Are we dreaming just as much?

Letter of the President of the World Association of Psychoanalysis

Laurent Dupont's invitation to write on the theme of the dream, with a view to the next Congress of the World Association of Psychoanalysis leads me to consider how, in these times of crisis, the thesis of the dream-interpreter orients us.

Are we dreaming just as much? "What are you dreaming of during the coronavirus crisis?" That is the question that the New York Times asked their readers as recently as last week, inviting them to send their dreams.[1] With this question, the newspaper thus encourages its readers to join a common destiny, which according to them, from Ancient Greece to World War II, allows dreamer subjects to orient themselves and step out of the routine.

This comment immediately reminded me of the testimonies relating to dreams that occurred at the time of the Holocaust. Our colleague Fabian Naparstek, during his intervention at the evening "Use of the dream. Use of the sinthome", had shown that the decisive step resulting from these dreams was for the subject "to dream of being elsewhere" and thus preserve his identity in order to cope with the impossible nomination of the horror of the concentration camps.

The very history of psychoanalysis shows us how the use of the dream fundamentally calls psychoanalytic practice to the test of reaching on its horizon the subjectivity of its time. The response occurs on a case-by-case basis, provided that it extracts the absolute difference of the dream. Didn't Freud himself make this forced choice? Firstly by publishing his dreams and then by preserving the entire text of The Science of Dreams, despite the advances of psychoanalysis, in order to conserve its character of self-analysis.[2] Almost twenty years had passed since the first publication, and Freud recognizes that his Traumdeutung always captivates. This interest in no way declined during the World War and a fifth edition will be required. However, Freud often hesitated to recognize this enthusiasm from the public and fellow psychiatrists, when it was only his own dreams. Yes, he had advanced in the century, from these infinitesimal, ever so personal productions.

Between the classics and the time that followed, lies Ella Sharpe's work, Dream Analysis (1937), where it is concretely a matter of publishing as a conclusion, in the last chapter of the book, not the conclusive dream of an experience of analysis, (such as we have in several testimonies of the AS), designating that it " is that part of concrete discourse qua transindividual, which is not at the subject's disposal in re-establishing the continuity of his conscious discourse[3]", but rather the last dream of a life, three days before death as " […] was related by a woman three days before her death"[4]. Infinite analysis is on the horizon.

To define psychoanalysis as the access to sinthomal identity [l'identité symptomale], as Jacques-Alain Miller proposes in his reading of Lacan's seminar "L'Une bévue …", targets the dream with the absolute difference of the One on the horizon. The dream, "from what the sinthome of the One has of the absolute[5]" leads us to rethink our practice from dreams. Sinthomal identity goes hand in hand with the impossible identification of the analyst, provided that the place of psychoanalysis is moved into the register of the One, psychoanalysis which proceeds from the One-All-Alone and not from the Other.

An invitation to dream therefore, as the dream-interpreter engages us and guides us in the present moment: a push to work the dream, as it constitutes a theme fundamental to psychoanalysis, time and again.

Angelina Harari, President of the World Association of Psychoanalysis