Int. J. Psychoanal.

(2002) 83, 483

HISTORY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS: FREUD AND DREAM

CONTRIBUTING TO AND CELEBRATING THE CENTENARY
OF THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS AS THE ORIGIN OF
THE PSYCHOANALYTIC METHOD

Moderated by: HAROLD BLUM, Roslyn Estates, NY

Reported by: JOHN S. KAFKA, Washington, DC

The presenters and discussants of this panel
had been asked to contribute to the celebra-
tion of the birth, more than a century ago, of
The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud, appar-
ently half-joking, had wondered ’ if there
would ever be a marble tablet with the in-
scription ’’ Here the secret of dreams was re-
vealed to Dr. Sigmund Freud on July 24,
1895’’ ’ . All panellists, as celebrants, empha-
sising different aspects of Freud’s work, said
essentially: ’ No joking necessary. Here is the
plaque that honours your achievement’ .
Harold Blum described and celebrated
Freud’s achievement by summarising major
themes of the book and showing why it was a
’ landmark in the history of thought, a revolu-
tion in the understanding of the human
psyche’ . Then, working as an archival detec-
tive, Blum speculated on the probable pere-
grinations of a manuscript dealing with
Freud’s own dreams and the topic of typical
dreams. Blum spoke of Freud’s use of dreams
in his self-analysis and Freud’s early belief
that dream self-analysis might be sufŽcient
for some other ’ not-too-sick’ future analysts.
Freud, as Blum pointed out, was aware of his
wishes both to reveal and to hide content and
interpretation of his own dreams. The fact
that Freud’s manuscript dealing with his own
and with typical dreams was in the hands of
Alfred Adler was the starting point of some
of Blum’s research and speculations not only
about phases in the relationship between
Freud and Adler but also about the intersect-
ing historical tracks of scientiŽc, educational,
promotional and political ambitions of Freud
and his entourage. Blum, in his presentation
’ The interpretation of dreams’ , thus con-
nected the development of psychoanalytic
ideas with the fate of the psychoanalytic
movement.
The language in the title of the panel, ’ The
Interpretation of Dreams as the origin of the
psychoanalytic method’ , provided the focus
for Grubrich-Simitis’s carefully documented
study of the sources of, and the development
of, psychoanalytic method and technique.
The scope of this study is such that it can
obviously not be summarised here. Her
central thesis, however, was that ’ If we are
talking about origins at all, then the title
should read: ’’ The psychoanalytic (clinical)
method as the origin of The Interpretation of
Dreams’’ ’ . This approach permitted her, for
instance, to show how the patient’s prepara-
tion for dream analysis corresponds to pre-
paration for analysis generally; how the focus
on details of the dream (not the whole dream)
corresponds to developments in analytic tech-
nique generally; how interest in dreams was

Panel held at 42nd Congress of the International PsychoanalyticalAssociation, Nice, France, 24 July 2001.
Panellists: Ilse Grubrich-Simitis (Frankfurt), Elias M. da Rocha Barros (São Paulo).
Discussants: Riccardo Steiner (London), John S. Kafka (Washington, DC).
484 42nd CONGRESS OF THE IPA
present already in the Studies on Hysteria of
1895, and how the development of a ’ funda-
mental change in the traditional relationship
between doctor and patient’ is intimately
connected to the birth of the psychoanalytic
method. It ’ provides the unique and highly
speciŽc subject-matter for an entirely novel
epistemological debate, based not on the
traditional dichotomy of subjectivity and
objectivity, but on their interrelationship’ .
Grubrich-Simitis celebrates The Interpreta-
tion of Dreams and the psychoanalytic meth-
od that has led to it, since ’ no procedure of
comparable productivity has been discovered
for rendering the unconscious inner world as
directly accessible’ . The scope and the im-
plications of this development are such that
’ the recently ended twentieth century—other-
wise referred to in the wake of the holocaust
as ’’ the century of the breach of civilisa-
tion’’ —could also be called ’’ the century
richest in a humane science of the psyche’’ ’ .
Not all participants in the panel chose to
make ’ historical’ contributions. Da Rocha
Barros acknowledged deep but rather general
historical roots in Freud’s ideas and proposed
to ’ honour Freud by putting psychoanalytic
ideas ’’ to work’’ ’ . As the title of his paper,
’An essay on dreaming, psychical working
out and working through’ , indicates, his focus
was more on his own theoretical position and
clinical approach than on historical trajec-
tories leading to them. The theoretical inter-
est in this essay was largely on the mind’s
constitution of meaning and the various ways
of conceptualising the transformation from
the archaic to the representational, to the
’ verbal image that expresses meaning’ . Bion
was clearly an important source for da Rocha
Barros, whose interest in the transformations
from the archaic was also illustrated in his
reference to Jonathan Lear when he said,
’ Unconscious thinking tends to be a con-
scious conceptualised judgement that stands
in a developmental relation to a more archaic
preconceptualised mental activity that is
genuinely [my italics] unconscious’ . In the
dream world ’ the mind engages in an initial
attempt to deal with conicts by giving
expressive pictorial representation to the
emotions involved in a conict: a Žrst step
towards thinkability . . . Dreamwork is a
process through which meaning is appre-
hended, built and transformed’ . ’Affective
pictograms’ was the term used by da Rocha
Barros to describe visual images in dream-
work that ’ increase in complexity, sophistica-
tion and level of abstraction’ . Da Rocha
Barros also described the analyst’s work with
dreams as that of a crypto-linguist trying to
decipher an unknown language, rather than
merely the work of a translator. In a complex
clinical case, da Rocha Barros illustrated how
he uses his concepts in his clinical work. A
patient reports a dream in which he orders the
castration of a Panda bear and da Rocha
Barros considers the Panda bear to be an
’ affective pictogram condensing fright of
ferocity and tenderness’ .
Because of time constraints Riccardo Stei-
ner could only present a fraction of an
extremely rich and complex discussion of the
papers. In connection with Blum’s presenta-
tion Steiner gave additional information (for
instance, about Freud’s very early interest in
dreams), asked searching questions (related
to pre-oedipal themes in Freud’s dreams) and
wondered if Freud, like other artists, was
compelled again and again to work on his
self-portrait. Steiner expressed his great ap-
preciation for Grubrich-Simitis’s work and
his general agreement with her views. In
connection with her emphasis on the unpre-
dictable—the always potentially surprising
elements in analysis—he pointed out that
Freud rarely used the term ’ free association’ .
The word Einfall was much more frequently
used. It is difŽcult to translate but, he noted,
’ seems to insist on the unpredictability of
something—a feeling, a thought, an image,
which suddenly falls into our mind as from
nowhere, but which at the same time has an
enormous amount of work behind it in order
to be produced in the labyrinths of our
unconscious way of functioning’ . Steiner
pointed out that one of the difŽculties in
 PANEL REPORTS
discussing da Rocha Barros’s paper was the
fact that all the panellists and discussants had
received several sequential versions of the
paper. At the request of the author, Steiner
had offered comments that had in turn inu-
enced various aspects of later versions of the
paper—additions and subtractions. Steiner
asked da Rocha Barros questions about the
difference between some of his formulations
and those of other authors, for instance
Aulagnier’s notion of pictogram, and the
relationship of his views to Hanna Segal’s
work on dreams. She, too, had taken Bion’s
views into account, but had expressed the
idea ’ that even for very primitive symbolisa-
tion to have taken place, a mourning process
must already have taken place in the drea-
mer’ . Steiner asked if da Rocha Barros saw a
link between his ’ pictogram’ and Freud’s
process of condensation and displacement.
He raised critical questions concerning da
Rocha Barros’s apparent ’ identiŽcation of
visual thinking in the dream as the proto-
conceptual’ , since so many non-visual inter-
nal sensations are involved on that level of
experience. Steiner questioned da Rocha
Barros’s view of the analyst as a crypto-
linguist who has to discover a new grammar,
by contrasting such a view with the notion of
a common language of universal symbolism.
Steiner expressed the view that a reference to
the literature on the transmutation of one
system of signs to another—such as from the
visual to the verbal—would have been perti-
nent. Finally, Steiner offered some different
perspectives on da Rocha Barros’s patient’s
dream.
John Kafka, in his discussion of Harold
Blum’s paper, pointed out that Freud’s am-
bivalence concerning revealing and hiding
content and interpretation was not restricted
to his dream material. For instance, in docu-
ments recently made accessible in the Freud
Archives, Max Graf, father of ’ Little Hans’ ,
described to Kurt Eissler how, around 1900,
the ’ Wednesday Group’ proposed to ’ analyse’
Freud, who agreed to say what came to his
mind, without censorship etc. According to
485
Graf, when Freud spoke about his mother and
then a black muff, and the entourage smiled
knowingly, the latter refused to continue.
Discussing da Rocha Barros’s paper, Kafka
said he thought that it was not spelled out
clearly whether and how this constitution of
meaning is different in the dreaming and in
the waking mind. When da Rocha Barros said
that he is ’ implicitly attempting to clarify the
way in which meaning is built and trans-
formed in mental life’ , ’ building’ and ’ trans-
forming’ are mentioned in one breath. But
the ’ transforming’ of meaning is related more
to clinical practice—at least in work with
non-psychotic patients—than is the ’ build-
ing’ of meaning. There was some discontinu-
ity in da Rocha Barros’s paper because his
concern in dream interpretation is more on
the transformation of meaning—the trans-
lation of meanings; while his theoretical
emphasis is on the mind’s building of any
meaning—the beginnings of ’ thinkability’ .
While agreeing with Grubrich-Simitis’s care-
fully documented thesis that the psycho-
analytic method is the clinical origin of The
Interpretation of Dreams, Kafka also under-
lined the prominence of Chapter Seven and
its recognised closeness to Freud’s least
clinical work, the ’ Project for a scientiŽc
psychology’ of 1895. The Interpretation of
Dreams thus also occupies a prominent place
in the history of models of the mind. Kafka
highlighted Freud’s thinking about ’ time’ in a
model of the mind that is in many ways
congruent with current trends in psychobio-
logical research. Freud had observed drug-
induced structural changes in his own
dreams, and Kafka thought that the signiŽ-
cance of Freud’s experiences with cocaine
for his theory building have been relatively
neglected.
Time pressure unfortunately limited the
discussion from the oor. Antonio Imbascati
commented that da Rocha Barros’s psycho-
analytic concepts have a good Žt with devel-
opments in the cognitive sciences. His own
work on ’ progressive chains of signiŽcants’
and parallel information processing generally
486 42nd CONGRESS OF THE IPA
correspond to some of da Rocha Barros’s
’ transformations’ , in which dreams may be
on the ’ intermediate passage’ . In cognitive
terms one could speak of a passage from
many multiple information-processing codes
to a smaller number of codes, towards that
’ choice’ that will be allowed to be conscious.
The quasi-universal recognition that the
unconscious plays a role in dream formation
has facilitated—and continues to facilitate—
the introduction of psychoanalytic ap-
proaches at times and in places hostile to
psychoanalysis. On the occasion of the anni-
versary of The Interpretation of Dreams,
therefore, the speakers and the audience of
this panel had come together to celebrate
what, in the public mind, is an essential icon
of psychoanalysis.

JOHN S. KAFKA Copyright # Institute of Psychoanalysis, London, 2002

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