of the dream,2 he is careful not to call unconscious that “which has not yet become conscious,”—as would be the case, for example, of a repressed desire that the interpretation of the dream would bring to consciousness. Such a repressed desire, accessible to consciousness after interpretation, is preconscious, that is, a desire which has found a possible representation, disguised by the elaboration of the dream and revealed by its interpretation .What Freud calls the Unconscious is rather the driving force, the “motive force,” or the mnemic trace, excited and mobilized, which strives to structure itself and causes the formation of the dream.This energy must link itself to representations and then transfer its energy into them.These representations, under certain transforming conditions, can reach the dream and become its manifest content. In a dream, the drive is structured through the dream images, a figurative process whose laws of elaboration Freud sought to describe in terms of condensation and displacement, and so forth. From an economic standpoint, the chosen representation must be trivial, “insignificant ,” says Freud, so that they can serve as a “cover,” since censorship allows the subject to go on sleeping.3 Comparing dreams to a rebus, Freud opened the way to their interpretation: To each image must be given back the word, the formula, the proverb that the dream image sets up.Thus, the interpretation of the dream reveals the laws that govern its elaboration, whether we call these laws condensation and displacement, as Freud did, or metaphor and metonymy as Lacan did to emphasize the linguistic structure of the dream’s elaboration. The representations invested by the energy of the “motive force” and therefore serve to structure the real of the drive, are part of what Freud calls the “Preconscious system.” Here is how he explains the relation between the Preconscious and the Unconscious: The new discovery that we have been taught by the analysis [of the dream] . . . lies in the fact that the unconscious (that is...