Lieux du rêve

Abstract

Context

This article traces the origins of research into the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, at the dawn of the first confinement, historian Hervé Mazurel and psychoanalyst Elizabeth Serin launched a dream collection. The aim of this collection is to grasp something of the articulation between psychic life and the historical social, and to identify the extent to which they are intertwined. It's an open-ended study, empirically constructed, that attempts to make dream narratives speak outside the realm of the cure, in order to interrogate what is inscribed in them about a collective experience – in this case, a global pandemic.

Objectives

Postulating that the Freudian unconscious is not just another scene cut off from social reality, we hope to test the historicization of the unconscious and the porosity of psychic dimensions to the social and political present.

Method

Our research method is empirical. Starting with the identification of imaginaries and their motifs, and the way they are repeated and hybridized in dream narratives, we explore with our theoretical and clinical references what these manifest contents refer to, thus proposing an exploration that aims to air psychoanalytical concepts in their friction with the fields of the social sciences, handling them from new points of view that produce a decentering.

Results

This exploration leads us to reopen the question of dream interpretation, which, though turned towards childhood experiences, fantasies and the subject's unconscious desires, are nonetheless spaces for dialogue with the present. Experienced during this period in these dream narratives as concentrationary, and with the Second World War as its reference catastrophe, this present questions the future of our societies, particularly in the light of climate change, which in its own way opens up the field of possibilities.

Interpretations

While Freud conceives of the dream and its narrative as a utopia, we consider it to be heterotopic in the multiplicity of polarities it deploys. This research revisits the dialogue between Freud and Ferenczi on the status of fantasy and reality, and questions the links between hallucination, representation and perception. By displacing the ego's oppositional relationship to external reality as the rock of castration, it questions the interweaving of spaces ranging from the psychic to the social and political.