Int. J. Peyehoancl. (1999) 80, 1205 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE NEUROSCIENCES: A TOPICAL DEBATE ON DREAMS! MAURO MANCIA, MILAN ‘The author begins by pointing out that, whereas Freud first tamed his attention to dreanss in 1895, they becarne an object of neuroscientfic interest only in the 1950s, after the discovery of rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep and the observation that a subject woken inant REM Phase could remember and narrate then. He discusses the various brain structures found by the neuroscientists to be implicated in dreaming and the associated hypotheses about their {involvement inthe processes ofremembering dreams, thetr spaiial construction and semanite ‘organisation, and the dreanser's emotional participation in and narration of dreams. Atten- tion ts drawn to recent psychophysiological research findings indicating that dreaming ‘occurs in all sleep phases and not only in REM episodes. The cogniivist contribution i also discussed. The author goes on to demonstrate the difference between the neuroscientific and ‘Psychoanalytic approaches to dreams. Whereas the neuroscientists are interested in the Structures involved in dream production and in dream organisation and narratability, ‘psychoanalysis concentrates on the meaning of dreams aud on placing thent in the context of the analytic relationship in accordance with the affective history of the dreamer aud the transference. The brain structures and functions of interest to the neurosciences, while constituting the physical and biological substrate of these aspects, are stated to be irrelevant to their psychoanalytic understanding. Lot me begin my paper on a historical note. Psychoanalysis has concerned itself with dreams, and has used dreams and their inter- pretation to support the drive theory of the mind and to demonstrate the determining force of the unconscious since 1895. It was not ‘until much later, in the 1950s, when the neuro- physiologists discovered REM sleep, that the neurosciences (among which I would include neurophysiology, neurochemistry, neuropsy- chology and psychophysiology) tured to dreams. The REM phase of sleep differs from its non-REM counterpart, in which the EEG trace is synchronous, by the presence of an intensely desynchronised pattern of cortical electrical activity resembling that of waking life (hence the term paradoxical sleep), aiony of the * Translated by Philip Slotkin, MA (Cantab,), MITL. CCopyrigh' © 2009 Pre@uest LLC. All rights reserved, Copyright © international Journal of Psychoanalysis. postural muscles, rapid eye movements (REM) and the appearance in the visual system of sin- glephase waves (known as ponto-geniculo- occipital or PGO waves) and newrovegetative storms characterised by respiratory and car- diac arrhythmia with variations in systemic arterial pressure. In those early days in the 1950s, Kleitman's group (Aserinsky & Kleitman, 1953; Dement & Kieitman, 1957; Dement, 1965) in Chicago succeeded in studying mental activity in sleep by waking the subjects during episodes of REM and non-REM sleep. When awakened at the end of an REM episode, the subject nar- rated an experience which, by virtue ofits hal- lucinatory sel-representational and emotional characteristics, was definable as a dream. If the