The Sociological Interpretation of Dreams

For Freud, dreams were the royal road to the unconscious: through the process of interpretation, the manifest and sometimes bewildering content of dreams can be traced back to the unconscious representations underlying it. But can we understand dreams in another way by considering how the unconscious is structured by our social experiences?

This is hypothesis that underlies this highly original book by Bernard Lahire, who argues that dreams can be interpreted sociologically by seeing the dream as a nocturnal form of self-to-self communication. Lahire rejects Freud's view that the manifest dream content is the result of a process of censorship: as a form of self-to-self communication, the dream is the symbolic arena most completely freed from all forms of censorship. In Lahire's view, the dream is a message which can be understood only by relating it to the social world of the dreamer, and in particular to the problems that concern him or her during waking life. As a form of self-to-self communication, the dream is an intimate private diary, providing us with the elements of a profound and subtle understanding of who and what we are. Studying dreams enables us to discover our most deep-seated and hidden preoccupations, and to understand the thought processes that operate within us, beyond the reach of our volition.

The study of dreams and dreaming has largely been the preserve of psychoanalysis, psychology and neuroscience. By showing how dreams are connected to the lived experience of individuals in the social world, this highly original book puts dreams and dreaming at the heart of the social sciences. It will be of great value to students and scholars in sociology, psychology and psychoanalysis and to anyone interested in the nature and meaning of dreams.

Auteur
Bernard Lahire is Professor of Sociology at the École Normale Superieure de Lyon. He has published over twenty books, including This is Not a Painting and The Plural Actor.

Contenu
Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: A dream for the social sciences

1. Advances in the science of dreams

   The dream before Freud

   The need for an integrative theory

   Scientific progress and relativism

   The art of limping: the end of pure speculation

   On the scientific interpretation of dreams

   Beyond Freud

2. The dream: an intrinsically social individual reality

   Can the social be absorbed into the cerebral?

   A few precedents in the social sciences

   Limitations of environmentalist approaches: the ecology of dreams

   Limitations of literal approaches: content analysis of dream accounts

   In what sense are dreams a social issue?

   A general formula for the interpretation of dreams

   3. Psychoanalysis and the social sciences

   Between biological and social

   Psychoanalysis and the general formula for interpreting practices

   Infantile hypothesis

   Sexual hypothesis

   The highs and lows of the dream: sexuality and domination

   4. Incorporated past and the unconscious

   Ways in which the incorporated past is actualized

   The statistician brain or practical anticipation

   The internalization of the regularities of experience

   Oneiric schemas and the incorporated past

   A critique of the event-focused approach

   5. Unconscious and involuntary consciousness

   The involuntary consciousness of the dreamer

   Unconsciousness or involuntary consciousness

   The unconscious without repression

   6. Formal censorship, moral censorship: the double relaxation

   The most private of the private: on stage and behind the scenes

   All dreams are not the fulfillment of an unsatisfied wish

   7. The existential situation and dreams

   Dream and outside the dream

   The driving force of emotions

   The therapeutic and political effects of making problems explicit

   8. Triggering events

   The day residue: theoretical and methodological inaccuracies

   The day residue: the inertia of habit

   The deferred effects of triggering events

   Nocturnal perceptions and sensations

   9. The context of sleep

   Cerebral and psychic constraints

   Withdrawing from the flow of interactions

   Self-to-self communication: internal language, formal and implicit relaxation

   10. The fundamental forms of psychic life

   Practical analogy

   Analogy in dreams

   Transference in analysis as analogical transference

   Association: analogy and contiguity

   11. The oneiric processes

   Verbal language, symbolic capacity and dream images

   Visualization

   Dramatization-exaggeration

   Personal or universal symbolization

   Metaphor

   Condensation
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