Who Is the Dreamer, Who Dreams the Dream?: A Study of Psychic Presences

385 Pages·2000·170.9 MB·English

by  James S. Grotstein

Who 1s the Dreamer
Who Dreams the Dream?
Volume 19
Relational Perspectives Book Series
Copyrighted Material
RELATIONAL PERSPECTIVES BOOK SERIES
STEPHEN A. MITCHEll AND LEWIS ARON
Series Editors
Volume 1 Volume 10
Rita Wiley McCleary Neil J. Skolnick and David E. Scharff,
Conversing with Uncertainty: editors
Practicing Psychotherapy in a Fairbairn, Then and Now
Hospital Setting
Volume 11
Volume 2 Stuart A. Pizer
Charles Spezzano Building Bridges: Negotiation of
Affect in Psychoanalysis: Paradox in Psychoanalysis
A Clinical Synthesis
Volume 12
Volume 3 Lewis Aron and
Neil Altman Frances Sommer Anderson, editors
The Analyst in the Inner City: Relational Perspectives on the Body
Race, Class, and Culture
Volume 13
Through a Psychoanalytic Lens
Karen Maroda
Volume 4 Seduction, Surrender, and
Lewis Aron Traniformation: Emotional Engagement
A Meeting of Minds: in the Analytic Process
Mutuality in Psychoanalysis
Volume 14
Volume 5 Stephen A. Mitchell and Lewis Aron,
Joyce A. Slochower editors
Holding and Psychoanalysis: Relational Psychoanalysis: The Emergence
A Relational Perspective of a Tradition
Volume 6 Volume 15
Barbara Gerson, editor Rochelle G. K. Kainer
The Therapist as a Person: The Collapse of the Self and
Life Crises, Life Choices, Its Therapeutic Restoration
Life Experiences, and Volume 16
Their Effects on Treatment Kenneth A. Frank
Psychoanalytic Participation:
Volume 7
Action, Interaction, and Integration
Charles Spezzano and
Gerald J. Gargiulo, editors Volume 17
Soul on the Couch: Spirituality, Sue Grand
Religion, and Morality in The Reproduction of Evil: A Clinical and
Contemporary Psychoanalysis Cultural Perspective
Volume 8 Volume 18
Donnel B. Stern Steven H. Cooper
Unformulated Experience: Objects of Hope: Exploring Possibility
From Dissociation to Imagination and Limit in Psychoanalysis
in Psychoanalysis
Volume 19
Volume 9 James S. Grotstein
Stephen A. Mitchell Who is the Dreamer
Influence and Autonomy in Who Dreams the Dream?
Psychoanalysis A Study in Psychic Presences
Copyrighted Material
Who 1s the Dreamer
Who Dreams the Dream?
A Study of Psychic Presences
James S. Grotstein
~ THE ANALYTIC PRESS
2000 Hillsdale, NJ London
Copyrighted Material
Copyright © 2000 by The Analytic Press, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form: by photostat,
microform, electronic retrieval system, or any other means, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
The chapters in this book have appeared elsewhere and are reprinted here in modi
fied form by permission of their publishers: ch. I-Contemporary Psychoanalysis (1979,
15: 110-169) and rev. in Do I Dare Disturb the Universe? A Memorial to Wilfred R. Bion, ed.
J. Grotstein (1981, Beverly Hills, CA: Caesura Press); ch. 2-lntegrating One-Person and
Two-Person Psychologies:Autochthony Versus Alterity in Counterpoint. Psychoanalytic
Quarterly (1997,66:403-430); ch. 3-Matte-Blanco Today I: Mainly Clinical, Special Issue of
Journal of Melanie Klein and Objea Relations (1997, 15:631-646); ch. 4-lnternational Journal
of Psycho-Analysis (1978,59:55-61); ch. 5-Journal ofA nalytical Psychology (1998,43:4-68);
ch. 6-Journal ofA nalytical Psychology ( 1997, 42:47-60); ch. 7 -Journal ofA nalytical Psychology
(1997,42:585-611); ch. 8-American Journal of Psychoanalysis (1997,57: 193-218); ch. 9-
American Journal of Psychoanalysis (1997,57:317-335); ch. I O-Bion's Transformations in
"0;' Lacan's "Real" and Kant's "Thing-in-ltself":Towards the Concept of the Transcendent
Position. Journal of Melanie Klein and Objea Relations (1996, 14: 109-142.)
Published by The Analytic Press,lnc.
101 West Street, Hillsdale, NJ 07642
www.analyticpress.com
Typeset in Adobe Palatino by CompuDesign, Chariottesville,VA
Indexed by Leonard Rosenbaum, Washington, DC
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Grotstein,James S.
Who is the dreamer who dreams the dream? : a study of psychic
presences I James S.Grostein.
p. cm.-(Relational perspectives book series; v. 19)
Includes bibliographical references and index
ISBN 0-88163-305-4
I. Psychoanalysis I. Title II. Series
BF I 73.G756 2000
150.19'5-dc21
00-036273
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4
Copyrighted Material
CONTENTS
Foreword - Thomas H. Ogden VIl
Preface xv
Acknowledgments xxxiii
1 The Ineffable Nature of the Dreamer 1
2 Autochthony (Self-Creation) and Alterity (Cocreation):
Psychic Reality in Counterpoint 37
3 A Fearful Symmetry and the Calipers of the
Infinite Geometer 59
4 Inner Space: Its Dimensions and Its Coordinates 83
5 Psychoanalytic Subjects 101
6 Internal Objects 143
7 The Myth of the Labyrinth 189
8 Why Oedipus and Not Christ? - Part I 219
9 Why Oedipus and Not Christ? - Part II 255
10 Bion's Transformations in 0 281
References 305
Index 329
v
Copyrighted Material
About the Author
James S. Grotstein, M.D. is Professor of
Psychiatry, U.C.L.A. School of Medicine,
and a Training and Supervising Analyst at
the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute
and at The Psychoanalytic Center of
California.
Copyrighted Material
FOREWORD
Thomas H. Ogden
In reading about this book, and now attempting to speak about it, I feel
a bit like humble Dante being guided through the underworld by Virgil.
The wonder, the marvel, the splendor, and the terror of the unconscious
as portrayed by Grotstein is reminiscent of Dante's portrayal of the
underworld in The Inferno. Grotstein brings to life for the reader the
excitement that Freud must have experienced as the imminence of
another order of experience first began to reveal itself to him through
his exciting/frightening encounters with the female hysterics who had
overwhelmed Breuer. The mystery and the awe became all the greater
as Freud followed the trail of his thoughts and feelings in his journey
into the underworld of his own mind and body and spirit, an under
world occupied with subjects and objects and invisible presences with
their own utterly alien and utterly familiar subjects and objects and his
tory and sense of time and space. Perhaps most important of all is
Grotstein's ability to convey a sense of unlimited creative potential of
the unconscious; the goal of realizing a greater share of this potential in
the analytic experience itself is a pivotal touchstone for the reader's
reconsideration of his or her analytic technique.
I will not attempt to present a precis of this book: to do so would
require at least twice the number of pages written by Grotstein. With
the caveat that any attempt to paraphrase Grotstein is as doomed as an
effort to paraphrase a poem, I will discuss a few of the ideas developed
in this book. As Frost put it, "Poetry is what gets lost in translation." I
would, however, like to offer something of a "Reader's Guide to
Grotstein." This is a dense book that, despite its weight, moves very
quickly; the writing is enthusiastically brimming over with ideas. This
vii
Copyrighted Material
viii FOREWORD
book requires that the reader tolerate a good deal of a feeling of not
knowing, of feeling confused and lost. But this difficulty in reading is
offset by the fact that the major concepts discussed in this book are revis
ited in each of its chapters. The return of increasingly familiar, but never
static themes has the quality of a recurring musical leitmotif that accrues
richness of meaning as the composition proceeds. The book builds
toward its final chapter, "Bion's Transformations in 0," where I believe
the reader will find that the book comes together as more than the sum
of its parts.
To tum to the text itself, Grotstein, in his preface, presents his belief
that Freud's structural model, involving the interplay of id, ego, super
ego, and external reality, is a woefully inadequate model with which to
attempt to conceptualize the mind. (The Latin terminology introduced
by Strachey, despite Freud's admonitions, renders the terms abstract
and experience distant.) Grotstein attempts to rediscover the energy and
muscularity of Freud's insights by offering a model of the psyche in
which there is a phenomenal subject (our conscious experience of our
selves as "1") and an "Ineffable Subject of the Unconscious." The latter
term is intentionally ambiguous in that it represents a subject who is a
reflection of itself and is known (and knows itself) only indirectly. This
is perhaps the central paradox of the book. From the perspective devel
oped by Grotstein, psychological health might be thought of as the
degree to which an individual has been able to create a generative ten
sion between the phenomenal subject and the Ineffable Subject of the
Unconscious.
Grotstein's discussion, in chapter 1, of the dreamer who dreams the
dream and the dreamer who understands the dream represents, to my
mind, an important contribution to the psychoanalytic understanding
of the phenomenon of dreaming. Grotstein views the mystery of dream
ing from the point of view that dreaming is a critical way we have of
communicating with ourselves and of processing that unconscious com
munication in the very act of dreaming. The remembering of dreams
and their verbal narration in the analytic setting are secondary and ter
tiary phenomena. The dreamer who dreams the dream works in con
cert with the dreamer who understands the dream in their effort to give
visual, narrative shape to psychic pain that can be viewed by an inter
nal audience. That audience (the dreamer who understands the dream)
understands and bears therapeutic witness to the truth of the experi
ence that is brought to life in the experience of dreaming. This internal
therapeutic dialogue, like the stars in the sky, is continuous, but visible
only at night (that is, in sleep). The dreamer, never represented in the
dream, is the "Ineffable Subject of the Unconscious." In this context, the
Ineffable Subject of the Unconscious might be understood as a quality
Copyrighted Material
THOMAS H. OGDEN ix
of being that is forever creating metaphoric reflections of itself: Dreams
are among its most creative, magnificent, terrifying, enigmatic, unlo
calizable creations. It could be said that we are most fully ourselves in
the dreaming of the dreams that dream us.
Grotstein's development of the idea of autochthony in the second
chapter is a cogent statement of what is most central to the analytic
enterprise. "Autochthony," the fantasy of self-creation, is seen as stand
ing in dialectical tension with "alterity," the awareness of the other as a
whole and separate subject with an inner life very much like one's own.
Autochthony is not a state of being to overcome or outgrow; it is an
essential, life-long aspect of experience through which we "personal
ize" the world by imagining that we created it and that it is a reflection
of who we are. Grotstein enriches Winnicott's notion that transitional
phenomena are necessary for the infant to accept the separateness of the
object and, ultimately, to be able to take part in "object usage." He adds
to Winnicott's formulation the important element of an autochthonous
(self-creating) phantasy as a healthy unconscious dimension of all object
relatedness. Trauma, from this perspective, is the experience of the exter
nal world forcing itself on the individual before the individual has had an
opportunity to create it in his own image; the traumatized individual defen
sively personalizes the trauma (after the fact) by fantasizing (feeling
convinced in the most irrefutable way) that he caused and was respon
sible for the traumatizing events that overpowered him.
Two important principles of technique follow from this conception
of autochthony:
Initially, the analyst's interpretations should address the patient's
unconscious fantasies concerning his own responsibility for creating the
dangerous (anxiety-generating) situation being experienced (whether
within or outside of the analytic relationship. For example, an inter
pretation might be addressed to the patient's unconscious conviction
that his inability to love caused his parents to neglect him in a way that
left him feeling terrifyingly alone. The analyst need not concur with the
patient's belief that he brought his frightening isolation on himself, but
the analyst must recognize the life-preserving, defensive (personaliz
ing) function of the patient's unconscious fantasy that he did so.
The analyst's premature attempts to demonstrate to the patient the
"reality" that he or she is not responsible for all that has occurred in his
or her own life may undermine the patient's necessary efforts to per
sonalize his world, consequently leaving the patient even more help
less in the face of traumatizing impingements (past and present).
Second, as analysis progresses and the patient becomes conversant
with his unconscious autochthonous fantasies (as they have been expe
rienced, interpreted, and rendered manageable in the transference-
Copyrighted Material