Reviews
Dream Bibliophile - Book Review
Can psychoanalysis ever catch up to the 21st-century dreamer? It was Sigmund Freud who proclaimed that dreams are, as he put it, “the royal road to knowledge of the workings of the unconscious mind”—and thus not only a valid subject of study, but indispensable to our modern understanding of ourselves. We can still learn much from Freud and his followers about how our deepest needs and desires are symbolized in the content of dreams, as well as in neurotic symptoms, slips of the tongue, even jokes.
But that dream theory! Within 15 years of the master’s passing, scientific research established that dreaming occurs universally in humans in cycles through a night’s sleep, shaking the foundation of the original psychoanalytic theory. If dreams are not simply “the guardian of sleep”—cloaking disturbing wishes in elaborate disguises—then identifying those repressed desires cannot be the ultimate, unique goal of dream interpretation. Freud’s model of the dream as akin to a neurotic symptom just doesn’t match up with subsequent decades of research into the conditions of dreaming, or the relation of dream content to waking life and concerns… or with the evidence of countless dreams logged by lay people as well as researchers that have proved anything but symptomatic.
Of course, psychoanalysis has adjusted to reality, in both theory and practice. At the present moment, no one is better suited to make the case for reinvigorating that adjustment—and it is certainly going to take more than a tune-up—than Dr. Mark J. Blechner, the author of The Mindbrain and Dreams: An Exploration of Dreaming, Thinking, and Artistic Creation, a summation of much of the work he’s done on dreams and dreaming in the past thirty years. Blechner’s previous work devoted to the subject, The Dream Frontier (2001), is a spirited defense of the continuing vitality of the psychoanalytic model of the unconscious, integrated with an accessible account of relevant findings in neuroscience, in particular research on mental processes of cognition, emotional response, association of ideas, and decision-making. In Blechner’s account, it is the very bizarreness—their affront to common sense, so to speak—that makes dreams a unique and irreplaceable form of thought. Even if images in dreams are, as J. Allan Hobson has controversially argued, the result of random neural firing, they still constitute breakthrough thinking, a rare mode of open-mindedness—hence the affinity of dreams with the most adventurous forms of art in all media and genres.
This recent book, further pursuing the premises of The Dream Frontier, aims its argument toward psychoanalysts—or perhaps more properly, the psychoanalytic establishment, which responded to the collapse of Freud’s basic dream theory by more or less banishing dream analysis from the practice of therapy, on the grounds that free association generally is just as revelatory as exploring dreams, as well as better aligned to the patient’s waking reality. Blechner’s title for the section on this reorientation of therapeutic practice announces his judgment upon it: “Psychoanalysis cuts off its right arm.” His argument for the unique value of dreams is pursued both with examples from clinical practice and with a survey of the ways that scrutiny of dream-thought may indicate how, as he puts it, “the mindbrain structures reality”—that is, how dreams indicate what we actively, if unconsciously, bring to our understanding of the world.
But the author’s avowed aim is not only to offer models for deep and productive exploration of dreams in psychoanalytic practice—in this respect, the many telling examples in The Mindbrain and Dreams are as compelling as Freud’s—but also to promote “neuropsychoanalysis”: a unified view of both mental events as we experience them and brain physiology as current research discloses its secrets. Hence the provocation of the key term in the title. “Mind/ brain” appears to be established in contemporary philosophy, but Blechner banishes the punctuation of that dividing slash, in the hope of contributing to a conceptual reset integrating physiology with philosophy as well as psychology. Before we respond too quickly that lexical innovation isn’t likely to overcome centuries of body/mind dualism, we might remember that if it isn’t sufficient, it is certainly necessary to establish a new concept. You only have to think of Freud’s ego, id, and superego to see that sometimes words are a theory.
Blechner works his way through revision of the mechanisms of Freud’s “Dream-work.” The “interobject”—when a dream image “was x but was also y”—receives particular development because it exemplifies the capacity of dreams to produce new concepts, which are, as Blechner argues, not mere disguises or deflections, but truly creative dreamthinking. The same applies to the appearance of psychological defenses as dream elements: for example, repression signified by hunting for some all-important item through a series of drawers that always turn up empty; splitting by the appearance of all-good and all-evil dream entities. Close attention to the manifest content of dreams provides opportunities to observe how the mindbrain continually makes experience into our complex and unique responses to life. But, although the first goal here is to achieve a fuller account of the neurobiological substrate of dream content, the author concludes (acknowledging a kinship with Jung, Erik Erikson, Robert Bosnak, among others, with an eloquent tribute to Montague Ullman’s dream-sharing process) that focus on the manifest dream also, in contrast to Freud’s method, yields countless insights in clinical practice: it is the dream itself that, as Blechner succinctly puts it, “guides its own interpretation.” The sentiment will be familiar to most students of dreaming outside the hermeneutic circle of psychoanalysis—as will the author’s insight that the dream represents a truth grasped by the mindbrain, even when it is not accessible to consciousness.
This is less a revision of Freud’s view than a reversal. In another connection, Blechner cites Heraclitus’ “You cannot step into the same river twice,” with the common gloss, “Things must always change in order to stay what they are.” The Mindbrain and Dreams gives Freud’s example an energetic push into contemporary reality; maybe a correction of course can save the master’s most valuable contributions from being carried away by the currents of time.
Anyone who thinks, writes, or teaches about dreams, and anyone who works with them clinically, needs to be familiar with this remarkable and engaging book. Mark Blechner's clinically based ideas about dream theory and the use of dreams in treatment are thoughtful, lucid, illuminating, and often startlingly original as well. The Dream Frontier will be taught and read all the way from undergraduate classes to psychoanalytic institutes. It is a contribution that will endure.
- Bernard Welt, DreamTime Magazine, Winter 2020, Professor Emeritus of Arts and Humanities at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design at the George Washington University, and a frequent commentator on the relationship between dreaming and the arts