Not a surprise that it wouldn’t take long for a blogging philosopher/psychologist to post about dreams, right?
I was having one of those movie-length dreams last night, the kind where a real story seems to be getting told, and with the bonus feature that I wasn’t overtly in it. Crystal-clear, real dialogue among multiple characters, plot building. Some real dramatic tension, but the kind where you actually want the story to continue, as opposed to the more frequent anxiety-laden dreams of missing teeth, falling, or one of my worst “favorites”........ finding myself naked sitting on a toilet out in the open in the middle of a very public room populated with just the right number of acquaintances for maximum humiliation. Now that’s the definition of finding yourself in a tight spot: figuring out how to “finish your business” discretely right smack in the middle of a cocktail-party size room full of people.
So I was having one of those dreams last night, the kind that you want to keep going as opposed to the I can’t wake up fast enough to get the relief of “thank God that was only a dream.” As you’re trying to balance maintaining a sleep state to keep the dream alive with just enough consciousness to later catalogue everything that you dreamed, you lose the stream and it’s gone — the movie already irreparably fragmented upon initial awakening with the inevitable massive further dissolution of fragments. I can’t hold the dream together. Like puzzle pieces that already have poured through my hands before I could see or touch them. Simply too much gone, and now, a full hour later, only a few loose fragments. Too few to reconstruct in thought or words.
A black man... a black male friend... turns out he’s in prison, maybe the friend was a staffer... about to be released... sees another black male friend talking about him on television in a way he interprets as negative... distraught rage, violently damages a vehicle, then trying to flee, subdued correctional-style including by his friend... now not going to be released.
That’s it, that’s all that is left. I have a vague Slingblade association.
Now some who know me well would say they know EXACTLY what these fragments mean, but that is another story and I just wish I had the whole movie back.
I am a huge proponent of psychoanalysis. There has been enormous focus over the past half-century on wrinkles that Freud got wrong or part-wrong, allowing cognitive-behavioral psychology, and its partner managed mental health care, to emerge dominant. There also has been the proliferation of feminist thought. But the core elements of psychoanalysis are true...a deep and undifferentiated libidinal pool that takes on specific forms and directions, and gets articulated, via profoundly embedded structures beyond our grasp and indeed ‘unconscious.’ I would argue that modern day ‘deconstruction’ is psychoanalysis, or at least I believe it is true that 20th century French thought never happens without Freud and Nietzsche.
[And here I give the nod to Freud, although Freud does not happen without Nietzsche who really was the first psychoanalyst. Freud once said of Nietzsche, “He knew himself better than any man that ever lived or is likely to live.” Actually, I think Nietzsche said that about Nietzsche. Love that guy! Noble narcissism is the attempt to truly understand oneself as well as possible, and of course it helps make a person just a bit more tolerable if they are fairly good at it.]
OK, reeling myself back to topic, I do think Freud had the dream thing right in terms of dreams coming from and verifying the existence of the unconscious. What I think he got wrong is the extent to which dreams can be recovered in some real archaeological fashion. By the time the analyst gets a hold of a dream, the uncovering is of a story in some reconstituted and filtered many times over kind of state. In other words, I don’t think he or she is uncovering the original latent content, but rather some other story (or stories) that has been constructed. This other story very well may be worth analyzing in itself, but its semblance to the original story, the mostly lost story, surely is rather remote.