Maladies des rêves, maladies en rêves

Abstract

Context

In the psychoanalytical field, the study of dreams questions the possible presence of “sick dreams”, whether it concerns traumatic dreams, limit dreams, melancholic dreams or either “white dreams”, which are likely to highly affect the psychic state of some patients.

Objectives

Therefore, this article will try to discern how some specificities and qualities of our dreams can enlighten the nature of the many soul illnesses that abound in our contemporary world. First of all, some pathologies affect patients in the grip of some kind of hyper-lucid phenomena which are regularly bound to an hyper-alertness of “insomniac thoughts”, obstructing any possibility for the patient to access a certain psychical relaxation. As a result, we can prereferentially observe regarding the limit pathologies, how “the undreamt dreams” inject in the awaken life some “undreamt nocturnal remainders”, some “insomniac thoughts” capable of transforming these patients in awaken sleepwalkers controlled by these very undigested nocturnal remainders. These latter infuse and direct their behaviours where an obvious hyper-vigilance as well as an hyper-acuteness appear to better hide a subjective life tied up in a negative way and in a “white dream”.

Method

Favouring a qualitative methodology, the author will base his study upon a clinical approach of two female patients’ dreams, the actual basis of his argument. The first female patient, affected with eating disorders, was untimely using, during sessions, her “undreamt dreams” in order to deliver a dreamlike feeding as well as an unbridled projection of her “crowd self”. The second female patient, in the grip of suicidal tendencies and deeply affected with melancholy, was recounting her repetitive dreams in which the presence of an only frozen image, left her captive of a hypnotic relationship with this actual representation. Nightmares where the mesmerized image of the body tends to reflect the massified organisation of the self in order to defend itself against any risks of implosion or collapse.

Results

On a metapsychological level, the issue of the white screen of dreams’ interiorisation, linked to the structuration of a negative hallucination is questionned, this latter fundamentally conditional to the nature of an onirical or a fantasmatic production. Where the dream, in its neurotic structuration allows the patient to hallucinate in an “healthy way”, this freedom gets jeopardized as soon as the structuration of the negative hallucination is missing. The borderlines patients’ dreams, with whom the adaptation of the screen of dreams appears to be faulty, not only derogate from the Freudian rule claiming that every dream consist of the expression of a desire, but in the same way promote harmful interpenetration phenomena between nocturnal and diurnal psychological activities. Therefore, for these patients, the account of their dreams produces a paradoxical effect, since it does not stop to keep them away from an acknowlegement of themselves.

Interpretations

Un unusual issue arises concerning the psychoanalytical approach which will mainly attempt to 0repair this thin layer of the actual screen ensuring the patient against an overflow of excitements. In the same way, the psychoanalytical work will aim less giving access to the unconscious self space, through the royal way of the interpretation of dreams, than producing the transferential conditions capable to slot the dream in the sleep of the night.