Des rêveurs en leur « rêvoir » : pour une histoire conceptuelle des rêves et de l’appareil psychique

Abstract

Background

In the theoretical landscape of psychoanalysis today, the threefold link between dreams/dream interpretation/‘psychic apparatus’ (i.e. the metapsychological synthesis of their mutual relations) appears to be completely fragmented. Each school has its own, or relies on an ad hoc reading of the Traumdeutung, or refuses entirely to justify itself on these grounds. To such an extent that the dream has ceased to be the via regia to the unconscious, but more often a place to apply metapsychological formulae drawn from elsewhere (child psychoanalysis, psychoses, etc.).

Objective

This essay aims, on the contrary, to weave together at least one red thread in the historical development of psychoanalysis, up to its so-called ‘contemporary’ form (Winnicotto-Bionian), by exploring, as a working hypothesis, a sequence of key episodes in this development. It passes through Ferenczi, M. Klein, E. Sharpe, Meltzer, Lacan and Bion. It ends with Bollas, Ferro and Ogden.

Method

An undertaking of this kind is a matter of conceptual history. It therefore combines epistemological criticism with an examination of the concrete historical conditions in which concepts have been used, as a function of clinical practice. It highlights the growing interpretive conflicts between the various possible readings of the final chapter of the Traumdeutung, while attempting to detect a certain dialectical logic, which does not render the final contradictions absolutely irredeemable.

Results-Interpretation

This history yields two results: it highlights the importance of the problems posed by borderline states in post-Freudian dream theories. But it also stresses the unresolved uncertainty that affects their recent developments, because by distancing itself from the original mechanistic model, the psychic apparatus postulated by contemporary versions of psychoanalysis remains suspended in an interpsychic ‘space’ whose contours are difficult to grasp, and because it has ceased to be interested in the deciphering of dreams. Finally, the limitations of this argument, linked to a very limited selection of authors and points of view in the history of psychoanalysis, are recalled.