Concept
Dream-work
The processes that turn latent dream-thoughts into the manifest dream.
Development
1900
introduced by Sigmund Freud
Freud set out the mechanism of dream formation in Die Traumdeutung (1900). In the Dora case history he refers back to that book's rule that every dream represents a wish as fulfilled, in disguise when the wish is repressed, and tests it against Dora's first dream; he calls the dream a detour around repression, a means of indirect representation.
In Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905);The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)
1962
reworked by Wilfred Bion
In Learning from Experience Bion makes the work of dreaming continuous with waking life: alpha function must work on the sense impressions of an emotional experience, asleep or awake, before they can serve as dream-thoughts, and its products resemble the dream images Freud interpreted. The 'dream' it makes possible keeps conscious and unconscious apart, which Bion offers as the reason the dream of classical theory resists being made conscious.
In Learning from Experience (1962)
Relations
- 1900 introduced by Sigmund Freud
Freud set out the mechanism of dream formation in Die Traumdeutung (1900). In the Dora case history he refers back to that book's rule that every dream represents a wish as fulfilled, in disguise when the wish is repressed, and tests it against Dora's first dream; he calls the dream a detour around repression, a means of indirect representation.
- 1962 reworked by Wilfred Bion
In Learning from Experience Bion makes the work of dreaming continuous with waking life: alpha function must work on the sense impressions of an emotional experience, asleep or awake, before they can serve as dream-thoughts, and its products resemble the dream images Freud interpreted. The 'dream' it makes possible keeps conscious and unconscious apart, which Bion offers as the reason the dream of classical theory resists being made conscious.
- 1962 gave rise to Alpha function
Bion modelled alpha function on dreaming: it is the function that makes the 'dream' possible, and the alpha-elements it produces resemble, or may be identical with, the visual images of dreams that Freud's interpretation resolves into their latent content.
Works
- 1900
Freud's book on dreams, issued by Deuticke in November 1899 with the imprint date 1900, argues that a dream is the disguised fulfilment of a repressed wish. It sets out a method of interpreting dreams through the dreamer's associations and distinguishes the manifest content of a dream from the latent dream-thoughts. The dream-work turns the latter into the former through condensation, displacement, considerations of representability and secondary revision. The seventh chapter proposes a model of the psychical apparatus made up of the systems unconscious, preconscious and conscious, with a censorship between them and two modes of functioning, the primary and the secondary process. The book is also the first printed statement of the theme Freud later named the Oedipus complex. Freud enlarged it in many later editions.
- 1905
Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria
Freud's case history of "Dora", an eighteen-year-old Viennese woman (later identified as Ida Bauer) whom he treated for about eleven weeks at the end of 1900; written in 1901, it appeared in 1905 in the Monatsschrift für Psychiatrie und Neurologie. Dora suffered from a nervous cough, loss of voice, shortness of breath and low moods, and her father brought her to Freud after her parents found a letter in which she hinted at suicide. Behind the symptoms Freud uncovers a family entanglement: her father's affair with Frau K., and the advances of Frau K.'s husband, Herr K., whom Dora slapped after a proposal by a lake and whose earlier kiss had filled her with disgust. Freud reads her symptoms as the expression of repressed sexual wishes — love for Herr K., a revived childhood attachment to her father and, at the deepest layer, love for Frau K. — and builds the case around the interpretation of two dreams: a burning house from which her father rescues her while her mother wants to save her jewel case, and a wandering through a strange town after her father's death. Dora broke off the treatment on 31 December. In the Postscript Freud attributes the failure to his not having recognised and interpreted in time the transference of her feelings for Herr K. onto himself, and gives his first sustained account of transference as a new edition of old impulses directed at the physician.
- 1962
Learning from Experience, published in 1962, is the first of the short theoretical books in which Bion tried to give psychoanalysis an instrument for thinking about thinking. Drawing on his work with psychotic patients and on Freud's account of the two principles of mental functioning, he asks how a person comes to learn from emotional experience, and why some cannot. To keep his terms free of the associations of existing theory, he introduces signs deliberately empty of meaning, chief among them alpha-function, and treats the personality as a set of functions and their factors. Alpha-function works on sense impressions and emotional experiences and turns them into alpha-elements, which can be stored, used in dream thoughts and in unconscious waking thought, and remembered. What is not so transformed remains as beta-elements: undigested facts felt as things in themselves rather than as thoughts, fit only to be evacuated by projective identification or discharged in action. Alpha-elements cohere into a contact barrier that both separates and joins conscious and unconscious, so that one can be awake or asleep, aware or unaware; where alpha-function fails, a screen of beta-elements takes its place, and the person cannot properly dream, and so can neither fall asleep nor fully wake. The function develops in the infant through the mother's capacity for reverie: she takes in the states the infant projects into her, such as a fear of dying, and returns them in a form it can bear, and the infant introjects the function along with them; when she cannot, what returns to the infant is nameless dread. Thinking begins when an expectation meets frustration: an infant who can bear the absence forms a thought of it, while one who cannot treats the absence as a bad object to be got rid of. Bion describes the links between objects as love, hate and knowledge (L, H and K), and makes K — the painful activity of getting to know something, as distinct from possessing knowledge about it — the link on which learning from experience depends; its negative, minus K, strips experience of meaning and is driven by envy. In the later chapters he discusses how the analyst abstracts models from clinical experience and recognises a selected fact that gives coherence to the scattered material of a session, and he abstracts the mother–infant model into the relation of container and contained, which his later books develop.
See also
People
References
- Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria1905Evidence for a relation
- The Interpretation of Dreams1900Evidence for a relation
- Learning from Experience1962Evidence for a relation