Excerpts
Choose a section below to read an excerpt
THE MINDBRAIN
DREAMS AND THE MINDBRAIN’S STRUCTURING OF EXPERIENCE
PSYCHOLOGICAL DEFENSES AND DREAMS
METAPHOR
NONLINGUISTIC METAPHOR
SYNESTHESIA
SYNKINESIA
METAPHOR AND TRANSFERENCE
PUNS
SEMANTIC AND SYNTACTIC PUNS
WORKING WITH DREAMS OVER TIME
WHEN YOUR MINDBRAIN KNOWS THINGS THAT YOU DON’T
THE LANGUAGE OF THOUGHT AND THE WAKINGWORK
THE MINDBRAIN
Let us start with the word “mindbrain.” I made it up, but not out of whole cloth. It is a word that has been gestating for a long time. When we say “mind,” we mean the collection of mental processes and faculties. When we say “brain,” we mean the bodily organ located in our cranium which most scientists think is responsible for the processes we call mind. We hear that distinction from our earliest years, and so it evolves into a conceptual distinction that is hard to shake. Descartes argued that mind was separate from brain, and we have been wrangling with Descartes’s dualism for 400 years. Modern neuroscientists find it incompatible with scientific evidence; we are quite sure today that Descartes was wrong that the mind or soul was located in the pineal gland. We have been moving ever closer to viewing the unity of the mind and brain. Linguistically, it has become quite common to write about the “mind/brain.” But that forward slash retained the trace of dualism. Since the words “mind” and “brain” continually force us into Descartes’s dualism, no matter how much we try to escape from it, we must take linguistic action and create a new word that will enable us to think new thoughts. In my book The Dream Frontier (2001), I wrote:
The aim of modern neuroscience, as well as Freud’s aim in his Project for a Scientific Psychology, is to be able to account for mental events in terms of neurobiological processes, and vice versa, so that ultimately we will understand them as unitary phenomena. And so, many of us have come to talk about the “mind/brain.” This compound term is the closest we can get in English these days to bypass Cartesian dualism. Maybe someday we will have a single word for the mind/brain. Perhaps we will say “mind/brain” often enough, and it will be slurred into a new word like “mibron.” Or maybe a completely new word will be coined. Maybe someone will create such a new word in a dream.
I will no longer wait for “someone.” I have decided to take the linguistic bull by the horns, coin the new word, and use it over and over. You may ask, “How far is mindbrain from mind/brain?” My answer is,
Very far. Get rid of the forward slash, and you may free human thought from the semantic trap of dualism. By the time you reach the end of this book, see whether you have gotten used to “mindbrain” and have found your thinking about the mind and brain restructured.
Semantic liberation is conceptual liberation.
DREAMS AND THE MINDBRAIN’S STRUCTURING OF EXPERIENCE
The Outline of Psychoanalysis opened the way for psychoanalysts to consider the role of the mindbrain in dreams and how much the characteristic structure of each person’s mindbrain makes itself visible in a dream. This line of thought was elaborated by Erik Erikson, in his great paper of 1954, “The dream specimen of psychoanalysis,” which laid down a pathway for looking closely at how the mindbrain structures experience in dreams. Erikson proposed that in dream analysis, we do a sentence-by-sentence analysis of the manifest dream with the four “W questions”: Who is there at that moment (the dreamer and other people)? What is the emotion? Where is the dream taking place? What is the time — past, present, or future, or some mixed tense? Using this kind of analysis, one obtains a startling picture of the dreamer’s mindbrain and interpersonal world. Erikson wrote:
Any segment of overt behavior reflects, as it were, the whole store. One might say that psychoanalysis has given new depth to the surface, thus building the basis for a more inclusive general psychology of man.… Officially, we hurry at every confrontation with a dream to crack its manifest appearance as if it were a useless shell and to hasten to discard this shell in favor of what seems to be the more worthwhile core. (1954, pp. 16—17)
Erikson showed us how to chart a dream: divide it into segments, more or less equivalent to sentences, and then analyze each segment according to the five dimensions (see Table 10.1). By charting out a dream in this way, we can see the dreamer’s characteristic ways of dealing with the inner and outer worlds. This method of analysis can reveal how consistent or changeable is the dreamer’s experience of other people, what role they play in the dreamer’s life, and how this interacts with the dreamer’s emotions and psychological defenses. The pattern of interpersonal configurations in a dream may tell us something significant about the dreamer, especially in relation to the affects in the dream. Does the dreamer, for example, become anxious when the interpersonal situation gets more intimate, or does the dreamer feel pleasant feelings when intimacy is increased? By doing this kind of analysis, one can see how the dreamer’s mindbrain is portrayed in the dream and how that representation interacts with emotions and other aspects of experience. It could be called the dreamer’s “mindbrain style,” especially if the pattern repeats, more or less, in other dreams.
PSYCHOLOGICAL DEFENSES AND DREAMS
On September 11, 2001, terrorists crashed airplanes into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. The event was traumatic for all New Yorkers. Shortly after the event, three different people told me dreams which they related directly to the terrorist attacks.
- One person dreamt: “I was sleeping in my apartment, and a plane crashed through the window of my bedroom. I awoke suddenly, terrified and unsure if the attack had really happened.”
- Another person dreamt: “I am on a train. I am looking at the Upper West Side skyline. I watched a plane going into a building. Then one went into a building in Queens, where my niece lives. Then one went into Harlem where Bill Clinton’s office was.”
- A third person dreamt: “I am a prisoner of war in a German camp during World War II. Single-handedly, I escape to another camp, which I liberate by tying a bungee cord around it. I see Hogan from Hogan’s Heroes, except that Hogan is a German officer, and I must evade him, since Hogan knows all of my tricks.”
None of the three dreamers had been at the site of the World Trade Center buildings during the attack. None had lost anyone they knew in the attacks or had been physically harmed. And yet one can see in each dream a different style of relating to the world and a different set of psychological defenses against trauma, conflict, unacceptable desires, and unpleasant experience.
Each of the three people who reported dreams after 9/11 employed a different pattern of psychological defenses that showed up in his dream. The first dreamer was generally anxious and fearful even before the World Trade Center attacks and often braced himself for the worst to happen. After the attacks, he modified his life in New York. He refused to fly, and he would not take the subway or trains. He had always led an avoidant and schizoid existence, and believed, after the terrorist attacks, that he needed to change his life toward even greater cautiousness and constriction than before. His defenses were not very effective, primarily being an attempt to control danger and unpleasant affects by obsessional attempts at total control of his environment. The manifest content of the dream shows the lack of any defense at all. He is completely vulnerable, in his own bedroom, to the very attack that he fears. His obsessional defense is seen in his reaction to the dream; he awakens in a panic, “terrified and unsure if the attack really happened.” This combination of terror and uncertainty, great fear and obsessional doubting, were essentials of his psychological functioning. He lived out that combination is his real life. After the attacks, he immediately worked out a plan for moving to a safer place; yet he did not put this plan into action. That is an essential trait of obsessional living: panic, rumination, resolve, and then inaction. One can see that living style in his dream. The second dreamer spent most of his life detached from his emotions. In therapy, it was often hard for him to acknowledge any feelings, even about very important things that had happened to him. He had been subjected to so much shame and prejudice throughout his childhood that he learned to distance himself from feelings. His way of handling the World Trade Center disaster in real life was to live exactly as he had done before, making no changes and presuming that he would not be affected by trouble in the world. He occasionally had moments when he thought he should be more afraid, but he quickly dismissed those feelings. He relied on the defense of “isolation of affect”; he separated his emotions from his reactions. One can see that defense in his manifest dream. He observes the three planes crash, but always from a distance and in the safety of a train. The third dreamer was a man who coped with danger situations through action. He liked to take charge of situations and fancied having a kind of omnipotence. He also was a thrill-seeker and had gone bungee-jumping. After the attacks of 9/11, he wanted to take action to make America safer. Had he not been too old, he might have joined the Marines and gone to Afghanistan to hunt down terrorists. His prominent defenses were denial (of vulnerability), a sense of omnipotence, and reversal of roles. One could also describe this man as courageous; a virtue can be related to a psychological defense. What made his courage more of a defense was that it was extreme and unrealistic. One man could not wrap a bungee cord around an entire prison camp, nor is it clear what that would solve. In the dream, he changes his role from prisoner to captor, yet in the role of the captor, he knows the tricks of his true self. One can see the defensive style of each person in the narrative of his dream. The first dreamer uses obsessional defenses; the second dreamer uses isolation of affect; and the third dreamer uses denial of vulnerability, omnipotence, and reversal of roles.
Psychological defenses are processes by which our mindbrains change reality, suppress or transform drives and emotions, misattribute personality characteristics from ourselves to others or from others to ourselves, or leave out aspects of reality to lessen anxiety (S. Freud, 1937; A. Freud, 1936; McWilliams, 1994, 2011). Defenses enable our mindbrains to distort who is doing what to whom, who feels what, what we are feeling in the moment, or what has happened or is happening. Defenses also can divert emotions to bodily processes, such as in the defense of somatization. It is my view that many, perhaps all, psychological defenses can appear in dreams, and a study of their operation in dreams will help us understand defenses better, give us increased understanding of how the mindbrain transforms the world, and give us new ways to approach defenses in clinical work.
METAPHOR
Many people think of metaphor as a linguistic device, used by writers and poets, in which one thing is described in terms of another. Shakespeare’s Romeo says: “It is the East and Juliet is the sun.” He does not mean that Juliet is a ball of fire in the sky. He means that Juliet has characteristics of the sun: warm, radiant, and nurturing, and she illuminates his life. The metaphor instantaneously makes us think of Juliet in terms of all of the sun’s attributes — its warmth, brightness, and goodness (unless you live in the desert), so we understand this metaphor. A good metaphor needs us to have familiarity with the elements of the metaphor — otherwise it may sound capricious or crazy. If Romeo said: “It is the East and Juliet is Philadelphia,” his intended meaning would be less clear. The word “metaphor” derives from the Greek verb metaphora (μεταφορά) — to transport or transfer. The old definition of metaphor is: “A figure of speech in which one object is likened to another by asserting it to be that other or speaking of it as if it were the other” (Funk and Wagnalls’ New Standard Dictionary of the English Language, 1928). However, over the years, philosophers and psycholinguists have observed that metaphor is not just a device for literary artists. It is, instead, an integral part of human language and thought (Jakobson, 1956/1995; Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). Metaphor is one way the mindbrain connects and transforms different ideas, casting one into the shape of the other. It is hard, perhaps impossible, for people to speak without using metaphors, although most of us are not conscious of most metaphors that we use. For example, when a woman says to her boyfriend, “We are spinning our wheels,” he knows that she is not saying that their car is stuck in the mud; she means that the relationship is not progressing, not “moving forward.” The nature of the relationship is expressed in terms of car travel, mobility, and progress, or lack of progress, in this case. If we say “He is moving up in the world” we don’t usually mean he is driving to a higher altitude; we mean the he is achieving increased status. We are applying the domain of physical altitude to status. Along the same lines, we also say “his career is on the rise” or “his career is going downhill.” In general, the metaphor is “height is goodness.” We can say “Her beauty is at its peak,” “His political speech hit a new low.” We know that “hot babe” does not refer to an infant with fever caused by illness. The metaphors are that “heat is sexual attractiveness” and “a beloved person is an infant.” Are metaphors a uniquely human capacity? Ramachandran said: “Any monkey can reach for a peanut, but only a human can reach for the stars or even understand what that means” (quoted in von Bubnoff, 2005). Metaphor is not just a means of poignant, intense expression devised by poets; it is basic to most of our speech, and by extension, to most of our thinking.
Many metaphors are so overused that we no longer recognize them as metaphors. Nietzsche (1873/1976, pp. 46—47) observed this: “truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.” When we hear “He is moving up in the world,” we don’t think “A metaphor!” Some of those metaphors are like old coins, so overused that their identity as metaphors is barely perceptible. One way to make us aware of commonplace metaphors is to depict them as being heard literally. The television show Get Smart had a character, Hymie the robot, who made these errors. Secret agent Maxwell Smart’s boss said to Hymie, “Hymie, knock that stuff off ” and Hymie knocks all of his papers off the desk. Smart says, “Hymie, shake a leg,” and Hymie shakes his leg. These scenes are humorous, but they demonstrate how much we take common metaphors for granted. If a man went up a mountain on a funicular and said, “I am moving up in the world,” most people would find it comic or even startling. We are more used to the metaphoric meaning than the literal one.
NONLINGUISTIC METAPHOR
Please note: For a complete list of hyperlinks to the relevant musical examples featured in this chapter, please visit the dedicated webpage when prompted to listen.
Most of us, when we think of metaphor, think of a linguistic process — a usual meaning of a word or phrase is shifted, to map one domain of meaning onto another. However, metaphoric processes do not need words. Metaphor is a mapping of meaning from one domain to another — and neither domain needs to involve words. A close friend asked me, “Which piece of music is you?” and I discovered that I had an immediate answer: I “was” Brahms’ Second String Sextet, Op. 36. It took time for me to think through how that piece “felt like me” at the time, and I realized that whatever linguistic adjectives I came up with (optimism, tenderness, gentleness) were not as precise as the music itself. The mapping of my emotional experience onto music bypassed language, but felt metaphoric, nevertheless. Similarly, one of my patients was told by her husband that their relationship reminded him of the last movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23. She felt she knew what he meant and was very flattered. Nonlinguistic metaphor was enshrined in classical music through the “Doctrine of Affects” (Affekten in German), which held that certain sequences of notes had an intrinsic, metaphoric connection to certain emotions. For example, a sequence of a descending minor seconds sounded like sighing, and a rapidly rising sequence of thirds sounded euphoric. Johann Sebastian Bach was an expert at creating these effects. The “Crucifixus” of his B- minor Mass has a constant flow of descending seconds in both the bass line and the chorus that convey the suffering on the cross (listen to Musical Example #1), while the “Et resurrexit” has ascending intervals that feel triumphant (listen to Musical Example #2). Much later composers used these Affekten too — Beethoven, in the slow movement of his String Quartet, Op. 130 has a tremendously sad descending scale, with the marking “beklemmt (anguished).” (Listen to Musical Example #3 for 44 seconds.) Mussorgsky has the Holy Fool singing mournfully about the fate of Russia in the opera Boris Godunov, using descending minor seconds in the orchestra that sound like continual weeping. (Listen to Musical Example #4.) A different musical metaphor occurs in Bach’s Cantata #111, “Was mein Gott will, das g’scheh allzeit (What my God wants, may it always happen).” In the duet for alto and tenor: “So geh’ ich mit beherzten Schritten, und wenn mich Gott zum Grabe führt (I go with courageous steps, even though God be leading me to the grave.)” (Listen to Musical Example #5.) The duet has a very energetic dotted-rhythm figure that is a nonlinguistic metaphor of the “courageous steps” that are described in the text. Albert Schweitzer (1911, p. 361) said the duet “is like a gladsome, stately march.” There are so many examples of nonlinguistic metaphors in music that it would take an encyclopedia to describe them all. Some are onomatopoeic, where the sound of the music matches a human utterance, like a sigh or a laugh. In some, the rhythm of the music matches a human physical movement, as in the Bach duet.
Some musical metaphors are more abstract. In Don Quixote, Richard Strauss’ tone poem for solo cello and orchestra, Don Quixote’s bizarre, mad conclusions are continually “metaphorized” by a chord progression (the cadence D to A-flat) that sounds “off ” or irrational (listen to Musical Example #6). Only at the very end, when Don Quixote is about to die and his insanity fades, do we finally hear the “normal” cadence, D to A (listen to Musical Example #7 for 35 seconds). Russian composer Dimitri Shostakovich turned this process upside down. The famous Tristan chord, from Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde, leaves the listener unsure where it is going, and then resolves in a way that is continually surprising (listen to Musical Example #8 for one minute, 50 seconds). Today most listeners hear the Tristan chord and expect a surprise resolution. Shostakovich, in his last symphony (#15), last movement, first quotes excerpts from Wagner’s “Ring Cycle,” just to make sure the listener has Wagner at the forefront of awareness. Shostakovich then quotes the set-up of the Tristan chord, but has it resolve “normally.” In context of our expectations, this is hilarious. It is not easy to write a purely musical joke, using no words, but this is one of the greatest (listen to Musical Example #9 for one minute 20 seconds). Nonlinguistic metaphors can also be found in paintings and sculptures. The original theory of empathy, as developed by art theorists Robert Vischer (1873) and Theodor Lipps (1903, 1913), proposed the operation of nonlinguistic metaphor. We look at a painting of a nonhuman or inanimate object, and we imagine our bodies in a posture that mimics what we see in the painting. (Would Vico have condemned this as one more example of man’s projecting himself into everything instead of appreciating things in themselves?) For example, the painting The Solitary Tree by nineteenth-century German artist Caspar David Friedrich shows a tree with contorted branches (Figure 5.1). In looking at that painting, we imagine our limbs in a similarly contorted shape, and that fantasy creates a feeling in us of strain and distress. We also imagine ourselves, like the tree, isolated in a barren area and that invokes additional feelings of loneliness. Some painters and sculptors made an artform of nonlinguistic metaphor. In René Magritte’s painting Le Viol (“The Rape”), a human face is mapped onto a female torso — or vice versa (Figure 5.2). Note that the metaphor occurs without words. We can describe it in words: face = torso, but we can grasp the nonlinguistic metaphor without words.
SYNESTHESIA
People who have synesthesia readily identify experiences in which objects in one sense modality automatically trigger an actual perception in a second modality (Vernon, 1937). It is an open question whether such synesthetic experiences are a sensory version of metaphor, the “source” domain being the presented stimulus, such as a musical tone, and the target domain, being the experience in another modality, such as color. Interestingly, like most metaphor, synesthetic experiences are usually unidirectional (Dixon et al., 2004), but not always (Cohen Kadosh et al., 2007; Goller et al., 2009).
One of my friends has synesthesia. He associates individual musical pitches with colors; E-flat for him has always been blue. He was startled to find out that this connection of pitches and colors was not universal. For the Russian composer Nicolai Rimsky- Korsakov,21 E-flat was also blue, but for Alexander Scriabin, E-flat was red- purple (von Riesemann, 1934). The violinist Fritz Kreisler once confessed how, “in a mood of irritability and ill temper,” he bought a coat “in the color of C sharp minor.” This caused some alarm to those who saw him, and to reassure them he had “a collar in E flat major sewn onto it” (Taylor, 1963, p. 62). Sound-color synesthesia was described by Mahling (1926), who, though German, called it by a French name, audition colorée. (See also Jewanski et al., 2009.)
One has to consider the difference, though, between (1) describing one sense modality in terms of another modality (a common human ability) compared to (2) actually seeing, feeling, or hearing (perhaps hallucinating) another sense modality (true synesthesia). We all can do the former: For example, we all know what is meant by a “loud shirt” although the shirt is soundless. The auditory adjective “loud” has come to metaphorically mean “brash, brassy colors” (note how in this explanation, I have extended the sound-color mapping with the word “brassy”; as we humans try to express ourselves, we are always expanding our use of metaphor). We know what “sharp cheese” means, even though most cheese is soft to the touch. We know what bitter cold means, even though cold has no flavor. We also, to varying degrees, can experience a color as “warm” or a light as “icy” or “harsh.”
SYNKINESIA
Another possibly “wired-in” form of nonlinguistic metaphor can occur between different types of muscular activity. In the phenomenon of synkinesia, when a person willfully makes one kind of movement, another body part will move involuntarily at the same time. This occurs in some pathological situations, caused by strokes or other neurological injury. For example, in Marin-Amat Syndrome, when a man opens his mouth, his eyes close (Jitendra, 2007). But synkinesias are also found in neurologically health people (Hwang et al., 2006).
Charles Darwin (1872) noticed that some people, when cutting with scissors, make an analogous up and down movement with their jaws. This might be due to the proximity of the motor maps for the mouth and hand, which are adjacent neurologically in the precentral gyrus. I know a man who wears contact lenses; when he uses his hands to spread his upper and lower eyelids before inserting the contact lens, his mouth involuntarily opens. In both these examples, there is an involuntary movement that mimics the voluntary movement.
METAPHOR AND TRANSFERENCE
The mindbrain is always involved in remappings of experiences and ideas, both in and out of dreams (Modell, 2009). The mindbrain is always asking: “This new experience — what is it like from my past?” That is the essence of transference. Something that happens in psychoanalytic treatment is experienced in terms of related experiences from the past, and past experiences are re-remembered and revised according to current experiences.
For example, I was away from my practice during the summer for eight weeks. Each patient experienced the break in treatment differently. What was it like for them? Here are some responses, drawn from different patients:
- “It is like when my mother’s breast was unavailable to me for too long and there was nothing I could do about it.” In treatment, she may learn that there is something she can do about it in the present; she may also learn that smaller incidents of unavailability from the analyst, or incidents of inadequate feeding or inadequate responsiveness from the analyst, need not lead to panic or despair, but can be negotiated and regulated; also, in retrospect, she can see why her mother, with an absent father and six children to raise, might not have been optimally available.
- “It is like when my parents sent me to 8-week summer camp at age 5 so they could travel in Asia.” The patient may discover that not all absences will lead to an overwhelming sense of abandonment; that not all absences mean a general disregard of his well-being; and, in retrospect, he can reconsider and re- evaluate the past. The parents were selfish and perhaps ill-advised; but nothing tragic happened during their absence, as it might have. The experience was nevertheless traumatic, and shaped his lifelong defenses of isolation and resistance to dependence.
- “It is like when I could finally have some free time on my own and not have to take care of my mentally ill mother.” The patient may realize how much attachments imply the loss of freedom to him and a depressing, overbearing need from the mother; that, when faced with a needy person, he need not drop everything and forego all his own needs. He also can realize that the mother was mentally ill and could not be otherwise.
PUNS
Puns bring together two domains, but they are not conceptually related. The two domains of meaning have to do with the fact that a single word has more than one meaning. The pun creates a sentence in which the expected meaning is forcibly shifted. For example, consider the following interchange from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll:
“And how many hours a day did you do lessons?” said Alice, in a hurry to change the subject.
“Ten hours the first day,” said the Mock Turtle, “nine the next, and so on.”
“What a curious plan!” exclaimed Alice.
“That’s the reason they’re called lessons,” the Gryphon remarked: “because they lessen from day to day.” (1865, p. 145)
This is funny because the two words — “lesson” and “lessen” — which sound virtually identical, are set up by the story to make it sound like their two meanings are actually connected, when they are not. Thus, in puns, the sounds of words are their connection, whereas in metaphor, the meaning of words underlies their connection. “A metaphor reveals a deep similarity, whereas a pun is a superficial similarity masquerading a deep one — hence its comic appeal” (Ramachandran and Hubbard, 2003, p. 53, original emphasis). Some puns exploit the meanings of two words that sound virtually the same as a single word, or vice versa. For example, a patient who said: “I want to be little” could be heard by the analyst as wanting to belittle other people (Skelton, 1996, p. 174). The name “Eileen” could be a pun for “I lean” (Fosshage and Loew, 1987). A patient of Ella Freeman Sharpe (1937, p. 39) dreamt of “Iona Cathedral” which was a pun for “I own a cathedral.” One of my patients troubled by guilt feelings dreamt that flying toward her was a man named “Mr. Gill Tee.”
Sometimes numbers can be puns. A man dreamt that he was looking for the room that his class was in, and he thought it was 302. In waking life, he was involved in a relationship with a married woman. In the dream, he found out that his lover had previously slept with his old best friend. The combination of the real situation and the dream suggested that it might be important to him to be involved in a triangle. Consequently, he concluded, the number “302” in the dream should be pronounced “Three or two?”
SEMANTIC AND SYNTACTIC PUNS
All the puns we have examined so far are what I would call “semantic puns” — they play on the fact that words and their homonyms can have multiple meanings. Semantic puns are the most common type, but some puns involve the meaning of an entire sentence rather than just a word or two. I call these “syntactic puns.” They play on the fact that two sentences can have the exact same words but two different meanings, because the syntax of the sentence can be parsed in two ways. Consider the following interchange:
Teacher: I used to teach Copernicus.
Student: You’re that old?
Here the punning involves two meanings of the sentence “I used to teach Copernicus.” The intended meaning was “I used to teach students about Copernicus.” The unintended meaning, heard by the student, was: “I used to teach lessons to Copernicus himself.” In English, the direct object of the verb “to teach” can either mean the subject matter of the teaching or the person who is taught.
Sometimes puns are quite complex. We all know the nursery rhyme that begins: “Mary had a little lamb.” But consider what happens when we add: “Mary had a little lamb — and Jane a little pork.” The sentence changes its meaning, and we suddenly become aware of two meanings of “had” — (1) to possess; (2) to eat (see Vendler, 1977). The effect strikes us as comic; we thought of Mary as a sweet girl with her cute little lamb, and suddenly she is eating the lamb. The sentence makes us aware not only of the two meanings of “had,” but of another peculiar aspect of our language. If the sentence had been lengthened thus: “Mary had a little lamb — and Jane a little pig,” the word “had” would not have been changed. The sentence highlights that in English, we often use two versions of an animal name — the generic name versus the food label — such as pig versus pork, cow versus beef, sheep versus mutton, calf versus veal. With “lamb,” the generic name and the food label are identical, which allows for the surprise effect of “Mary had a little lamb — and Jane a little pork.” Dreams show the mindbrain’s abilities as a pun-maker, even when the person, in waking life, does not seem able or willing to use puns, as was the case with the woman who dreamt of “Mr. Gill Tee.”
WORKING WITH DREAMS OVER TIME
Reading textbooks on dream interpretation, one can have the impression that psychoanalytic dream interpretation is a circumscribed process. The patient tells the dream, the patient associates to the dream, and an interpretation is developed by the analyst and patient. In actual clinical practice, however, dream interpretation is usually not so neat and circumscribed. Dream interpretations evolve, sometimes over the length of an entire analysis. And actions are as important as words. The patient may reveal meanings of the dream nonverbally, such as small gestures or tics, or grander, dramatic behaviors that extend over time (Schimel, 1969; Levenson, 1983; Joseph, 1985; Blechner, 1995).
Most dreams have a huge amount of material condensed in them, including the primary psychological concerns of the dreamer, facts of the dreamer’s life history, and feelings of the dreamer toward other people. To understand and discuss all these aspects of every dream would be very time-consuming and not realistically possible. The clinician, with the dreamer’s collaboration, must use judgment about what in the dream is most emotionally salient for the dreamer and also what in the dream is most new. An exhaustive analysis of a dream is very useful as an exercise for training the psychotherapist. But in day-to-day practice, work with dreams is quite different. I will present some examples of dream interpretation as it is carried out in psychotherapy.
WHEN YOUR MINDBRAIN KNOWS THINGS THAT YOU DON’T
It started with laughter. I was listening to a new recording of the Piano Quintet by British composer Thomas Adès. During the first movement there is a passage (listen to Musical Example #30 for 15 seconds) that sounds like the repeated cadence at the end of the first movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in E-flat, Op. 81a (listen to Musical Example #29 for seven seconds). When I heard it, I started laughing heartily. The resemblance between the two pieces is striking, but why, I wondered, was it funny? I listened to the piece again and again, trying to figure it out. More connections with Beethoven’s Sonata jumped out at me. The first movement of the Adès has an opening theme of three rising notes; it could be an upside-down version of the opening theme of Beethoven’s Sonata, which is three descending notes. Later in the Adès piece, the theme is reinverted so that it sounds even closer to the Beethoven. But from where did my laughter come? Suddenly it hit me; the Beethoven Sonata is called “Les Adieux” (“The farewell”). “Farewell” can translate into the German word Adè, and Adè, pluralized, is — Adès! I don’t know whether Thomas Adès consciously calculated this play on his name, but I was shocked that my mindbrain figured it out unconsciously and caused my laughter, which my conscious mindbrain then had to figure out.
THE LANGUAGE OF THOUGHT AND THE WAKINGWORK
What is the language of thought? Is there a primary, primal language of thought? Does the mindbrain use something like the machine language that computers use? For computers, basically all language is reducible to a code of 1’s and 0’s. People who are not computer scientists may deal with computers for decades and never have direct contact with this system of binary code that underlies the most complex computer operation, but such a language exists. Similarly, there may be some underlying levels of mindbrain language to which we so far have no direct access. Might dreams give us insight into this underlying mindbrain language?
…
Freud thought that behind the dream lay a “latent dream thought.” The dream thought was conceived by Freud to be like a verbal sentence. The dreamwork transformed this latent dream thought into the dream by all manner of distortion: condensation, displacement, symbolization, pictorialization, etc. Calvin Hall (1953, p. 175) similarly wrote, “Dreaming is pictorialized thinking; the conceptual is made perceptual.” Patricia Kilroe (2013, p. 233) wrote that in dreams, “verbal thoughts may be transformed into images.” I would like to propose instead that the verbal “latent dream thought” may not come first. I have suggested instead that we call it the “constructed dream thought” — it occurs after the fact. The mindbrain in creating the dream may not start with verbal, sentence-like thoughts. It may start with the dream itself, a congeries of images, emotions, and words. This assemblage may seem confusing to our waking selves, but it may be the essence of thought, when thought need not be communicable.
…
Llinás and Paré (1991) anticipated the point of view that dreaming is primary and wakefulness is mental activity modulated by external sensory input. They wrote (p. 525), “Let us formally propose then that wakefulness is nothing other than a dreamlike state modulated by the constraints produced by specific sensory inputs.”
…
In dreams, we see the fluidity of how the mindbrain represents ideas and feelings, and transforms them. In dreams, we see the mindbrain creating meaning in many forms and shifting meaning from one form to another. We see the intersection of words, images, sounds, tastes, smells, ideas, and emotions. We see the intersection of rebuses, symbols, metaphors, metonyms, categories, and other meaning transformations and encodings. While I have been asking the question about the language of thought in this chapter (a phrase that has a venerable history in works by Fodor and others), the term “language of thought” may be misleading. It implies language, which to most people involves words. It would be more accurate to ask about the “substrate of thought,” that is, the underlying medium of thought, which may or may not involve words. The substrate of thought allows transformations that can break the bounds of language. As I have stated before, dreams allow us to think thoughts that are “extralinguistic,” thoughts that can exist because they are not limited by representation in words. By being formulated in extralinguistic terms, some dreams allow us to transform mental contents without the constraints of language, leading to creative and generative thinking.