The Use of the Dream: to Locate a Real

Of dreams, in an analysis, we only have babbles. Even the most florid narrative, it's just babbling that tries to cover how unspeakable the dream is.

Lacan says it like this: “... of the unconscious, through the dream, only arrives (to him) the incoherent sense that he fables to dress in a phrase what it articulates.”[1]

To articulate in an always delusional sense, the non-articulable.

So the use of the dream is an ethical question, oriented by the real.

What comes from the dream is, first, the finding of a non-articulable of speech and, second, interpretation.

Then, the interpretation, either from the analysand or the analyst, “is only better because it makes appear the fault that the phrase denotes.”[2]

It's about making the non-articulable appear to subject it to the work of “dressing in a phrase,” but an increasingly singular phrase.

The dream touches the real in the instant just before waking up. Only under transference the analysand can do something with the mark that remains from that encounter.

Two dreams.

1-After a tense argument, the father leaves. As he walks away from the analysand, he becomes an unattainable woman.

Interpretation: The impossible of the father is transferred to the woman, a phrase that covers the untreatable fault of the Name-of-the-Father. It opens the field where the analysand will have to reach his know-how: feminine jouissance.

The use of this dream was that of an orientation from impotence to impossibility, leaving open but oriented, the game.

2-I see written in the air the phrase “you are a criminal.” I read "You're a criminal," a common phrase from the father to designate those who didn't think like him, the place he identified me to. Interpretation: what do those letters do there?

One, Two, the signifier alone, in its materiality as signifier that calls another, equally alone, to build the illusion of meaning.

The unconscious has transformed a signifier as enigmatic to make it an unconscious representation, an idea that for Lacan is empty, even crazy[3].

With the dream, we locate, under transference, the core of the real of the unconscious.

Once that real is located, it pushes the desire to testify about the discovery of the signifiers of lalangue that apprehended the analysand, its consequences and its arrangement.