Dream Flesh
by Iona Miller, (c)2012
"I bring you with reverent hands The books of my numberless dreams."
— W.B. Yeats
— W.B. Yeats
Karl Briullov, A Dream of a Girl Before a Sunrise- 1830-1833. US Public Domain
“Natural transformation processes [individuation] announce themselves mainly in dreams…” (Carl Jung 9i para 235). He continues the his thoughts, discussing inner transformation in terms of the archetypal process of rebirth:
[This is a] long-drawn-out process of inner transformation and rebirth into another being. This “other being” is the other person in ourselves-that larger and greater personality maturing within us, whom we have already met as the inner friend of the soul.”
“Natural transformation processes [individuation] announce themselves mainly in dreams…” (Carl Jung 9i para 235). He continues the his thoughts, discussing inner transformation in terms of the archetypal process of rebirth:
[This is a] long-drawn-out process of inner transformation and rebirth into another being. This “other being” is the other person in ourselves-that larger and greater personality maturing within us, whom we have already met as the inner friend of the soul.”
The unconscious is purposeful. Our dreams show us, through images, how to take
the next step in in our own individuation journey. A legend or fairy tale uses similar images to similar purpose.
the next step in in our own individuation journey. A legend or fairy tale uses similar images to similar purpose.
‘The Work’, according to Jung, involved firstly accessing archetypal forces resident in the collective unconscious such that they entered into a meaningful discourse with consciousness. Active imagination was one of the techniques Jung developed to encourage this consciousness/unconsciousness exchange of energies. Symbols communicated archetypal patterns and conflicts originating in the personal or collective unconscious to consciousness. Long-term commitment to this work, Jung believed, was beneficial to the psyche since it promoted imaginal catharsis, which relieved psychic pressures and realigned human beings with more positively polarised archetypes.
Jung decided that it was necessary to open his patient up to, not merely analysis of the unconscious, but to a true ‘exchange’ between unconscious energies and the patient’s conscious ego. He asked himself: ‘What do these dream figures wish us to do? What do they have to say about their condition and ours?’ Of course, he was under no illusion that their advice would always be useful or of benefit to patients (he’d had a lot of experience with people suffering from schizophrenia), but he did feel it was important to let such ‘personalities’ have their say, also to allow them to enter into discussion with other unconscious figures, and even, on occasion, he thought it worthwhile to do their bidding in the real world.
After four years scrupulously entertaining his own archetypal guests he realised that on occasion the presences had nothing to do with complexes associated with his own childhood. Similarly, the ones that seemed most useful for his own healing purposes (he was, remember, going through a period of intense introversion) were either mythological figures (he early on encountered his ‘anima’, for example) or, on some occasions, ‘spirits of the dead’ or spirits of socio-cultural warning (even prophesy). (Irving)
Jung decided that it was necessary to open his patient up to, not merely analysis of the unconscious, but to a true ‘exchange’ between unconscious energies and the patient’s conscious ego. He asked himself: ‘What do these dream figures wish us to do? What do they have to say about their condition and ours?’ Of course, he was under no illusion that their advice would always be useful or of benefit to patients (he’d had a lot of experience with people suffering from schizophrenia), but he did feel it was important to let such ‘personalities’ have their say, also to allow them to enter into discussion with other unconscious figures, and even, on occasion, he thought it worthwhile to do their bidding in the real world.
After four years scrupulously entertaining his own archetypal guests he realised that on occasion the presences had nothing to do with complexes associated with his own childhood. Similarly, the ones that seemed most useful for his own healing purposes (he was, remember, going through a period of intense introversion) were either mythological figures (he early on encountered his ‘anima’, for example) or, on some occasions, ‘spirits of the dead’ or spirits of socio-cultural warning (even prophesy). (Irving)
--Anthony Stevens
Leigh McCloskey
Dreams are an express path to connecting with our direct ancestors. They are waiting to remembered. The old way is shown, hidden in the dreams, folklore, and sayings of our families of origin. Such dreams can help us into a deeper connection with our past. They also help to ground us. The Ancestor Effect includes including boosting intelligence, confidence and self-esteem. Ancestral dreams come when we open up to that potential, but they also can come when we need them. Sometimes ancestral dreams simply help with reframing a situation with a deeper significance. Other times, they may lead to unconsciously held information that is embedded in your own dream mythology and has been passed down for generations. The trick is recognizing them, and then honoring them in waking life.
“Dream genealogy” uses sleeping dreams and shamanic journeying to gather and reclaim ancestral information from our ancient dreamways. Any part of a dream can be used as a portal to enter deeper states.
“Dream genealogy” uses sleeping dreams and shamanic journeying to gather and reclaim ancestral information from our ancient dreamways. Any part of a dream can be used as a portal to enter deeper states.
"DREAMWALKER"
Dreamwalker comes for me for the changes I shall see
Be my life forever changed I welcome thee
Forever blue, forever green the changes in me
For I will walk the path that has been lit for me
With open arms & open heart I welcome thee
The past far gone...is the future you see it all resides inside of me
Forever changed I shall be forever light I shall see
AMEN
Dreamwalker comes for me for the changes I shall see
Be my life forever changed I welcome thee
Forever blue, forever green the changes in me
For I will walk the path that has been lit for me
With open arms & open heart I welcome thee
The past far gone...is the future you see it all resides inside of me
Forever changed I shall be forever light I shall see
AMEN
TO THE DIVINITY OF DREAMS
THEE I invoke, blest pow'r of dreams divine,
Angel of future fates, swift wings are thine:
Great source of oracles to human kind,
When stealing soft, and whisp'ring to the mind,
Thro' sleep's sweet silence and the gloom of night,
Thy pow'r awakes th' intellectual fight;
To silent souls the will of heav'n relates,
And silently reveals their future fates.
For ever friendly to the upright mind
Sacred and pure, to holy rites inclin'd;
For these with pleasing hope thy dreams inspire,
Bliss to anticipate, which all desire.
Thy visions manifest of fate disclose,
What methods best may mitigate our woes;
Reveal what rites the Gods immortal please,
And what the means their anger to appease:
For ever tranquil is the good man's end,
Whose life, thy dreams admonish and defend.
But from the wicked turn'd averse to bless,
Thy form unseen, the angel of distress;
No means to cheek approaching ill they find,
Pensive with fears, and to the future blind.
Come, blessed pow'r, the signatures reveal
Which heav'n's decrees mysteriously conceal,
Signs only present to the worthy mind,
Nor omens ill disclose of monst'rous kind.
THEE I invoke, blest pow'r of dreams divine,
Angel of future fates, swift wings are thine:
Great source of oracles to human kind,
When stealing soft, and whisp'ring to the mind,
Thro' sleep's sweet silence and the gloom of night,
Thy pow'r awakes th' intellectual fight;
To silent souls the will of heav'n relates,
And silently reveals their future fates.
For ever friendly to the upright mind
Sacred and pure, to holy rites inclin'd;
For these with pleasing hope thy dreams inspire,
Bliss to anticipate, which all desire.
Thy visions manifest of fate disclose,
What methods best may mitigate our woes;
Reveal what rites the Gods immortal please,
And what the means their anger to appease:
For ever tranquil is the good man's end,
Whose life, thy dreams admonish and defend.
But from the wicked turn'd averse to bless,
Thy form unseen, the angel of distress;
No means to cheek approaching ill they find,
Pensive with fears, and to the future blind.
Come, blessed pow'r, the signatures reveal
Which heav'n's decrees mysteriously conceal,
Signs only present to the worthy mind,
Nor omens ill disclose of monst'rous kind.
Ancestral Philosophy
The archetypes to be discovered and assimilated are precisely those which have inspired the basic images of ritual and mythology. These eternal ones of the dream are not to be confused with the personality modified symbolic figures that appear in nightmares or madness to the tormented individual. Dream is the personalized myth. Myth is the depersonalized dream. --Joseph Campbell
No one who does not know himself can know others. And in each of us there is another whom we do not know. He speaks to us in dream and tells us how differently he sees us from the way we see ourselves. When, therefore, we find ourselves in a different situation to which there is no solution, he can sometimes kindle a light that radically alters our attitude; the very attitude that led us into the difficult situation. --C. G. Jung
In ancient times, rituals and initiations were creative dramatizations of the pattern and structure of the psyche and of life. These dreams usually represent the transition from one psychological stage to a higher one. For example, it may represent moving from childhood to adolescence, from youth to middle age or from middle-age to-old age. It can also represent the shift of interest from worldly ambitions to spiritual aspirations. The Call to adventure can come in dreams. We dream work, not to unravel it as Freud said, to undo the dream-work's undoing, but to respond to its work with the likeness of our work, all the while aiming to speak like the dream, imagine like the dream (Hillman 130)...or dream it forward.
DREAMWALKER:
Shaman/Therapist/Dreamhealer. A dreamwalker is one who works with and within dreams to understand, to create, to heal, to meet with elderhearts or ancestors, to journey this realm (out of body), to work with other worlds and realms, to teach, to unite with the ultimate. There are many ways to enter the dreamtime - journeys, drums, sweats, hypnosis, dreamwork, lucid dreaming, meditation.
Some people 'just do it' without any methodology. The dreamworld is any of many alternate realities. In past times, shamans were generally "called" by a compelling force during a dream state or on a vision quest (dreamwalking). In some cultures the position was hereditary or bestowed by an existing shaman on an individual selected to be an apprentice, directly by the gods or by bloodline and requesting initiation. The ability tends to follow bloodlines.
A Dreamwalker, mentor, or dream tender can enter any person's dreams to initiate or find the meaning within. They are the rare few who are "led by the spirit' who have "shed the yoke of desire and self-want," and have discarded the need for material gain and negative thought. Without any personal goals, they travel the path of knowledge and go where the spirit of truth leads them. According to Native Americans, Dream Walking is the ability to travel anywhere, anytime while you sleep. The experience is dream-like in quality. However unlike a dream other people who are or aren't asleep can see you & interact with the Dream-walking you.
Dreamhealing also incorporates ancient Greek dreamhealing culture and techniques. Tibetans, Druids and Native American (First People) are cultures that nurture the skills of the dreamwalker. A dreamwalker can alter their state of consciousness in such a way that their energy body can experience realms beyond this physical reality. The veil of everyday linear time, the restrictions of distance and limits of the natural world are lifted. In these realms, communication and information exchanges can happen with guides, angels, animals and other beings. Dreamwalking can also aid in healing, creativity, thoughts, ideas, understanding, knowledge and awareness.
Archetypes include symbols of primal source of growth and potential that can heal or destroy. In dreams they can appear as a magician, doctor, priest, father, teacher, guru or any other authority figure. Jung called this archetype 'mana' personalities. They can lead us to higher levels of awareness, or away from them.
The trickster exists to question, to cause us to question & not accept things blindly. He appears when a way of thinking becomes outmoded needs to be torn down built anew. He is the Destroyer of Worlds at the same time the savior of us all. In dreams {and myth} the trickster can be seen as The Fool, The Magician, The Clown, The Jester,The Villain, The Destroyer. The Great Mother is an archetype of feminine mystery and power who appears in forms as diverse as the queen of heaven and the witches prevalent in myth and folktale.
When we are asleep, our bodies are regenerating and what we dream is a direct perception of our unconscious mind. Everything that occurs in the dream is a part of ourselves even though we may associate it with the people or things we recognize in the dream from our conscious world. The unconscious is speaking in this language of symbols and the way it operates is how it is telling its story.
The dream can heal, because the body is always seeking to return to health, the homeostasis of its nature. In Ancient Greece, there was no separation between doctors and priests, temples and hospitals; Hippocrates is the healer we still remember today, because of the oath he took and which doctors in the West still take when they enter the profession of medicine. He was of a long line of initiates dedicated to the god of healing, Asklepios.
People made pilgrimages to the sacred places in nature where temples were built, slept within their precincts and reported to the initiate "priest/doctors" their dreams. As the Asklepiades understood the spiritual transformation process of the human lifespan, they could diagnose and prescribe remedies to help the body return to health, what in the East would be called the Tao, the Way of Nature.
"Our mutual friend, X, keeps sending me stuff about you. I don't have time to look at it. You appeared in my dream last night. Don't remember anything beyond that. You just appeared. Anything I should know?"
"Hey! I dreamt about you last night! I've always had an extremely full and exhausting dream life: they are very vivid and can leave me tired the next day since its often like living two lives!Anyway, I'm not sure if you have ever read Neil Gaimans 'The Sandman' series? (if not, give them a whirl; I think you would enjoy them a lot!). One of the books is called 'Worlds End' and the whole story is based in a strange inn named "Worlds' End, a free house". It is where travelers between realms shelter during reality storms, which may be the consequences of particularly momentous events. So anyway, I find myself knocking on the door to Worlds End. And you let me in out of the storm. Noone else was there, so I just took a seat. Eventually more and more people arrived. But each one was me! Me at different stages of my life; younger and older. And we all recognised each other. Obviously! And as the evening went on, different 'me's' chatted and observed different 'me's'. And I was also 'watching' the dream as an outsider: seeing my tics and strengths and my weaknesses (urghhhh). I saw the secrets I wished to hide and the dreams I had forgotten about. I saw what other people found annoying, and what other people loved. And some of these things really surprised me! It really was quite an experience - and certainly not all of it was comfortable. . I've never had that kind of dream before. So eventually the storm subsided and you started showing all the 'me's' out !"
" I dreamt about you again the other night. Only emailed now, since I was ummmming and ahhhhing about it. And I have been crazy busy and super tired!But the nut shell version is coming right up:So I am sitting in a large box room with no windows or doors. All 6 walls are painted black. I don't remember feeling anything at this point. You appeared from nowhere and encouraged me to dance. I kept refusing through a mixture of apathy, fear and embarrassment. But you were fairly relentless and offered your hands to me - which i took. And we began dancing in this room - like ballroom waltz style! Not that I know much about dancing. As I got more comfortable and learnt the moves and the fear started slipping away; so did the walls! They kind of 'melted' away and we were dancing in what I can only describe as the universe! Forgive my ignorance and less than eloquent vocabulary .... but it was just time and space as far as you could imagine. A deep colorless void which we 'dance-floated' through together. And then the coolest bit was this: We started to really enjoy the dancing. It became effortless and fun - and we began to intuitively know how each other wanted to move ... it was fluid like. Soon where our feet landed - stars were born. Also the touch of our fingers made more stars appear. The way our hair swept across the space, created galaxies - and, oh my goodness Iona, they were so beautiful! And this whole creation bought us such joy and we giggled and giggled and giggled. I remember we were both equally amazed at this whole process of creation!"
The archetypes to be discovered and assimilated are precisely those which have inspired the basic images of ritual and mythology. These eternal ones of the dream are not to be confused with the personality modified symbolic figures that appear in nightmares or madness to the tormented individual. Dream is the personalized myth. Myth is the depersonalized dream. --Joseph Campbell
No one who does not know himself can know others. And in each of us there is another whom we do not know. He speaks to us in dream and tells us how differently he sees us from the way we see ourselves. When, therefore, we find ourselves in a different situation to which there is no solution, he can sometimes kindle a light that radically alters our attitude; the very attitude that led us into the difficult situation. --C. G. Jung
In ancient times, rituals and initiations were creative dramatizations of the pattern and structure of the psyche and of life. These dreams usually represent the transition from one psychological stage to a higher one. For example, it may represent moving from childhood to adolescence, from youth to middle age or from middle-age to-old age. It can also represent the shift of interest from worldly ambitions to spiritual aspirations. The Call to adventure can come in dreams. We dream work, not to unravel it as Freud said, to undo the dream-work's undoing, but to respond to its work with the likeness of our work, all the while aiming to speak like the dream, imagine like the dream (Hillman 130)...or dream it forward.
DREAMWALKER:
Shaman/Therapist/Dreamhealer. A dreamwalker is one who works with and within dreams to understand, to create, to heal, to meet with elderhearts or ancestors, to journey this realm (out of body), to work with other worlds and realms, to teach, to unite with the ultimate. There are many ways to enter the dreamtime - journeys, drums, sweats, hypnosis, dreamwork, lucid dreaming, meditation.
Some people 'just do it' without any methodology. The dreamworld is any of many alternate realities. In past times, shamans were generally "called" by a compelling force during a dream state or on a vision quest (dreamwalking). In some cultures the position was hereditary or bestowed by an existing shaman on an individual selected to be an apprentice, directly by the gods or by bloodline and requesting initiation. The ability tends to follow bloodlines.
A Dreamwalker, mentor, or dream tender can enter any person's dreams to initiate or find the meaning within. They are the rare few who are "led by the spirit' who have "shed the yoke of desire and self-want," and have discarded the need for material gain and negative thought. Without any personal goals, they travel the path of knowledge and go where the spirit of truth leads them. According to Native Americans, Dream Walking is the ability to travel anywhere, anytime while you sleep. The experience is dream-like in quality. However unlike a dream other people who are or aren't asleep can see you & interact with the Dream-walking you.
Dreamhealing also incorporates ancient Greek dreamhealing culture and techniques. Tibetans, Druids and Native American (First People) are cultures that nurture the skills of the dreamwalker. A dreamwalker can alter their state of consciousness in such a way that their energy body can experience realms beyond this physical reality. The veil of everyday linear time, the restrictions of distance and limits of the natural world are lifted. In these realms, communication and information exchanges can happen with guides, angels, animals and other beings. Dreamwalking can also aid in healing, creativity, thoughts, ideas, understanding, knowledge and awareness.
Archetypes include symbols of primal source of growth and potential that can heal or destroy. In dreams they can appear as a magician, doctor, priest, father, teacher, guru or any other authority figure. Jung called this archetype 'mana' personalities. They can lead us to higher levels of awareness, or away from them.
The trickster exists to question, to cause us to question & not accept things blindly. He appears when a way of thinking becomes outmoded needs to be torn down built anew. He is the Destroyer of Worlds at the same time the savior of us all. In dreams {and myth} the trickster can be seen as The Fool, The Magician, The Clown, The Jester,The Villain, The Destroyer. The Great Mother is an archetype of feminine mystery and power who appears in forms as diverse as the queen of heaven and the witches prevalent in myth and folktale.
When we are asleep, our bodies are regenerating and what we dream is a direct perception of our unconscious mind. Everything that occurs in the dream is a part of ourselves even though we may associate it with the people or things we recognize in the dream from our conscious world. The unconscious is speaking in this language of symbols and the way it operates is how it is telling its story.
The dream can heal, because the body is always seeking to return to health, the homeostasis of its nature. In Ancient Greece, there was no separation between doctors and priests, temples and hospitals; Hippocrates is the healer we still remember today, because of the oath he took and which doctors in the West still take when they enter the profession of medicine. He was of a long line of initiates dedicated to the god of healing, Asklepios.
People made pilgrimages to the sacred places in nature where temples were built, slept within their precincts and reported to the initiate "priest/doctors" their dreams. As the Asklepiades understood the spiritual transformation process of the human lifespan, they could diagnose and prescribe remedies to help the body return to health, what in the East would be called the Tao, the Way of Nature.
"Our mutual friend, X, keeps sending me stuff about you. I don't have time to look at it. You appeared in my dream last night. Don't remember anything beyond that. You just appeared. Anything I should know?"
"Hey! I dreamt about you last night! I've always had an extremely full and exhausting dream life: they are very vivid and can leave me tired the next day since its often like living two lives!Anyway, I'm not sure if you have ever read Neil Gaimans 'The Sandman' series? (if not, give them a whirl; I think you would enjoy them a lot!). One of the books is called 'Worlds End' and the whole story is based in a strange inn named "Worlds' End, a free house". It is where travelers between realms shelter during reality storms, which may be the consequences of particularly momentous events. So anyway, I find myself knocking on the door to Worlds End. And you let me in out of the storm. Noone else was there, so I just took a seat. Eventually more and more people arrived. But each one was me! Me at different stages of my life; younger and older. And we all recognised each other. Obviously! And as the evening went on, different 'me's' chatted and observed different 'me's'. And I was also 'watching' the dream as an outsider: seeing my tics and strengths and my weaknesses (urghhhh). I saw the secrets I wished to hide and the dreams I had forgotten about. I saw what other people found annoying, and what other people loved. And some of these things really surprised me! It really was quite an experience - and certainly not all of it was comfortable. . I've never had that kind of dream before. So eventually the storm subsided and you started showing all the 'me's' out !"
" I dreamt about you again the other night. Only emailed now, since I was ummmming and ahhhhing about it. And I have been crazy busy and super tired!But the nut shell version is coming right up:So I am sitting in a large box room with no windows or doors. All 6 walls are painted black. I don't remember feeling anything at this point. You appeared from nowhere and encouraged me to dance. I kept refusing through a mixture of apathy, fear and embarrassment. But you were fairly relentless and offered your hands to me - which i took. And we began dancing in this room - like ballroom waltz style! Not that I know much about dancing. As I got more comfortable and learnt the moves and the fear started slipping away; so did the walls! They kind of 'melted' away and we were dancing in what I can only describe as the universe! Forgive my ignorance and less than eloquent vocabulary .... but it was just time and space as far as you could imagine. A deep colorless void which we 'dance-floated' through together. And then the coolest bit was this: We started to really enjoy the dancing. It became effortless and fun - and we began to intuitively know how each other wanted to move ... it was fluid like. Soon where our feet landed - stars were born. Also the touch of our fingers made more stars appear. The way our hair swept across the space, created galaxies - and, oh my goodness Iona, they were so beautiful! And this whole creation bought us such joy and we giggled and giggled and giggled. I remember we were both equally amazed at this whole process of creation!"
The Big Dream as Modern Rite of Passage
Today, we are sadly removed from the indigenous practices of our ancestors. The dream, the last frontier, bestows on us access to esoteric knowledge, in the form of the ‘Big Dream.’ This is what Jung calls an "archetypal" dream, a psychological variation on a mythological theme, initiation into a new consciousness of reality. How? The collective unconscious" is "unconscious" because, for the most part, it exists beyond people's conscious awareness.
The collective unconscious holds the archetypes, mythological patterns, and the sources of religious symbols that manifest in human culture. Sometimes these symbols, archetypes, or mythological patterns will burst forth into our dreams, often when we really need some help from something greater than ourselves, when we need a profound transformation in our lives.
Dreams serve as the catalyst to transformation; awakening an inner knowing beyond words. Unlocking these mystical symbols, metaphors and archetypal stories in our dreams, we find the truth and wisdom of our very existence, while healing the psyche and integrating fragmented parts of the self. Dreams enriche consciousness, so that it learns to understand the forgotten language of the pre-conscious mind. The dream is already valuable without having any literalizations or personalistic interpretations tacked on to it.
All of us live in a powerful archetype called a paradigm, groupthink, mindset or worldview. Whether or not you are aware of your worldview, dreams can create transformative awareness that extends your experience making you capable of extending or rejecting it into an introspective relationship with Source -- rebirth through understanding the inner nature -- experiential gnosis and transcendence. In this we take our existential stand and become transparent to the cosmos.
Only the one who sees can reveal. Dreams extrude this deeply resonant hidden truth which is embodied in the dream flesh of the dreamer. Dreams, the realm of the collective unconscious, are where our holographic and ancestral memories live, and we can access them from there, and they likewise access us through the dreamworld.
Emotional truth undergirds the dreaming process. Dreams are the mind's vehicle for the processing of emotional states of being, particularly the fear, anxiety, anger or elation that often figure prominently. Dream sleep is also the guardian of memory, playing a part in forgetting, encoding and affective organization of memory.
The propensity for human beings of widely separated cultures, language, age, or gender, to meet with the same symbols in their dreams, fantasies or religious feelings suggests, not necessarily a collective unconscious, but certainly an innate sensing of collective human experience, and a meeting with the forces of the cosmos active in us. Because the mass of experience we hold, or live within, is largely unconscious. So it seems likely that when we are unguarded in our sleep, or at times of stress or heightened feelings, the themes and images connected with archetypal experience would emerge.
At critical times our dreams depict aspects of our individual relationship with this collective human experience, with Life itself, or what we have harvested from it. Such dreams suggest that the essence of all experience is somehow available to us, and that we are directly part of the huge processes of the cosmos. They depict graphically the universal levels of experience out of which our personal self is woven. They also give some personal experience of how at some level of our being we are intricately intermeshed with all creatures, with all the cosmos. This is no longer simply an imaginative or mystical idea. It is often full of collective wisdom and energy, both positive and negative, depending upon how you relate to it.
Our largely unconscious connection with the massive potential that we hold within, and our direct existence within the warp and woof of cosmic and natural forces, forms a dynamic ever moving and developing process that our conscious and apparently independent personality interacts with. The simplest definition of the archetypes is that they are symbols of our own enormous potential. In particular they depict potential that still remains unconscious, and the details of archetypal dreams shows us how we are relating to that potential.
Dreams are a context which allow us to enter in their exploration into the possibility of repositioning self-narratives through so-called “significant dreams”, Jung's “Big Dreams”. These significant dreams, or dreams which are highly charged, remembered, and subjectively retro-actively felt to carry “significance”, can “motivate or animate personal repositioning”, healing, or transformation (Knudson, R., Adame, A., & Finocan, G., 2006, p. 221). "Big dreams" are "memorable" dreams, "important" dreams, "especially significant" dreams, and "impactful" dreams. They are characterized by significantly higher Central Image Intensity than control groups of dreams - thus more powerful imagery.
As James Hillman says in The Dream and the Underworld: "Mythology is a psychology of antiquity. Psychology is a mythology of modernity" (1979: 23). Hillman counters the notion of dreams as compensation with his idea that dreams are an initiation. While analytical (Jungian) psychology is concerned with the manifestations of the Self and the path of individuation, Archetypal psychology is focused centrally on psyche, or soul (Hillman, 1983).
The poetic basis of mind, the notion of “soul” as imaginative possibility engendered by this approach, seeks to explore images (fantasies, dreams, etc) rather than explain them. The focus of Archetypal psychology then becomes a refinement of imaginative capacity, and “the aim of working with dreams or life events as dreams is to bring reflection to declarative and unreflected discourse...so that...speech becomes imagistic, self-referent, descriptive of a psychic condition as its very expression” (Berry, 1982, as quoted in Hillman, 1983, p. 46).
The central focus for Hillman's approach to dreams is "sticking to the image", describing it in its fullness, encountering it as autonomous and non-egoic, deepening our capacity to hear and explore psychological experience; keeping the dream itself alive. This work is a conservation which implies “holding on to what is, and even assuming that what is is right” (Hillman, 1979, p. 116). This conservation and encounter with the images of the psyche on their own terms is a goal in and of itself for the archetypalists. Hillman was especially adamant in insisting that the interpretation of the dream or an "a-ha" moment about "what the dream means" brings a premature end to its life, stopping the process.
What Jung calls a "mythologem" adapts an ancient mythological motif for a modern psychological purpose. The dreamer descends and ascends. In mythological terms, the hero descends into the underworld and then ascends from it; or, in psychological terms, the ego descends into the unconscious and then ascends from it. The ego is initiated into the irrational, mythic and underworld aspects of psyche. Dreams provide what is missing from the dayworld that is crucial to us individually and collectively.
How do you know when you have an archetypal dream? Well, the dream usually feels very profound, like you were in the presence of something "other" that is sacred, powerful, mystical, indescribable, mysterious, godlike, supernatural, other than human, and so on. All of these descriptors may not always apply, but usually some will. When you have an archetypal dream, you will know it. Many of us experience the Big Dream or Extraordinary Human Experience for a greater purpose than we consciously realize. New knowledge emerges from these experiences that may alter us in a profound way. These dreams are often spiritual awakenings or initiations and may lead to a dramatic transformation in the dreamer.
The significance of the significant dream lies precisely in the fact that the dream images do not become pinned down by any particular interpretation, are never literalized into any single fixed concept or "meaning. Instead the dreamer returns or is drawn again and again to an experiential "living in the image," with new meanings potentially emerging over time as one goes, in Hillman’s words, 'more deeply into the image'” (Knudson, 2003, p. 13). Knudson argues for the primary importance of the act of imagining, over and above interpreting, in working with dreams.
He suggests that images, including dream images, are not representations of objects that require interpretation, but are rather presentations, “acts that transform reality, freeing the imaginer from the constraints of both past and present” (Knudson, 2003, p. 15), a corrective concern with re-presentation that will reappear in phenomenology.
He accords with Hillman in not reducing images from dreams, especially “significant” dreams into reified, singular interpretations. Knudson, following Hillman, returns to the ideas of Gaston Bachelard, who suggests that images, as they are ever changing and hard-to-pindown, are things “of beauty and self-fulfillment, not usefulness...they release the imagination from the confines of personal and interpersonal life”(Knudson,2003, p. 16).
It is through encountering and paying respect to the autonomy and mutability of images that arise through fantasy and dream that, Knudson and Hillman suggest, psychotherapy may best offer its original etymological sense; care of soul.
http://epublications.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1042&context=gjcp
But how does this dream stand out from others and what is its purpose in our lives? Emotional impact is the most important aspect of “Big Dream” on the dreamer. The feelings of pure joy and love, even to the point of ecstasy rarely experienced in waking life, are an indication that you are having a transformation, spiritual awakening or initiation.
Archetypal dreams are most likely to occur at important transitional points in life, bear strongly on our identity, and are remembered throughout life.
As far as content is concerned, there are certain common elements to these “big dreams” such as apocalyptic scenes, strange locales, encounters with guides, ancestors, wisdom figures, tricksters, allies, animals, or otherworldly beings, alchemical death and rebirth motifs and more. When these dreams occur, the dreamer may transcend to a higher awareness or higher reality in the sleeping state or waking state.
The Dream Wave
Consciousness always strives to take on form. But something within us is also constantly seeking formlessness. These paradoxical currents in the stream of consciousness meet in imagination, overlap and set up interference patterns much like those of a hologram.
Energy flow patterns are defined by existential experience, which can not only channel, but distort the formless flow of free energy. Thus imagination can appear in representational and non-representational forms. It can appear as fleeting images or apparent absence of form or pattern that is nevertheless perceptible.
When we turn our attention to a specific “wave” of the stream of consciousness, the act of perception arrests the flux of the world, manifesting an image or impression of what may be in a state of continuous, perhaps infinite movement.
This “dream wave” may be followed from its representational form to more primal nonrepresentational perceptions. Perception occurs somewhere between sensory stimulation (physical or imaginal) and conscious awareness, and is subject to internal “tweaking” of its informational content.
There are other typical images found at the threshold of chaos, including spirals or vortices, “black holes in psychic space,” amorphous grayness, cloud or fog, dead and fertile voids. Whatever these perceptions represent, they are reiterated in various forms in dreams and symbolism. They each have analogies in the reports of mystics and myth. Representational activity seems to indicate transitional phenomena, while nonrepresenta-tional activity implies global experience, or diffuse existential states of being.
Archetypal dreams, as distinguished from personal dreams, are dreams which contain symbols and images that stem from the collective unconscious, a region of the psyche containing inherited structures from human evolutionary history (see definition on p. 47). C. G. Jung (1964) refers to these images as "mental forms which cannot be explained by anything in the individual's own life and which seem to be aboriginal, innate, and inherited shapes of the human mind" (p. 67).
They are potential patterns or motifs of human activity established through the ages that are activated in the individual psyche by developmental factors, such as puberty, and archetypal situations, such as marriage or childbirth. Personal dreams, on the other hand, contain images reflecting material from the personal history and the daily life of the dreamer. Definition of initiation. In anthropological terms, initiation refers to the rite of passage from childhood to adulthood or to a shaman's initiation into her or his vocational calling. More generally the term may be applied to the rites that mark the entrance into the priesthood, a fraternal order, or other organization.
From a depth psychological perspective, initiation is a matter of a passage from one stage of development to another or from one state of being to another. From this perspective, the definition of initiation includes the calling and entrance into a particular profession as well as the psychological process of transformation.
In an archetypal initiation dream the primordial pattern of initiation is activated. In anthropological terms, the initiation passage contains three stages: separation, transition, and incorporation. When the vocational aspect of a healer or of a depth psychotherapist is considered, the pattern of initiation of a shaman provides the most appropriate model.
The pattern of initiation can also be found in the motifs of alchemy, fairy tales, and mythology. This wider perspective is important because archetypal initiatory dream images are not limited to the pattern found in shamanism. Initiation dreams are of the utmost importance in the life of an individual, for they often lead to vocational decisions and to greater depth in one's thought process: they enhance one's knowledge by including archetypal revelations. Indeed, for some people initiation dreams may serve as the threshold through which they enter into the individuation process.
The archetype of initiation is an archaic pattern in the human psyche representing the ritualized transition from one stage of development to the next. It is present in earlier societies in myth, fairy tales, and alchemical symbolism and in the dreams of modern individuals. It presents itself in the symbols from the unconscious providing the prima materia of the individuation process in Jung. This phenomenological study looks for the archetype of initiation in the dream images of depth psychotherapists and its effect on their psychological life and vocation.
The participants supplied one or more archetypal initiation dream, giving their interpretation and the effect of the dream(s) on their life, psychology and vocation. They also commented on the healing qualities of the dream(s) and considered the possibility that the dream(s) had meaning beyond their personal life and psychology, which applied to the broader culture. The dreams and interviews were analyzed by breaking the material into natural meaning units and themes with a critical evaluation and comparisons of themes.
The study found the archetype of initiation represented in the dreams of all the participants with varying images and themes. All of the participants experienced their initiatory dream(s) as profoundly changing their lives and psychology.
A distinction needs to be made between an initiatory dream and an initial dream. An initial dream is the first significant dream a person has when beginning a course of analysis. These dreams contain the main themes of the analytic process which will follow, and to some degree, indicate the outcome. That dimension intersects the psychology of Freud, Jung, and Hillman and the mythic, archetypal realm experienced in numinous dream images, synchronicities, and life events, often exuding strong, sometimes overwhelming affect.
Initiation dreams often, though not always, contain archetypal elements or images. Sometimes they contain images that are entirely personal and mundane, but at other times, the images are clearly numinous, mythic, or strange, so the individual "knows" they are archetypal. Initiation dreams, therefore, may appear on a continuum from the personal to the archetypal.
The future shaman is introduced to magical and healing techniques and receives instruction in secret traditions, mythology, and rituals. Some of this teaching may take place as instruction from the ancestral spirits and guides during trance and some will be from the elder shaman for a period of time and as part of the initiatory process. He or she then returns to the community as a healer.
Archetypal motifs of initiation in alchemy.
Jung saw the symbols and patterns of alchemy as confirming his delineation of the individuation process. For example, the union of conscious and unconscious sides of the psyche is depicted by the Sol (sun) or King (representing consciousness) who must be broken down, softened, dissolved in the mercurial waters, heated, and then combined with Luna (the moon) or Queen (representing the unconscious) in a hieros gamos, a sacred marriage.
The essential stages of the alchemical process are usually characterized by the four colors: black, white, yellow, and red. These stages, like the various procedures of initiation, are further subdivided into such processes as solutio, separatio, divisisio, putrefactio, mortificatio, calcinatio, and coniunctio (or matrimonium). The sequence or ordering of these processes varies and often repeats in a circular fashion (Jung, 1944/1953, pp. 217-221 [CW12, para. 332-334J).
The topic of initiation was explored by Sigmund Freud in Tatum and Taboo (1913/1990) and by Jung in Symbols of Transformation (1952/1990b [CW 5]). Both discovered a correspondence between myth and initiation rituals in archaic societies and the fantasy material of modern individuals. On the basis of this correspondence, Freud concluded that an "archaic heritage" exists in the unconscious, whereas Jung referred to this heritage as the "collective unconscious."
For Freud, this material was essentially pathological, whereas for Jung these archetypal patterns needed to be integrated into a person's life. In his overview of initiation scholarship, the Jungian analyst, James Kirsch (2007), asserts that Jung did not specifically bridge the inner experience of initiation with its manifest cultural forms. Kirsch believes Jung described initiation only in terms of an inner process of transformation. It was Jung's pupil, Erik Neumann, who connected the psychological development with cultural mythology. Jung himself claimed he had "initiatory dreams" at various stages of his life, which served as transitions in his work.
One of the most interesting modern developments of Jungian style psychology can be found in James Hillman's book The Dream and the Underworld. Starting from the classical psychoanalytic premise of dreams as the bridge between the conscious mind and the depths of the unconscious, Hillman moves away from concepts like Freudian repression or Jungian compensation, towards a different and perhaps more intriguing view, that links the inward journey into the dream world to the soul searching journeys to the Underworld of Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Eliot.
The dream is the basic model of the psyche. This is set out more fully in The Dream and the Underworld (1979). In this text Hillman suggests that dreams show us as we are; diverse, taking very different roles, experiencing fragments of meaning that are always on the tip of consciousness. They also place us inside images, rather than images inside us. This move turns traditional epistemology on its head. The source of knowing is not Descartes' "I" but rather there is a world full of images that this I inhabits. Hillman further suggests a new understanding of psychopathology; sickness is a vital part of the way the soul of a person, that illusive and subjective phenomenon becomes known.
Hillman makes it clear he does not want the dream brought up into daylight meaning into ego consciousness. Hillman wants the dream images left in what he calls the Underworld. He prefers to leave the dream in its parts. He does not want to interpret the dream. He feels by leaving the dream in its parts and be doing so creates soul, or what he calls soul.
Hillman favors a certain sort of recognition of the dream. His reworking of dream therapy invokes the classical underworld of Greco-Roman mythology, not as an interpretive symbol or force, but as literal as the 'self' in the dream, that must be taken as it is, without analysis, for any sort of eventual therapy to begin. Interpretation gives way to a sense of encounter, or visitation, which for a moment brings awareness of continuity and connection with that mysterious realm we call nature.
Hillman creates a bridge to many postmodern theories in his writing about perspectivism and Archetypal Psychology. In perspectivism, one is always coming from at least one or more perspectives. This is the story-context. Even the belief that one can set aside all perspectives, [as in the phenomenological epoche of "bracketing-out"] is itself a perspective. But Hillman is not a relativist, he is an archetypalist. This means that each perspective we put on to see and understand the world is not ours, it is just borrowed. And usually we can't even borrow them, they borrow us. It would be better to use the word 'possession' than 'borrowed'.
Consider how young lovers see the world. They don't choose to be in love, they are possessed by this perspective of Eros and more likely than not, to play out the game of love very unconsciously and without much control. Depressed individuals also rarely choose their depression, but are seized by it and dragged down into the underworld and its perspectives. So why not seize control of our own perspectives? This too, Hillman points out, is just another perspective and the world is full of stories and mythologies that speak to this. In Greece, we find the myth of Heracles, who could will his way through most situations. But note what happens when he goes down into the underworld. He doesn't get it. He starts swinging his club at phantoms with no effect.
Hillman points out that each time we attempt an interpretation of a dream, we impose upon it a particular interpretive stance, a particular perspective. The way around this, he feels, is to stop imposing structures on the dream images and begin listening to them. Though this too is a perspective, it is one that includes the dream as valid autonomous image that is not *our* image but an existing essence in its own right. When we are asleep we are more aware that we are in the dream, it is not in us. It is only when we are awake and more willful that we take on the notion that the dream is in us.
Hillman would rather we see the dream image as living in-between, in the mundus imaginalis, an imaginal world. This is not an imaginary world of an individual, but a world that exist somewhat independent of the individual. This used to be somewhat of a radical notion, but with the advent of the Internet and the growing abundance of virtual realities that exist outside of us, it becomes clearer that there are realms that we participate in, but do not fully control alone.
However, the mundus imaginalis is not controlled like computer mediated virtual reality where groups of people contribute somewhat consciously. The mundus imaginalis is more like the world of Greek gods, inhabited by powers that can enlighten us, frighten us, and seize control of us through the parts of our personality that remain forever beyond our control. Its a realm that we continually live in, but of which we are not very aware.
The importance for us here is that this view breaks up the mind-body split into a neo-platonic three way split of 1. matter/empirics/concrete ---- 2. imaginal/soul/psyche ---- 3. ideal/abstract/spirit. Psyche in Greek means 'butterfly' and in this system psyche, like the butterfly, hovers between the material world and the abstract sky of spirit. It also connects them. Our minds or imagination interpret the material world and its relationship with the ideal world. And in the other direction, we interpret the ideal world and attempt to create it in the material world though our imagination, our perspectives.
This is also how psyche gets a bad name. She operates by taking what is and bending it, twisting it, distorting and folding in, unfolding out. She can fool us and deceive us about the world and our relationship with it. These same procedures can also create new perspectives.
But if everything we see and understand is a perspective from this middle zone, how can we ever escape this hall of mirrors? Hillman's suggestions to listen to the forces as they manifest to us can lead us to know more about the realm itself and its inhabitants, but it also sucks us deeper into the soul. For a dreamwork that is interested in exploring the soul, this may be enough. True, Hillman's soul is more a cultural thing, out there and surrounding us as much as in us. However, for a dreamwork that wants to connect with the material world, the political world, the social world, this relation building with images, in or out, though vital, will not be enough.
Hillman's attack on using dreams as representations of something other than themselves seems to lead to a kind of theater of the unconscious which parades itself through all aspects of life, dispensing thoughts, feelings and actions to individuals who no longer can do much but act out the individuation of these powers.
Shelburne argues that Hillman's rejection of all egoic concerns goes too far, and states that the ego does have a special role to play within the psyche. He argues that the ego function has come to be through a process of evolution
which has enabled us to live successfully in the actual world (Shelburne, 1984). Shelburne additionally argues that Hillman's disavowal of the traditional Jungian means of interpretive verification misses the mark, arguing that a successful interpretation does not simply reinforce the egoic point of view but challenges and brings something new
into ego consciousness.
Whether or not dreams really belong to the world of Hades and our experience of them compares to the famous descents to the Underworld of the literary masterpieces of antiquity and of our time, certainly the Underground exists in our minds as a pervasive metaphor of the Underworld and of the unconscious, in compensatory opposition and tense dialog with the conscious mind that lives out in the daylight its above-ground existence.
The Underground is a place of hiding, or resistance, to the point that it has become the very synonym of the Resistance movements that fight against oppression. The Underworld, on the other hand, is not only the realm of the dead. It has also become, in our modern city life, a synonym of the low life, the one that we imagine intent at carrying out shady deals in dark alleys, the living dead of the urban frontier, cast at the margins of society. Exclusion, resistance, opposition, diversity, hunted souls living in hiding, plotting in the darkness: this is all that the world below our world suggests to the imagination.
Listening to the Call
Joseph Campbell (1949/1973), in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, makes the connection between the themes of mythology, including the archetype of the hero, with the transformation of consciousness found in the process of individuation. Concerning the hero's transformation he writes: "The first step, detachment or withdrawal, consists in a radical transfer of emphasis from the external to the internal world" (p. 17). He includes in the hero's journey the following stages: a call to adventure, supernatural aid, crossing the threshold, the road of trials, meeting with the goddess, and return.
As for the last part of the journey Campbell writes: If the hero in his triumph wins the blessing of the goddess or the god and is then explicitly commissioned to return to the world with some elixir for the restoration of society, the final stage of his adventure is supported by all the powers of his supernatural patron, (pp. 196-197) Initiation as entrance into the feminine. In the context of this study, initiation into the feminine refers to the entrance into a depth dimension of the psyche, an underworld experience, which is all the more important as a compensation for the Apollonian attitude of the dominant conscious world view.
Today, we are sadly removed from the indigenous practices of our ancestors. The dream, the last frontier, bestows on us access to esoteric knowledge, in the form of the ‘Big Dream.’ This is what Jung calls an "archetypal" dream, a psychological variation on a mythological theme, initiation into a new consciousness of reality. How? The collective unconscious" is "unconscious" because, for the most part, it exists beyond people's conscious awareness.
The collective unconscious holds the archetypes, mythological patterns, and the sources of religious symbols that manifest in human culture. Sometimes these symbols, archetypes, or mythological patterns will burst forth into our dreams, often when we really need some help from something greater than ourselves, when we need a profound transformation in our lives.
Dreams serve as the catalyst to transformation; awakening an inner knowing beyond words. Unlocking these mystical symbols, metaphors and archetypal stories in our dreams, we find the truth and wisdom of our very existence, while healing the psyche and integrating fragmented parts of the self. Dreams enriche consciousness, so that it learns to understand the forgotten language of the pre-conscious mind. The dream is already valuable without having any literalizations or personalistic interpretations tacked on to it.
All of us live in a powerful archetype called a paradigm, groupthink, mindset or worldview. Whether or not you are aware of your worldview, dreams can create transformative awareness that extends your experience making you capable of extending or rejecting it into an introspective relationship with Source -- rebirth through understanding the inner nature -- experiential gnosis and transcendence. In this we take our existential stand and become transparent to the cosmos.
Only the one who sees can reveal. Dreams extrude this deeply resonant hidden truth which is embodied in the dream flesh of the dreamer. Dreams, the realm of the collective unconscious, are where our holographic and ancestral memories live, and we can access them from there, and they likewise access us through the dreamworld.
Emotional truth undergirds the dreaming process. Dreams are the mind's vehicle for the processing of emotional states of being, particularly the fear, anxiety, anger or elation that often figure prominently. Dream sleep is also the guardian of memory, playing a part in forgetting, encoding and affective organization of memory.
The propensity for human beings of widely separated cultures, language, age, or gender, to meet with the same symbols in their dreams, fantasies or religious feelings suggests, not necessarily a collective unconscious, but certainly an innate sensing of collective human experience, and a meeting with the forces of the cosmos active in us. Because the mass of experience we hold, or live within, is largely unconscious. So it seems likely that when we are unguarded in our sleep, or at times of stress or heightened feelings, the themes and images connected with archetypal experience would emerge.
At critical times our dreams depict aspects of our individual relationship with this collective human experience, with Life itself, or what we have harvested from it. Such dreams suggest that the essence of all experience is somehow available to us, and that we are directly part of the huge processes of the cosmos. They depict graphically the universal levels of experience out of which our personal self is woven. They also give some personal experience of how at some level of our being we are intricately intermeshed with all creatures, with all the cosmos. This is no longer simply an imaginative or mystical idea. It is often full of collective wisdom and energy, both positive and negative, depending upon how you relate to it.
Our largely unconscious connection with the massive potential that we hold within, and our direct existence within the warp and woof of cosmic and natural forces, forms a dynamic ever moving and developing process that our conscious and apparently independent personality interacts with. The simplest definition of the archetypes is that they are symbols of our own enormous potential. In particular they depict potential that still remains unconscious, and the details of archetypal dreams shows us how we are relating to that potential.
Dreams are a context which allow us to enter in their exploration into the possibility of repositioning self-narratives through so-called “significant dreams”, Jung's “Big Dreams”. These significant dreams, or dreams which are highly charged, remembered, and subjectively retro-actively felt to carry “significance”, can “motivate or animate personal repositioning”, healing, or transformation (Knudson, R., Adame, A., & Finocan, G., 2006, p. 221). "Big dreams" are "memorable" dreams, "important" dreams, "especially significant" dreams, and "impactful" dreams. They are characterized by significantly higher Central Image Intensity than control groups of dreams - thus more powerful imagery.
As James Hillman says in The Dream and the Underworld: "Mythology is a psychology of antiquity. Psychology is a mythology of modernity" (1979: 23). Hillman counters the notion of dreams as compensation with his idea that dreams are an initiation. While analytical (Jungian) psychology is concerned with the manifestations of the Self and the path of individuation, Archetypal psychology is focused centrally on psyche, or soul (Hillman, 1983).
The poetic basis of mind, the notion of “soul” as imaginative possibility engendered by this approach, seeks to explore images (fantasies, dreams, etc) rather than explain them. The focus of Archetypal psychology then becomes a refinement of imaginative capacity, and “the aim of working with dreams or life events as dreams is to bring reflection to declarative and unreflected discourse...so that...speech becomes imagistic, self-referent, descriptive of a psychic condition as its very expression” (Berry, 1982, as quoted in Hillman, 1983, p. 46).
The central focus for Hillman's approach to dreams is "sticking to the image", describing it in its fullness, encountering it as autonomous and non-egoic, deepening our capacity to hear and explore psychological experience; keeping the dream itself alive. This work is a conservation which implies “holding on to what is, and even assuming that what is is right” (Hillman, 1979, p. 116). This conservation and encounter with the images of the psyche on their own terms is a goal in and of itself for the archetypalists. Hillman was especially adamant in insisting that the interpretation of the dream or an "a-ha" moment about "what the dream means" brings a premature end to its life, stopping the process.
What Jung calls a "mythologem" adapts an ancient mythological motif for a modern psychological purpose. The dreamer descends and ascends. In mythological terms, the hero descends into the underworld and then ascends from it; or, in psychological terms, the ego descends into the unconscious and then ascends from it. The ego is initiated into the irrational, mythic and underworld aspects of psyche. Dreams provide what is missing from the dayworld that is crucial to us individually and collectively.
How do you know when you have an archetypal dream? Well, the dream usually feels very profound, like you were in the presence of something "other" that is sacred, powerful, mystical, indescribable, mysterious, godlike, supernatural, other than human, and so on. All of these descriptors may not always apply, but usually some will. When you have an archetypal dream, you will know it. Many of us experience the Big Dream or Extraordinary Human Experience for a greater purpose than we consciously realize. New knowledge emerges from these experiences that may alter us in a profound way. These dreams are often spiritual awakenings or initiations and may lead to a dramatic transformation in the dreamer.
The significance of the significant dream lies precisely in the fact that the dream images do not become pinned down by any particular interpretation, are never literalized into any single fixed concept or "meaning. Instead the dreamer returns or is drawn again and again to an experiential "living in the image," with new meanings potentially emerging over time as one goes, in Hillman’s words, 'more deeply into the image'” (Knudson, 2003, p. 13). Knudson argues for the primary importance of the act of imagining, over and above interpreting, in working with dreams.
He suggests that images, including dream images, are not representations of objects that require interpretation, but are rather presentations, “acts that transform reality, freeing the imaginer from the constraints of both past and present” (Knudson, 2003, p. 15), a corrective concern with re-presentation that will reappear in phenomenology.
He accords with Hillman in not reducing images from dreams, especially “significant” dreams into reified, singular interpretations. Knudson, following Hillman, returns to the ideas of Gaston Bachelard, who suggests that images, as they are ever changing and hard-to-pindown, are things “of beauty and self-fulfillment, not usefulness...they release the imagination from the confines of personal and interpersonal life”(Knudson,2003, p. 16).
It is through encountering and paying respect to the autonomy and mutability of images that arise through fantasy and dream that, Knudson and Hillman suggest, psychotherapy may best offer its original etymological sense; care of soul.
http://epublications.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1042&context=gjcp
But how does this dream stand out from others and what is its purpose in our lives? Emotional impact is the most important aspect of “Big Dream” on the dreamer. The feelings of pure joy and love, even to the point of ecstasy rarely experienced in waking life, are an indication that you are having a transformation, spiritual awakening or initiation.
Archetypal dreams are most likely to occur at important transitional points in life, bear strongly on our identity, and are remembered throughout life.
As far as content is concerned, there are certain common elements to these “big dreams” such as apocalyptic scenes, strange locales, encounters with guides, ancestors, wisdom figures, tricksters, allies, animals, or otherworldly beings, alchemical death and rebirth motifs and more. When these dreams occur, the dreamer may transcend to a higher awareness or higher reality in the sleeping state or waking state.
The Dream Wave
Consciousness always strives to take on form. But something within us is also constantly seeking formlessness. These paradoxical currents in the stream of consciousness meet in imagination, overlap and set up interference patterns much like those of a hologram.
Energy flow patterns are defined by existential experience, which can not only channel, but distort the formless flow of free energy. Thus imagination can appear in representational and non-representational forms. It can appear as fleeting images or apparent absence of form or pattern that is nevertheless perceptible.
When we turn our attention to a specific “wave” of the stream of consciousness, the act of perception arrests the flux of the world, manifesting an image or impression of what may be in a state of continuous, perhaps infinite movement.
This “dream wave” may be followed from its representational form to more primal nonrepresentational perceptions. Perception occurs somewhere between sensory stimulation (physical or imaginal) and conscious awareness, and is subject to internal “tweaking” of its informational content.
There are other typical images found at the threshold of chaos, including spirals or vortices, “black holes in psychic space,” amorphous grayness, cloud or fog, dead and fertile voids. Whatever these perceptions represent, they are reiterated in various forms in dreams and symbolism. They each have analogies in the reports of mystics and myth. Representational activity seems to indicate transitional phenomena, while nonrepresenta-tional activity implies global experience, or diffuse existential states of being.
Archetypal dreams, as distinguished from personal dreams, are dreams which contain symbols and images that stem from the collective unconscious, a region of the psyche containing inherited structures from human evolutionary history (see definition on p. 47). C. G. Jung (1964) refers to these images as "mental forms which cannot be explained by anything in the individual's own life and which seem to be aboriginal, innate, and inherited shapes of the human mind" (p. 67).
They are potential patterns or motifs of human activity established through the ages that are activated in the individual psyche by developmental factors, such as puberty, and archetypal situations, such as marriage or childbirth. Personal dreams, on the other hand, contain images reflecting material from the personal history and the daily life of the dreamer. Definition of initiation. In anthropological terms, initiation refers to the rite of passage from childhood to adulthood or to a shaman's initiation into her or his vocational calling. More generally the term may be applied to the rites that mark the entrance into the priesthood, a fraternal order, or other organization.
From a depth psychological perspective, initiation is a matter of a passage from one stage of development to another or from one state of being to another. From this perspective, the definition of initiation includes the calling and entrance into a particular profession as well as the psychological process of transformation.
In an archetypal initiation dream the primordial pattern of initiation is activated. In anthropological terms, the initiation passage contains three stages: separation, transition, and incorporation. When the vocational aspect of a healer or of a depth psychotherapist is considered, the pattern of initiation of a shaman provides the most appropriate model.
The pattern of initiation can also be found in the motifs of alchemy, fairy tales, and mythology. This wider perspective is important because archetypal initiatory dream images are not limited to the pattern found in shamanism. Initiation dreams are of the utmost importance in the life of an individual, for they often lead to vocational decisions and to greater depth in one's thought process: they enhance one's knowledge by including archetypal revelations. Indeed, for some people initiation dreams may serve as the threshold through which they enter into the individuation process.
The archetype of initiation is an archaic pattern in the human psyche representing the ritualized transition from one stage of development to the next. It is present in earlier societies in myth, fairy tales, and alchemical symbolism and in the dreams of modern individuals. It presents itself in the symbols from the unconscious providing the prima materia of the individuation process in Jung. This phenomenological study looks for the archetype of initiation in the dream images of depth psychotherapists and its effect on their psychological life and vocation.
The participants supplied one or more archetypal initiation dream, giving their interpretation and the effect of the dream(s) on their life, psychology and vocation. They also commented on the healing qualities of the dream(s) and considered the possibility that the dream(s) had meaning beyond their personal life and psychology, which applied to the broader culture. The dreams and interviews were analyzed by breaking the material into natural meaning units and themes with a critical evaluation and comparisons of themes.
The study found the archetype of initiation represented in the dreams of all the participants with varying images and themes. All of the participants experienced their initiatory dream(s) as profoundly changing their lives and psychology.
A distinction needs to be made between an initiatory dream and an initial dream. An initial dream is the first significant dream a person has when beginning a course of analysis. These dreams contain the main themes of the analytic process which will follow, and to some degree, indicate the outcome. That dimension intersects the psychology of Freud, Jung, and Hillman and the mythic, archetypal realm experienced in numinous dream images, synchronicities, and life events, often exuding strong, sometimes overwhelming affect.
Initiation dreams often, though not always, contain archetypal elements or images. Sometimes they contain images that are entirely personal and mundane, but at other times, the images are clearly numinous, mythic, or strange, so the individual "knows" they are archetypal. Initiation dreams, therefore, may appear on a continuum from the personal to the archetypal.
The future shaman is introduced to magical and healing techniques and receives instruction in secret traditions, mythology, and rituals. Some of this teaching may take place as instruction from the ancestral spirits and guides during trance and some will be from the elder shaman for a period of time and as part of the initiatory process. He or she then returns to the community as a healer.
Archetypal motifs of initiation in alchemy.
Jung saw the symbols and patterns of alchemy as confirming his delineation of the individuation process. For example, the union of conscious and unconscious sides of the psyche is depicted by the Sol (sun) or King (representing consciousness) who must be broken down, softened, dissolved in the mercurial waters, heated, and then combined with Luna (the moon) or Queen (representing the unconscious) in a hieros gamos, a sacred marriage.
The essential stages of the alchemical process are usually characterized by the four colors: black, white, yellow, and red. These stages, like the various procedures of initiation, are further subdivided into such processes as solutio, separatio, divisisio, putrefactio, mortificatio, calcinatio, and coniunctio (or matrimonium). The sequence or ordering of these processes varies and often repeats in a circular fashion (Jung, 1944/1953, pp. 217-221 [CW12, para. 332-334J).
The topic of initiation was explored by Sigmund Freud in Tatum and Taboo (1913/1990) and by Jung in Symbols of Transformation (1952/1990b [CW 5]). Both discovered a correspondence between myth and initiation rituals in archaic societies and the fantasy material of modern individuals. On the basis of this correspondence, Freud concluded that an "archaic heritage" exists in the unconscious, whereas Jung referred to this heritage as the "collective unconscious."
For Freud, this material was essentially pathological, whereas for Jung these archetypal patterns needed to be integrated into a person's life. In his overview of initiation scholarship, the Jungian analyst, James Kirsch (2007), asserts that Jung did not specifically bridge the inner experience of initiation with its manifest cultural forms. Kirsch believes Jung described initiation only in terms of an inner process of transformation. It was Jung's pupil, Erik Neumann, who connected the psychological development with cultural mythology. Jung himself claimed he had "initiatory dreams" at various stages of his life, which served as transitions in his work.
One of the most interesting modern developments of Jungian style psychology can be found in James Hillman's book The Dream and the Underworld. Starting from the classical psychoanalytic premise of dreams as the bridge between the conscious mind and the depths of the unconscious, Hillman moves away from concepts like Freudian repression or Jungian compensation, towards a different and perhaps more intriguing view, that links the inward journey into the dream world to the soul searching journeys to the Underworld of Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Eliot.
The dream is the basic model of the psyche. This is set out more fully in The Dream and the Underworld (1979). In this text Hillman suggests that dreams show us as we are; diverse, taking very different roles, experiencing fragments of meaning that are always on the tip of consciousness. They also place us inside images, rather than images inside us. This move turns traditional epistemology on its head. The source of knowing is not Descartes' "I" but rather there is a world full of images that this I inhabits. Hillman further suggests a new understanding of psychopathology; sickness is a vital part of the way the soul of a person, that illusive and subjective phenomenon becomes known.
Hillman makes it clear he does not want the dream brought up into daylight meaning into ego consciousness. Hillman wants the dream images left in what he calls the Underworld. He prefers to leave the dream in its parts. He does not want to interpret the dream. He feels by leaving the dream in its parts and be doing so creates soul, or what he calls soul.
Hillman favors a certain sort of recognition of the dream. His reworking of dream therapy invokes the classical underworld of Greco-Roman mythology, not as an interpretive symbol or force, but as literal as the 'self' in the dream, that must be taken as it is, without analysis, for any sort of eventual therapy to begin. Interpretation gives way to a sense of encounter, or visitation, which for a moment brings awareness of continuity and connection with that mysterious realm we call nature.
Hillman creates a bridge to many postmodern theories in his writing about perspectivism and Archetypal Psychology. In perspectivism, one is always coming from at least one or more perspectives. This is the story-context. Even the belief that one can set aside all perspectives, [as in the phenomenological epoche of "bracketing-out"] is itself a perspective. But Hillman is not a relativist, he is an archetypalist. This means that each perspective we put on to see and understand the world is not ours, it is just borrowed. And usually we can't even borrow them, they borrow us. It would be better to use the word 'possession' than 'borrowed'.
Consider how young lovers see the world. They don't choose to be in love, they are possessed by this perspective of Eros and more likely than not, to play out the game of love very unconsciously and without much control. Depressed individuals also rarely choose their depression, but are seized by it and dragged down into the underworld and its perspectives. So why not seize control of our own perspectives? This too, Hillman points out, is just another perspective and the world is full of stories and mythologies that speak to this. In Greece, we find the myth of Heracles, who could will his way through most situations. But note what happens when he goes down into the underworld. He doesn't get it. He starts swinging his club at phantoms with no effect.
Hillman points out that each time we attempt an interpretation of a dream, we impose upon it a particular interpretive stance, a particular perspective. The way around this, he feels, is to stop imposing structures on the dream images and begin listening to them. Though this too is a perspective, it is one that includes the dream as valid autonomous image that is not *our* image but an existing essence in its own right. When we are asleep we are more aware that we are in the dream, it is not in us. It is only when we are awake and more willful that we take on the notion that the dream is in us.
Hillman would rather we see the dream image as living in-between, in the mundus imaginalis, an imaginal world. This is not an imaginary world of an individual, but a world that exist somewhat independent of the individual. This used to be somewhat of a radical notion, but with the advent of the Internet and the growing abundance of virtual realities that exist outside of us, it becomes clearer that there are realms that we participate in, but do not fully control alone.
However, the mundus imaginalis is not controlled like computer mediated virtual reality where groups of people contribute somewhat consciously. The mundus imaginalis is more like the world of Greek gods, inhabited by powers that can enlighten us, frighten us, and seize control of us through the parts of our personality that remain forever beyond our control. Its a realm that we continually live in, but of which we are not very aware.
The importance for us here is that this view breaks up the mind-body split into a neo-platonic three way split of 1. matter/empirics/concrete ---- 2. imaginal/soul/psyche ---- 3. ideal/abstract/spirit. Psyche in Greek means 'butterfly' and in this system psyche, like the butterfly, hovers between the material world and the abstract sky of spirit. It also connects them. Our minds or imagination interpret the material world and its relationship with the ideal world. And in the other direction, we interpret the ideal world and attempt to create it in the material world though our imagination, our perspectives.
This is also how psyche gets a bad name. She operates by taking what is and bending it, twisting it, distorting and folding in, unfolding out. She can fool us and deceive us about the world and our relationship with it. These same procedures can also create new perspectives.
But if everything we see and understand is a perspective from this middle zone, how can we ever escape this hall of mirrors? Hillman's suggestions to listen to the forces as they manifest to us can lead us to know more about the realm itself and its inhabitants, but it also sucks us deeper into the soul. For a dreamwork that is interested in exploring the soul, this may be enough. True, Hillman's soul is more a cultural thing, out there and surrounding us as much as in us. However, for a dreamwork that wants to connect with the material world, the political world, the social world, this relation building with images, in or out, though vital, will not be enough.
Hillman's attack on using dreams as representations of something other than themselves seems to lead to a kind of theater of the unconscious which parades itself through all aspects of life, dispensing thoughts, feelings and actions to individuals who no longer can do much but act out the individuation of these powers.
Shelburne argues that Hillman's rejection of all egoic concerns goes too far, and states that the ego does have a special role to play within the psyche. He argues that the ego function has come to be through a process of evolution
which has enabled us to live successfully in the actual world (Shelburne, 1984). Shelburne additionally argues that Hillman's disavowal of the traditional Jungian means of interpretive verification misses the mark, arguing that a successful interpretation does not simply reinforce the egoic point of view but challenges and brings something new
into ego consciousness.
Whether or not dreams really belong to the world of Hades and our experience of them compares to the famous descents to the Underworld of the literary masterpieces of antiquity and of our time, certainly the Underground exists in our minds as a pervasive metaphor of the Underworld and of the unconscious, in compensatory opposition and tense dialog with the conscious mind that lives out in the daylight its above-ground existence.
The Underground is a place of hiding, or resistance, to the point that it has become the very synonym of the Resistance movements that fight against oppression. The Underworld, on the other hand, is not only the realm of the dead. It has also become, in our modern city life, a synonym of the low life, the one that we imagine intent at carrying out shady deals in dark alleys, the living dead of the urban frontier, cast at the margins of society. Exclusion, resistance, opposition, diversity, hunted souls living in hiding, plotting in the darkness: this is all that the world below our world suggests to the imagination.
Listening to the Call
Joseph Campbell (1949/1973), in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, makes the connection between the themes of mythology, including the archetype of the hero, with the transformation of consciousness found in the process of individuation. Concerning the hero's transformation he writes: "The first step, detachment or withdrawal, consists in a radical transfer of emphasis from the external to the internal world" (p. 17). He includes in the hero's journey the following stages: a call to adventure, supernatural aid, crossing the threshold, the road of trials, meeting with the goddess, and return.
As for the last part of the journey Campbell writes: If the hero in his triumph wins the blessing of the goddess or the god and is then explicitly commissioned to return to the world with some elixir for the restoration of society, the final stage of his adventure is supported by all the powers of his supernatural patron, (pp. 196-197) Initiation as entrance into the feminine. In the context of this study, initiation into the feminine refers to the entrance into a depth dimension of the psyche, an underworld experience, which is all the more important as a compensation for the Apollonian attitude of the dominant conscious world view.
There are those who actively seek out the mysteries of the universe. For others it is not a choice,
rather it is a calling they must heed out of responsibility for the tribe, or one that comes to them unbidden in dreams.
The hero is an archetypal figure recorded in literature and other art forms throughout history in cultures from all around the world. Some of these figures take fantastic journeys that test their heroic strengths and worth. Other figures undergo tremendous suffering for some greater, heroic purpose. Some suffering figures reach a level of heroic transcendence in a victory over adversity and their own limitations. The nature of the figure may receive a different emphasis in different cultures, and in some cultures, at some times, the anti-heroic figure may defiantly be proclaimed as the dominant archetype. Another common archetype is the superheroic figure, who has exceptional strengths to balance against exceptional monsters and fears.
rather it is a calling they must heed out of responsibility for the tribe, or one that comes to them unbidden in dreams.
The hero is an archetypal figure recorded in literature and other art forms throughout history in cultures from all around the world. Some of these figures take fantastic journeys that test their heroic strengths and worth. Other figures undergo tremendous suffering for some greater, heroic purpose. Some suffering figures reach a level of heroic transcendence in a victory over adversity and their own limitations. The nature of the figure may receive a different emphasis in different cultures, and in some cultures, at some times, the anti-heroic figure may defiantly be proclaimed as the dominant archetype. Another common archetype is the superheroic figure, who has exceptional strengths to balance against exceptional monsters and fears.
In True Hallucinations, Terence McKenna describes his journey with his brother, Dennis, and several others to the Amazon basin, where they conduct an experiment in consciousness expansion using indigenous psychoactive mushrooms. 24 hours after their key experiment, during the night, Dennis went on a wild ramble in the surrounding jungle; or at least he believed that he did — nobody saw him go or return. Whatever the reality-status of the experience, he had wandered into the jungle and found an especially tall tree. On impulse, he had climbed it, aware as he did that the ascent of the world tree is the central motif of the Siberian shamanic journey. As he climbed the tree, he felt the flickering polarities of many archetypes, and as he reached the highest point of his ascent, something that he called “the vortex” opened ahead of him — a swirling, enormous doorway into time. He could see the Cyclopean megaliths of Stonehenge and beyond them, revolving at a different speed and at a higher plane, the outlines of the pyramids, gleaming and marble-faceted as they have not been since the days of pharaonic Egypt. And yet further into the turbulent mass of the vortex he saw mysteries that were ancient long before the advent of man — titanic archetypal forms on worlds unimagined by us, the arcane machineries of sentient agencies that swept through this part of the galaxy when our planet was young and its surface barely cooled. This machinery, these gibbering abysses, touched with the cold of interstellar space and aeon-consuming time, rushed down upon him. He fainted, and time — who can say how much time — passed by him. This account seems to indicate some of the experiences that the “vortex” phenomena may yield when the ego can be released from its painfully desperate attempts to maintain its mastery.
Levels of why the recalled dream has meaning:
- Existential Level - The dream has meaning because I give it meaning.
- Affective Level - The dream has meaning because it feels meaningful.
- Functional Level - The dream has meaning because it is useful.
- Epiphonic Level - I am overwhelmed by the meaning(s) of the dream.
- Pragmatic Level - The dream is meaningful as the impact it happens to have.
- Autonomous Level - I listen to the dream for the answer about its meaning.
- Spiritual Level - All things have some alignment with the infinite, including dreams.
- Relative Level - Dreams give people more satisfaction than some other approaches.
- Testimonial Level - Dreams are meaningful and valued by many people.
Big dreams are milestones in our ongoing story, causing us to pause, reconnoiter, celebrate or, as the case may be, anguish. I have found that even fairly minor events in life take on huge significance if I imagine that I dreamt them because then they become symbolic. When something is symbolic we sense that there is much more going on than meets the eye, a subtext to the literal; the smallest thing or incident waxes numinous. When a big dream comes you can't exaggerate its significance. It doesn't disguise itself as just another dream, rather it announces itself dramatically for a reason; the psyche has something important to say. We might also refer to such dreams as crossroad dreams, archetypal dreams, threshold or even initiatory dreams.
The difference between a big dream and a nightly dream is significant: A typical dream might be quirky or full of personal material that may be undecipherable without the dreamer's associations, whereas a big dream is a fairly impersonal dream, in the way that a myth is impersonal in that it constellates powerfully around an archetypal theme or situation such as a chase, a fire, or an intruder. Often the characters do not correspond to real people, or the setting is foreign. The dreamer may play a role in such a dream, but not necessarily.
The big dream may unfold as a movie or it may start out rather uneventfully and move into the domain of the numinous by degrees. For example, the dreamer may dream of attending a play which then dramatizes the archetypal content. There may be levels to dreaming, sometimes within the same dream, involving a climb or a descent.
Regardless of how the big dream manifests, there is an energetic, emotionally charged or otherwise qualitative difference between a big dream and a "normal" dream. A big dream is more objective than a small dream. Jung sometimes referred to the Collective Unconscious as the Objective Psyche. The reason it can be objective is, the archetypes, which energize the psyche, are outside of our conscious orientation. When we interact with or enter into the field of an archetype we are in the presence of a force (pattern, situation, being) with its own (autonomous) intelligence, gravity or reality. We are no longer the decider and this can be both humbling and healing.
Jung put it this way: "A good dream, for example, that's grace. The dream is in essence a gift. The collective unconscious, it's not for you, or me, it's the invisible world, it's the great spirit. It makes little difference what I call it: God, Tao, the Great Voice, the Great Spirit."
The difference between a big dream and a nightly dream is significant: A typical dream might be quirky or full of personal material that may be undecipherable without the dreamer's associations, whereas a big dream is a fairly impersonal dream, in the way that a myth is impersonal in that it constellates powerfully around an archetypal theme or situation such as a chase, a fire, or an intruder. Often the characters do not correspond to real people, or the setting is foreign. The dreamer may play a role in such a dream, but not necessarily.
The big dream may unfold as a movie or it may start out rather uneventfully and move into the domain of the numinous by degrees. For example, the dreamer may dream of attending a play which then dramatizes the archetypal content. There may be levels to dreaming, sometimes within the same dream, involving a climb or a descent.
Regardless of how the big dream manifests, there is an energetic, emotionally charged or otherwise qualitative difference between a big dream and a "normal" dream. A big dream is more objective than a small dream. Jung sometimes referred to the Collective Unconscious as the Objective Psyche. The reason it can be objective is, the archetypes, which energize the psyche, are outside of our conscious orientation. When we interact with or enter into the field of an archetype we are in the presence of a force (pattern, situation, being) with its own (autonomous) intelligence, gravity or reality. We are no longer the decider and this can be both humbling and healing.
Jung put it this way: "A good dream, for example, that's grace. The dream is in essence a gift. The collective unconscious, it's not for you, or me, it's the invisible world, it's the great spirit. It makes little difference what I call it: God, Tao, the Great Voice, the Great Spirit."
- Initiations are processes. They may take many different forms, and vary in scope and impact. Here, the process of initiation is divided into three cycles — (a) peaks (initiatory crises), which can take the form of intense over-load experiences, crushing breakdowns or accidents/illnesses; (b) troughs, in other words Dark Nights of the Soul, dryness of spirit and an oppressive sense of emptiness; and (c) plateaux, where “nothing much seems to be going on”.
- Initiatory processes are fractal. Here, they are described in terms of Macroscopic and Microscopic initiations. That is, Big Ones and Little Ones; different scales of process which share a basic similarity in structure, and which often contain elements, motifs or archetypes that resonate across space and time.
- The key to dealing with initiatory cycles is recognition. Through examining your own experiences, you can become consciously aware of the particular process you are moving through. Kalkinath & Vishvanath’s method for dealing consciously with IF processes is the A PIE formula: Assess — stop and realise you are at a turning point, examine possibilities open to you, use option lists, divinatory techniques, “be vulnerable to the forces of change.”; Plan — decide what you need to do, gather resources necessary for its implementation; Implement — do it! Follow things through, do not give in to inertia; Evaluate — assimilate your experiences into your Self, real-ize the lessons you have learned.
DREAMS & GENETICS
2011
FETAL DREAMS AND THE SOURCE OF DESIRE
It has been known for decades that the fetus in utero spends most of its time in a state akin to REM (Rapid-Eye-Movement) dreaming sleep. There also seems to be little doubt that this state of sleep is a key factor in the development of the central nervous system (Roffwarg, Muzio & Dement, 1966). This article will examine the complementary theory of Michel Jouvet that the fetal dreams are actually responsible for programming the developing brain in utero. If we combine Jouvet’s theory about fetal dreams with the theory of neurobiologist and philosopher Jean-Didier Vincent concerning the Biology of Passions we come up with a clear concept of what is being programmed into the developing brain. We shall also look at the writings of a variety of theorists and psychoanalysts including those of Françoise Dolto, and Jacques Lacan concerning the source and nature of desire with a view to arriving at some sort of understanding of our psychological heritage.
Dreams as genetic programming
Michel Jouvet advanced the theory that certain genetic programs are periodically reinforced in the brain and this reinforcement first establishes and then maintains the functionality of the synaptic circuits responsible for our psychological heritage. He felt that such a system had the advantage of reestablishing certain circuits that may have been altered by epigenetic factors, that is factors not strictly determined by our genes. This genetic reprogramming occurs during the phase of sleep he called ‘paradoxical sleep’ also known as REM (Rapid Eye-Movement) sleep, which is generally considered to be the time when we dream (Jouvet, 1992).
Jouvet advanced three keys for unlocking the enigma of paradoxical sleep. Firstly that dreaming mechanisms require a lot of energy through the consumption of oxygen. Secondly the likely reason why the so-called ‘cold-blooded’ animals, namely fishes, amphibians and reptiles do not appear to engage in paradoxical sleep is that their nerve cells continue to divide throughout the life of the animal. This is contrary to the situation with homothermal animals, that is animals that maintain a constant body temperature independent of their external environment. The third key in relation to the latter species, namely mammals and birds, is that the more immature they are (in utero or in vivo) the more something resembling paradoxical sleep (referred to as ‘active sleep’) becomes important.
According to Jouvet, there are many studies that show a positive correlation between the immaturity of the nervous system and the fragility of the thermoregulation system of the neonate mammal, and the increased proportion of time spent in paradoxical sleep. A human neonate will spend 50 to 60 percent of its sleep-time in paradoxical sleep. A kitten or baby rat can spend up to 80 or 90 percent of its sleep-time in paradoxical sleep. This significant increase in paradoxical sleep has also been found to apply in utero for the fetuses of many mammal species. Jouvet points out that it is precisely at the time the nervous system is finishing its initial maturation and genetic programming that the amount of paradoxical sleep, which in due course will become dreaming sleep, attains its greatest proportions. After this initial maturation process the amount of paradoxical sleep gradually decreases. This has to be a very significant phenomenon.
Jouvet’s primary research as a neurophysiologist was to locate the mechanisms in the brain responsible for paradoxical sleep. According to him the topography of neurons (more than likely cholinergic) that constitutes the endogenous generator of the activity ponto-geniculo-occipital (PGO) of dreaming has been defined precisely. It is situated in the reticular formation of the pons in the brain stem. The routes are also known whereby the PGO activity reaches the centers for motor ocularity, which causes the rapid-eye movements of dreaming sleep. The ascending paths leading to the cerebral cortex, either directly or via an intermediate thalamic relay, have been equally defined with great precision.
By blocking the inhibitory system which prevents motor discharges during paradoxical sleep, Jouvet found that a sleeping cat will perform certain characteristic behavioral patterns as if it is acting out its dreams. The animal will get up quickly and start walking as if it is stalking an imaginary prey. It will then stop and demonstrate the characteristic gesture of catching a fish. Other stock actions can quickly follow. It may demonstrate fear with its ears back, or open its jaws wide in the snarling hiss of feline rage, or even feign an attack with quick backward movements of its paws and biting movements in thin air. It will also groom itself by licking its paws and flanks but it can equally start licking the perimeters or floor of its cage. Jouvet stresses that these behaviors occur without any external visual or auditory stimulus, and thus indicate that the dream is a programmed activity of the brain. In this context, he recalls a remark made by Piaget that a dream resembles a game inside the brain.
Jouvet fundamentally poses the perennial question of nature versus nurture. If dreams are a genetic programming mechanism for the brain, then they would be responsible for the individual variations in the instinctive activities and behaviors of animals as well as being responsible for human personality traits to the extent that they are innate or inherited. That is to say, that part of our psychological heritage which can not be attributed to our environment, our culture or learning. If Jouvet is correct, the importance of dreams during our formative years cannot be overemphasized and our dreams continue to iteratively program the subtlest reactions of our waking consciousness throughout life.
Fetal movements are without doubt the expression of motor discharges caused by the genetically programmed formation of synapses during the maturation of the central nervous system, according to Jouvet. It is impossible to deny the influence of the environment in utero in the behavior and comportment of the neonate, and it is equally certain that the genetic program plays a predominant role in the stereotypical movements of approach to the mammary, of twitching and sucking which occur during periods of paradoxical sleep in the neonate.
For Jouvet, it is difficult to understand how a definitive genetic program established at the end of the initial maturation period can efficiently organize future innate behaviors given the plasticity in modifications of the synaptic connections induced by environmental causes. Furthermore, the definitive genetic program of hundreds of billions of synaptic connections would require a great many more genes than are known to exist in the genome. For these reasons, the concept of a recurrent or periodic genetic programming appears more satisfactory. This endogenous periodic process would excite at regular intervals the synaptic structures responsible for the recognition and processing of stimuli which produce stereotypical innate behavior. An obvious candidate for such a periodic genetic programming is paradoxical sleep.
However, Jouvet also raises various questions about his theory. There is no proof of the existence of paradoxical sleep in the vertebrates (fishes, amphibians, or reptiles) although fishes and amphibians do display the alternative states of activity and repose, and variations of electrical activity can be detected in the brains of sleeping reptiles. The question therefore arises as to how the brains of these other species are programmed if not through paradoxical sleep.
Another major doubt is the proposition that the sleep of the mammal in utero is not true paradoxical sleep but merely the forerunner of paradoxical sleep. This sleep of the fetus has been termed active, and is characterized by movements that reflect the intrinsic property of each motor element to activate strongly without central coordination. The ontogenesis pre- and post-natal is accompanied by a transition, the limits of which are uncertain, between the end of the genetic programming by neurogenesis of the central nervous system and the appearance, at first slowly and then more rapidly, of a new mode of programming effected by paradoxical sleep.
Jouvet also raises the issue that the suppression of paradoxical sleep through the use of certain drugs does not seem to produce any symptoms that can be attributed specifically to the absence of paradoxical sleep. He cites the case of patients being treated for narcolepsy or depression who take drugs for several months (inhibitors of monoamines oxydases and tricyclical antidepressants), which suppress totally or almost totally their paradoxical sleep. Also the literature concerning the retention of learning and paradoxical sleep seems to contain a similar number of positive and negative results, according to Jouvet. These results certainly do not prove that paradoxical sleep is responsible for an iterative genetic programming process. However, they do suggest that it is illusory to test the effects of paradoxical sleep deprivation on a genetically heterogeneous population because each member can react in a different fashion.
The final, and potentially major, concern is caused by the fact that some people dream a great deal and others claim to dream very little, if indeed at all. Jouvet quotes in English a statement by Mayr: “Genetic variability is universal, a fact which is significant not only for the student of morphology but also for the student of behavior. It is not only wrong to speak of the monkey but even of the rhesus monkey… The time has come to stress the existence of genetic differences in behavior… Striking individual differences have been described for predator-prey relations, for the reactions of birds to mimicking or to warning colorations, for child care among primates , and for maternal behavior in rats. It is generally agreed by observers that much of this individual difference is not affected by experience but remains essentially constant throughout the entire lifetime of the individual. Such variability is of the greatest interest to the student of evolution , and it is to be hoped that it will receive more attention from the experimental psychologist than it has in the past…” (Mayr, 1958)
Jouvet’s book was written prior to the controversy about paradoxical sleep introduced by Solms in 1997. By studying patients with neurosurgical lesions, Solms was able to differentiate REM sleep, as defined by purely physiological criteria, from dreaming, a psychological process. These two processes occur simultaneously, but that does not mean that they are one and the same thing. Solms makes two assertions. He found that patients with lesions in the brain stem continued to dream. This fact is very surprising because as outlined above, the work of Jouvet is based on PGO activity being responsible for initiating paradoxical sleep. By the same token, other patients that had lesions in the parietal and frontal lobes of the brain did not dream at all. Solms concluded that the anterior structures of the brain are essential for dreaming, but not the structures in the brain stem (Bléandonu, 2002).
Following the work of Solms it becomes even more reasonable to assert that the fetus is actually dreaming in utero. The fact is that by the third trimester of gestation the anterior regions of the brain of the human fetus are largely developed. Taking the work of Jouvet, Roffwarg et al. and Solms together, it is highly likely that the active sleep of the fetus is a key factor in the development of the central nervous system (including the anterior regions of the brain), which means that it is a genetic programming mechanism for our innate behavior and psychological heritage.
The dreaming aspect of REM sleep becomes an extension or continuation of the original active sleep. Fetal dreams commence at a time when the central nervous system is substantially developed and is in the nature of a window into our genetic programming. Dreaming is not of itself a programming mechanism, but as a result of our dreams, we can get a glimpse of what our genetic programming is all about. To dream or not to dream becomes a non-essential phenotype of the genetic code which some of us experience but others do not, and recalls the statement made by Mayr above concerning the individual differences in our psychological heritage. In this way we can still assert, consistent with the theory of Jouvet, that our innate passions are being genetically programmed in utero during the active sleep.
A biological basis for desire Jean-Didier Vincent advances a concept of a fluctuating central state on which he founds a biological explanation for passion (Vincent, 1986). In a later work, he speaks of opposing processes (Vincent, 1996). The evolution of the species consists of a progressive increase in the number of intermediaries between information coming from the external world and factors responsible for our actions. The degree of liberty or free will of the animal increases with the number of these intermediaries. But it is because of the liquid element, and the substances transported therein, which introduces a solution of continuity in the organization of cells that this liberty or free will is possible. His approach to explaining the passions is therefore preceded by a study of the body’s humors, that is to say the liquid elements of the organism and the substances which, in opposing and fluctuating processes, permit the communication
Dispersed throughout the body, either scattered or grouped within glands, specialized cells introduce into the blood stream secretory products or hormones. These cells are called endocrine to distinguish them from the exocrine glands which secrete their sugars and liquids externally or in the digestive system (sweat glands, salivary glands etc) The endocrine glands are a familiar element in the anatomical landscape. Some of the better known ones are the thyroid gland, the gonads or sex glands, the hypophysis, and the pancreas. The same gland generally contains many types of cells. The anterior hypophysis, for example, contains at least five types of cells which each secrete one or more hormones. The endocrine pancreas, as distinct from the exocrine pancreas which has a digestive function, secretes three hormones; Insulin which reduces the amount of sugar in the blood, glucagon which increases the amount of sugar, and somatostatin which inhibits the two preceding secretions. The same hormone can be secreted from different sources. Many hormones secreted by the digestive tract are also released in the brain. The walls of the digestive system is an extended gland with a large repertoire of endocrine secretions; the gastro-intestinal hormones. Other organs and tissues, while not directly endocrine glands, also are capable of secreting hormones (liver, kidneys, blood cells etc). The nervous system itself also acts as a multifunctional gland liberating neurohormones and neurotransmitters with hormonal actions.
In general terms Vincent explains that the hormones have a double function. On the one hand, by assuring communication between the cells, they integrate the chemical and physiological functions to maintain a constant state, and adapt the responses of the organism to changes in the environment. On the other hand, they are indispensable for the complete and harmonious development of the neonate, the growth of the individual, and the proper functioning of the bodily organs in adulthood. For the most part the hormones are directly synthesized from the genetic code and their presence and interaction within the brain and body of the organism is in the nature of programming determined by the genetic code.
Again in general terms Vincent states that desire is located somewhere between joy and need, profit and loss. The satisfaction of a need that leads to reinforcement is the basis of learning theories. Desire also holds a central place in Freudian psychology based on need and the experience of satisfaction. But more than need, it is perhaps the sense of lack, the anticipation or simulation of need, which is at work in a sustained feeling of desire.
One of the primary characteristics of a desiring behavior pattern is found in the association between an affective or emotional component and the anticipation of the outcome of the action. Vincent tells us that this involves visceral manifestations and hormonal secretions that offer a veritable somatic translation of the emotion. The emotional landscape that accompanies a desiring behavior pattern is the hallmark of desire, and demonstrates the difference from a simple instinct, that is an affective desert by comparison. It is suggested that fetal dreams are responsible for the affective or emotional component of desire that occurs simultaneously with the programming of the hormonal milieu in utero. The affective or emotional component is our psychological heritage.
The catalogue of substances that contribute to the central fluctuating state is extensive. For example a noradrenergic pathway acting in the brain of a female rat will cause her to accept the advances of a male rat. By the same token, luliberin, in conjunction with the male hormones, will transform a timid hamster afraid of an aggressive female into an intrepid and willing lover. Acetylcholine modulates the activity of the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system. The morphine peptides, the receptors for which abound in the cerebral cortex, regulate the level of sensory input. Finally there are the neuropeptides, the list of which never ceases to grow, that are the ingredients of our central nervous system and whose workings are often mysterious.
The multiplicity of chemical substances is not the only complicating factor. The dispersion of nerve terminals, their interdependency, and the magnitude of their numbers contributes to the confusion. The same nerve terminal can liberate many substances; dopamine for example as well as cholecystokine. In addition this amine is not only liberated at the terminal level but equally within proximity of the cell bodies at the dendrite level. Dopamine is also capable of controlling its own release.
Vincent speaks of a non-specific activation for which dopamine is responsible. This non-specific activation is a general phenomenon that applies to all behavioral patterns or comportments independent of sensory input. This is desire devoid of all specificity and, as such, is considered as the foundation of spontaneity. However, for this desire to have full and optimal effect it has to attain a level above which its operation is harmful. Lesions of the hypothalamus that interrupt the operation of the dopaminergic fibers of the reticular formation which communicate with the anterior regions of the brain, will cause an animal not only to cease to eat and drink, but also to display a state described as akinesy or catalepsy. The animal loses all spontaneity (shows zero desire), ceases to move and retains the posture in which it is put by the experimenter.
The lateral hypothalamus is also considered to be a pleasure center in the brain. Vincent refers to Panksepp’s definition of the lateral hypothalamus as a ‘goad without goal’, a non-specific prod. As an adjunct to desire, the prod activates the appropriate behavior. The choice of behavior is determined by the principal object present in the environment. Given that the conditions of the interior milieu are right (hormones, composition of the blood etc) the vision or scent of a consenting female will cause the animal to copulate, or the presence of food will stimulate the animal to eat. When the lateral hypothalamus is stimulated electrically, the behavioral response will be determined by the nature of the stimulus present. In this regard it is considered that the lateral hypothalamus maintains a non-specific behavioral tension.
The lateral hypothalamus is also a site for auto-stimulation. A rat that is wired in such a way that it can electrically stimulate this part of its own brain by pressing on a lever will soon become addicted to the sensation. It becomes incapable of denying itself this pleasure. A starving animal that has the choice of two levers, one which will furnish food and the other which will allow it to auto-stimulate, will choose the latter even at the cost of its own life. The animal is insatiable and shows no signs of becoming accustomed to the pleasure. Depriving it of the lever is the only way to stop it. The lateral hypothalamus is not the only pleasure center in the brain. There are others in the limbic and striatal structures of the anterior brain and in the brain stem.
Auto-stimulation and the pleasure derived from it will have no physiological significance if it cannot be combined with a natural action. Consequently it has been found that electrical stimulation of all these sites of auto-stimulation induces, depending upon the place and conditions, all the behaviors of which a rat is capable; sniffing, eating, drinking, grooming, transporting and collecting objects, digging, copulating, killing mice, gathering its young. Vincent says that it is hard to escape the idea that neuronal circuits developed according to plans laid out in the genetic code, revised and corrected by learning, are responsible for these different behaviors.
Vincent tells us in his later work (Vincent, 1996) that the same hormone seems to be at work in religious and mystical ecstasy that plays a large part in sexual orgasm. In both cases there is a massive liberation in the hypothalamus of the hormone oxytocin. This same hormone can also act as a neurotransmitter in the neuronal networks implicated in the regulation of functions of attachment and to social memory. Oxytocin is effectively a neurohormone synthesized by the hypothalamus and liberated by the anterior hypothysis at the time of breast-feeding; its secretion being in the form of pulsating discharges as a reflexive response to the suckling of the baby causes a periodic ejection of milk. This substance is also liberated inside the brain at the level of nerve terminals in the hypothalamic and limbic (preoptic and septum) system. A massive secretion occurs at the moment of orgasm for both sexes.
In explaining love from a biological point of view Vincent says that there exists a need for an other just as there is a biological need for water or for proteins, and this need for an other is what constitutes the desire called love. For the biologist, the state of being in love is only a particular form of the central fluctuating state, as it expresses the presence of the other in external space. The sexual partner epitomizes the other. The state of being in love is accompanied by a transformation of the body for both parties. The role of the sexual glands is a determining factor. The sexual hormones act directly on neuronal receptors in the brain. Hormones such as prolactin and luliberin are concerned with the genesis of being in love. However, the secretion of the sex glands alone does not bring about this state of being in love. Desire is universal and is tied up with the proper functioning inside the brain of the desiring systems of which sexuality is just one aspect. Love represents a fusional state in which the individual can realize its own unity with the other. And in the case of humans, language becomes the essence of love in which the sexual organs play a minimal role. In other words, over and above the secretion of hormones and the fluctuating state of the central nervous system as a matter of pure biology, love is also intimately dependent on our psychological heritage.
In addition Vincent cites with approval a passage by Freud that there are many other types of love apart from the common conception of sexual love constituted by a sexual union. We can’t separate the love of self, parental and familial love, friendship and the love for humankind in general any more than we can separate attachment to material objects and to abstract ideas and causes because all these varieties of love are expressions of one and the same tendency; a tendency that in certain cases invites a sexual union but in many other cases is directed towards other ends. The word love brings about a synthesis in language of a multiplicity of significations. They all express in one way or another the operation of desire which brings us back to a biological need for the other, and a sense of lack as part of our psychological heritage.
Vincent maintains that our subjectivity, that is to say, our psychological heritage is derived from the body of the mother. An infant knows its mother even before meeting her. A new born rat, crawling and blind, finds its way with the certainty of someone who knows to the maternal mammary. To detach it from its mother is a sensation comparable to picking a fruit from a tree. If its sense of smell is destroyed , or if the maternal mammary is washed with detergent, it is no longer able to find the mammary. However if the maternal mammary that has been washed with detergent is then covered with amniotic fluid collected at the time of birth, the newborn rat is again able to find its way to suckle. The mother rat instinctively licks the amniotic fluid from its newborn and licks its own mammary, so that her young are attracted to the mammary by the odor.
If the natural odor of the amniotic fluid is changed by injecting a lemon flavor into the uterine environment some time prior to birth, the baby rat will elect to attach itself to a lemon flavored mammary if forced to choose between several mothers. The story does not end there. The male adult demonstrates the same affinities towards a female with a lemon flavored vagina. The male adult will take twice as long to ejaculate with a female rat that does not exude a scent of lemon. Vincent argues for a perfume of infancy which will play a key role in the sexual attachments of the adult, whether male or female. It seems clear, at least, that the heterosexual male will seek to find in the female the olfactory image of its mother, an image derived originally from the amniotic fluid. Vincent refers to the conclusion drawn by Chateau that there exists in the brain of the mother and the infant a biogrammar that fixes, of which the rules of syntax determine language, the behavior of attachment between mother and infant. These are the constituents of our psychological heritage; programmed emotions, gestures and language that form the base of what sociolinguists call intersubjectivity.
In his later work, Vincent reminds us that the study of grammar amounts to the analysis of true functions (expansion, coordination, subordination etc) to the point where it is no more absurd to talk of the physiology of language than it is to talk of its genetic origin. (Vincent, 1996) A statement by Paul Guillaume is quoted with approval that it is a banal fact that the advent of vocal reactions is under the influence of the general infantile state, of emotions and needs. In the initial period of life the cry corresponds to suffering, to physical discomfort and to hunger; later to more complex feelings of displeasure. One can distinguish at the end of the second postnatal month cries characteristic of desire, impatience and deception. Later other vocal reactions develop with the state of well-being and agreeable excitement. The direct action of the affective state on the vocal organ does not find its expression simply through the cry of an infant; potentially here lies the natural root of developed language. It is impossible to separate the acquisition of language with its related affects and emotions. Language merges into our psychological heritage and, according to Jouvet’s theory, is programmed into the brain of the fetus during paradoxical sleep.
Life before birth
It is never too early to speak of a human being, declared Françoise Dolto at the end of the 1970s. It is an être de parole (a being capable of communication) even as a fetus, and it is easy to understand why a mother and father speak to the fetal person who is in the uterus of the mother. Dolto explains what she means by an être de parole: a being who has a need to be spoken to, to be addressed directly, a being for whom language is essential, vital, because it has a thirst for communication and knowledge. This is the human being from the beginning to the end of its existence. For the infant the need for communication is as necessary as nourishment for the metabolism of the body. Dolto was convinced of the existence of a symbolic function peculiar to humankind. As vital as our vital functions, this factor is at work during the life of the fetus in utero at the very heart of the exchanges between the mother and her progeny. The fetus is not just living, it is desiring, perceiving, communicating and memorizing. At the heart of the fetal night it has joys and torments, it knows happiness and unhappiness. It is a communicator in the making (Canault, 2001).
Dolto formulated the concept of an unconscious archaic memory of life in utero. A memory of an affective relation with its umbilical cord, of its liquid environment immersed in amniotic fluid, with the placental envelopes. In other words a memory of its universe at the time; the matrix, that is to say the maternal womb. The fetus in effect bathes in the amniotic fluid. That archaic image of self linked to its mother in utero, symbolizes in the infant unconscious its basal security. This unconscious archaic memory of life in utero is, according to Dolto, also the beginnings of the unconscious image of the body for the being to be born. These are the concepts that make up our psychological heritage, that Jouvet would have us accept is programmed into the brain by the paradoxical sleep of the fetus. By the same token Dolto speaks of sleep in the adult as a state of natural regression to the fetal stage.
For Dolto every human being is a desiring subject. Human beings aspire to communicate from conception onwards. The unconscious image of the body is the concept which permits Dolto to take into account a continuity of being , before and after birth, which is the subject. What separates the body of the infant from the body of the mother, and makes it viable, is the umbilical cord and its ligature. The umbilical originates the body schema within the confines of an envelope that will become the skin (the placenta and the envelopes contained in the uterus having been cut away). The image of the body, made up partially of the rhythms, the warmth, the sonorities, the fetal perceptions, finds itself abruptly modified with the change in perceptions at birth, in particular the loss of the passive auditory pulses of the double heartbeat that the fetus heard in utero. This modification is accompanied by the advent of breathing through the lungs, and the activation of the peristaltism of the digestive tube which, when the infant is born, emits the meconium accumulated during the fetal period. The umbilical scar and the loss of the placenta, a fact in the course of human destiny, can be considered as the prototype of all the experiences that will be called castrations (including genital). This first separation should be called umbilical castration. It is contemporaneous with birth, and it is the foundation, in the modalities of joy and anguish which accompanied the birth, of the infant’s subjective relations of desire for others (Dolto, 1984).
The first attachment The expulsion of the placenta is hardly talked about in most prenatal groups that prepare the mother for the birth, but the infant is born with the placenta. Almost a half an hour can pass before the expulsion of that thick spongy mass, beautiful for some, formidable for others, with a very particular odor. The expulsion of the placenta often surprises the mother because of the pain and the contractions that it reinvoques. Mothers often consider that it’s all over when the baby is delivered. Doctors and midwives on the other hand monitor with vigilance the expulsion of the placenta, for if retained in the uterus, even with modern medicine, it can be a source of important complications, at times even dramatic. The echoes from the birthing room can be a matter of life and death.
But what is actually delivered? Is it simply an anatomical mass, an organ which no longer has a function, and is only of interest to research laboratories and to the cosmetics industry. Or is it a profoundly intimate companion which is no longer of use to us, from which we are forced to separate by nature, and which, after the first loss, that of the amniotic fluid, prefigures the first lost object, and evoques the paradise lost common to so many, if not all, originating myths (Rapoport, 1989).
The placenta, the perfect union between two beings, rises to a state that no other organ can equal. It can not be considered as a parasite and is in the nature of a transplant, expressed by both organisms and rejected by neither. It is the symbiosis and parabiosis of two beings united in the flesh, and yet the blood remains separate. The placenta is the seat of all the transfers of nutriment or waste product, oxygen, carbon dioxide, sugars, lipids, proteins and vitamins. The placenta plays an active role; it is the indispensable relay between the two organisms. At its peak in the thirty-fifth week of gestation, the maternal blood flow to replenish the villosities will attain thirty-six litres an hour (Clément-Faraut, 1989).
Certain analysts maintain that, at the outset, the infant sees itself and thinks of itself as being one with the mother. That it is not the mother who incorporates the infant into herself, but it is the infant that achieves unity with the mother, and lives as if it is a part of the maternal body, just like a leaf on the branch of a tree. When one studies what occurs between the maternal circulation and the fetal circulation, it is clear that the placenta creates a barrier, a frontier, strictly delimiting two territories; certain substances pass through the placental barrier, and others are stopped. The placenta is an obstacle to the unification fantasy, the desire to be at one with the loved one, a fantasy fundamental to humankind. In playing this role as obstacle it is also an organ protecting the fetus from the mother (This, 1989).
After the birth the mother does not disappear. She is there, attentive, taking care of the infant. It is precisely the placenta that has disappeared. The cut is located at this level, between the infant and that part of itself. So why do we so often describe the birth as a separation between mother-infant? Why don’t we talk of an umbilical cord that has to be sliced between the mother and the infant? Instead it is necessary to cut the umbilical cord. Everything happens as if the umbilical cord unites the mother and the infant, as if they communicated with each other, as if the umbilical cord was in the nature of a mirror where each is a reflection of the other, that each is the double of the other and yet, at the same time, contained within the other (This, 1989). The placenta is actually an amputated limb of the neonate, and as such remains in our psychological heritage as a phantom.
The fetus is inside; but this ‘inside’ is already an ‘outside’ because its sensory organs are continually informing it about what is happening from afar. We know that it is listening attentively when it is awake, perceiving from a distance, obtaining information about everything that is happening in its neighborhood, in what we could call its territory. Listening to our words, participating in its own way, living in a world structured by language. The mother eats curry and the amniotic fluid has a curry taste. The fetus is permanently savoring this liquid; it drinks two and a half litres per day, and we know that its tongue, its mouth and the upper part of the esophagus are constellated with gustatory papillae that will disappear at the time of birth. Because of the placental function, the infant, so tiny and weak, has an astonishing power of attraction, and of suction of liquid elements and of their dissolved content. It is this power of suction that causes the milk to rise in the maternal breast. The placenta is the window for the fetus to the world outside preparing the fetus for its future life. Because of its operation the fetus is neither inside nor outside (This, 1989).
Now we can appreciate the anguish of birth, the emergence from the primordial aquatic milieu when it exits from the amniotic fluid; the leap into a world where its lungs come into play, where it has to breathe air in order to survive. The trauma of birth is not separation from the mother per se but the strangeness of this new milieu so strikingly different. Lacan attributes to this moment the anguish of birth, inherent in life, inevitable, an anguish which can project its shadow for the rest of life. The infant has lost in this adventure of birth that part of itself from which it becomes separated, discarded, abandoned, the ‘book of flesh’ that was the placenta engaged in signifying relations with the mother and the external world. The important thing is to know that this abandoned object is at the base of all that is desirable in life, because now it has disappeared, it instills in reality a sense of lack, of an emptiness (This, 1989).
If the subject that is born situates itself and constitutes itself in a rapport with the Other, because it is born to the extent that it is represented by the signifier (the signifier brings the subject into existence because it only has meaning as a signifier for other signifiers), we have to recognize with Lacan that, in this operation, something remains which becomes ‘object-cause of desire’, the lost object where the function of cause can take root (This, 1989).
Therefore at the base of subjectivity, in front of all other objects, at the horizon of being, there is this object irretrievably lost, and the desire functions inside a bubble which, although burst, still contains the trace of what it originally enclosed inside the envelope. We desire because we have been deprived of the liquid world, of our envelopes, of our placenta. This means that the experience of that severance marks the subject in all its development, the relation of subject to object being always felt as unsatisfying. It can not bring contentment, it can not bring security. The object will always be the cause of desire, according to Lacan, the cause of an unsatisfied desire. “Where the Thing was, one could say, I have to be” because we are desiring subjects. A fact of nature divides us… in order that we may be born (This, 1989)
Desire according to Lacan Lacan’s theory of desire stems originally from the ideas of Plato that on the one hand desire is fundamental movement of living beings and that the soul is the living principle, and on the other hand that desire implies the essentially psychic process of memory. The body, which is only capable of grasping what is actual and immediate, is incapable when confronted with a void or emptiness of experiencing the feeling of repletion or of being satiated. It is only the soul that can ‘have contact’ with what is presently absent, because the soul possesses the memory of a repletion that has already been experienced. This is why there is no bodily desire.
Only the soul can, by virtue of memory, anticipate the pleasure that an object that is missing can procure, and instigate, by that anticipation, the movement towards the object; this is what desire consists of. Desire is incapable of being reduced to a bodily affectation. It is essentially a movement of the soul towards a satisfaction previously experienced (Baas, 1992) Plato’s theory is therefore enhanced by the theory put forward by Jouvet, that we are born with this satisfaction previously experienced as part of our psychological heritage that has been programmed into our memory by fetal dreams. What Plato refers to as our soul is what Jouvet would consider our psyche that is based in our fetal dreams.
For Lacan, over and above desire in terms of an articulated desire towards a desired object, there is the Thing. In terms of a lost object the Thing recalls the Freudian concept of an ‘experience of satisfaction’ to be understood certainly as an original experience. For Freud there is certainly the original experience of the mother, of which the memory traces constitute a sort of dissolved image in the psyche of a satisfying object. This image determines the elaboration of desire and engages the subject to find what is lost according to a logic of identity. If we follow the maze of representations, the associative knots, the fantasies and the dreams we will always find ourselves there; the body of the mother. This is what, according to the Freudian tradition, will give a meaning to the ‘lost object’, the body of the mother is the embodiment of the Thing (Baas, 1992)
Lacan attempts a transcendental theory of desire. To the question what is there in the subject which renders the loss possible from which the desire proceeds, Lacan employs this word - the Thing - precisely because the Thing is not discernible, even less representable, because to give a content to this thing means that one has already entered into the game of the signifiers, one has already confused the thing with the desired object, the Thing is already reduced to something desirable for its own sake. Consequently the Thing is above the signifying game through which operates the desiring function of the subject, even if – or rather – because it is the condition which renders the game possible.
For Lacan, the Thing is ‘hors-signifié’ which means impossible to signify. The loss is anterior to what is lost. This means that if there is desire, and if the desire permeates all the detours of the substitutive process, of the signifying metonomy, it is not by virtue of the loss of some origin of sorts, but it is precisely because the loss is itself the origin. That is why the object of desire, the desired object, is always an object that has been found again The Thing is the loss itself, the fundamental and original lack, a pure lack which constitutes the subject in terms of being a divided subject (Baas, 1992).
It is necessary therefore to distinguish the desired object and the ‘object which is the cause of desire’; the latter, always qualified in these terms by Lacan, is what he refers to as l’objet a, which literally means the object ‘a’ in lower case. The letter A stands for Other (Autre in French). L’objet a is always designated as an object separated, detached, from whatever may be the desired object, the maternal breast, the feces, the voice, or the regard. It is not reducible to the desired object, nor is it identifiable with the subject of the desire, the desiring subject. It is simply articulated by the desiring subject which is itself a subject divided. This division comes about in the subject because its desire proceeds from nothing tangible, but only from the pure lack of the Thing. It is the lack of the Thing which bars the subject from desire. No matter how desire expresses itself, always articulated within it is the fantasy of l’objet a. The fantasy of the lack renders possible the synthesis of the facultyof desiring and of the empirical desired object (Baas, 1992).
Before the separation, that is before birth, there is neither subject nor object. It is the separation which produces at the same time both the subject and the object. Alienation and separation are therefore the constituents of the subject. In Lacan’s theory the subject does not come into existence until approximately six months after birth with the commencement of the mirror stage. The loss therefore occurs at a time prior to formation of the subject, and therefore logically prior to the feeling of desire itself. The desire can only abstract itself from the signifying order in which it is constituted. In desire derived from the signifying order there is a sort of small remainder which rises up from the (anterior) pure lack, that is to say l’objet a. (Baas, 1992). Lacan’s theory therefore reinforces the theory of Jouvet. Evidently the fetal dreams have no subject per se. The fetus is dreaming of its circumstances in utero which provide for it a psychological heritage. It is only after birth when the umbilical cord is cut, and the subject begins to constitute itself, that desire comes into play. Because the loss preceded the subject we can understand Lacan’s assertion that l’objet a exists only in the fantasy of desire and not in reality.
The Thing is not an object of this world and is not a part of this world, even if it is true that the world is what constitutes itself for the subject through the network of signifiers. Nor is the fetal dream experience of the placenta and the fetal envelope of this world. It truly predates the advent of the subject itself. The Thing, or the pure lack, here occupies the place of an unconditioned absolute, in as much as it is from what desire proceeds, and yet it can not be articulated by this desire through a signifier. To cover the Thing, the pure lack, by a signifier is to constitute a ‘myth’ according to Lacan.
Thus for example, (and evidently it is not important what example) to identify the Thing as the body of the mother is a myth to use Lacan’s word, that is to say with exactitude, the transcendental illusion (Baas, 1992). What the fetus experienced in its dreams was of another world. What the fetus lost was the aquatic milieu in the amniotic fluid, the link with the mother via the placenta and the umbilical cord. However, to say this is obviously to reenter the world of signifiers. We are again in the grip of the transcendental illusion. It is actually impossible for us to conceive the precise nature of the fetal dream of its intrauterine experience, which is why it will always be for us a pure lack.
The myth consists of giving a figure to the Thing (it is the figure, the mythical figure of the great maternal goddess), but it also consists – and this is why it is an illusion – in supposing a consistent or substantial reality behind the figure, a reality of which the figure can only be an appearance or the symbolic manifestation (it is the body of the mother in the supposed experience of the original satisfaction).
In order to avoid such an illusion, it is necessary, opposed to the myth, to affirm that behind the figure there is nothing, that there is nothing else than the Thing, that is to say the pure lack (Baas, 1992). The fetal dream can not be proved as a fact. The content of fetal dreams is not of this world and has no place in the order of signifiers which we take to be reality. From the point of view of a living subject, the fetal dream that forms the base of our psychological heritage is precisely what Lacan suggests – nothing. Nothing, that is, in the sense of no thing. And yet it is the fantasy…
REFERENCES
Baas, B. (1992) Le désir pur [The pure desire]. Louvain: Éditions Peeters.
Bléandonu, G. (2002) À quoi rêvent nos enfants? [What do our infants dream about?]. Paris: Odile Jacob.
Canault, N. (2001) Comment le désir de naître vient au fœtus [How the desire to be born comes to the fetus]. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer.
Clément-Faraut, C. (1989) Le délivre [The delivery]. In A. Bouchart, D. Rapoport, & B. This (Eds.), Les cahiers du nouveau-né 8: Délivrances ou le placenta dévoilé [The journal of the neonate 8: Deliveries or the placenta unveiled] (pp. 43 - 96). Paris: Stock.
Dolto, F. (1984) L’image inconsciente du corps [The unconscious image of the body]. Paris: Le Seuil.
Jouvet, M. (1992) Le sommeil et le rêve [The sleep and the dream]. Paris: Odile Jacob.
Mayr, E. (1958) Behavior and systematics. In Roe, E., & Simpson, G. (Eds.) Behavior and evolution. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Rapoport, D. (1989) Pourquoi le placenta dévoilé [Why the placenta unveiled?]. In A. Bouchart, D. Rapoport, & B. This (Eds.), Les cahiers du nouveau-né 8: Délivrances ou le placenta dévoilé [The journal of the neonate 8: Deliveries or the placenta unveiled] (pp. 9 – 12). Paris: Stock.
Roffwarg H., Muzio, J., & Dement, W. (1966) Ontogenetic development of Sleep-Dream cycles, Science, 52,604 - 619.
Vincent, J-D. (1986) Biologie des passions [Biology of passions]. Paris: Odile Jacob.
This, B. (1989) Le placenta: médiateur, protecteur, premier objet perdu? [The placenta: mediator, protector, first lost object?]. In A. Bouchart, D. Rapoport, & B. This (Eds.), Les cahiers du nouveau-né 8: Délivrances ou le placenta dévoilé [The journal of the neonate 8: Deliveries or the placenta unveiled] (pp. 109 – 140). Paris: Stock.
Vincent, J-D. (1996) La chair et le diable [The flesh and the devil]. Paris: Odile Jacob.
FETAL DREAMS AND THE SOURCE OF DESIRE
It has been known for decades that the fetus in utero spends most of its time in a state akin to REM (Rapid-Eye-Movement) dreaming sleep. There also seems to be little doubt that this state of sleep is a key factor in the development of the central nervous system (Roffwarg, Muzio & Dement, 1966). This article will examine the complementary theory of Michel Jouvet that the fetal dreams are actually responsible for programming the developing brain in utero. If we combine Jouvet’s theory about fetal dreams with the theory of neurobiologist and philosopher Jean-Didier Vincent concerning the Biology of Passions we come up with a clear concept of what is being programmed into the developing brain. We shall also look at the writings of a variety of theorists and psychoanalysts including those of Françoise Dolto, and Jacques Lacan concerning the source and nature of desire with a view to arriving at some sort of understanding of our psychological heritage.
Dreams as genetic programming
Michel Jouvet advanced the theory that certain genetic programs are periodically reinforced in the brain and this reinforcement first establishes and then maintains the functionality of the synaptic circuits responsible for our psychological heritage. He felt that such a system had the advantage of reestablishing certain circuits that may have been altered by epigenetic factors, that is factors not strictly determined by our genes. This genetic reprogramming occurs during the phase of sleep he called ‘paradoxical sleep’ also known as REM (Rapid Eye-Movement) sleep, which is generally considered to be the time when we dream (Jouvet, 1992).
Jouvet advanced three keys for unlocking the enigma of paradoxical sleep. Firstly that dreaming mechanisms require a lot of energy through the consumption of oxygen. Secondly the likely reason why the so-called ‘cold-blooded’ animals, namely fishes, amphibians and reptiles do not appear to engage in paradoxical sleep is that their nerve cells continue to divide throughout the life of the animal. This is contrary to the situation with homothermal animals, that is animals that maintain a constant body temperature independent of their external environment. The third key in relation to the latter species, namely mammals and birds, is that the more immature they are (in utero or in vivo) the more something resembling paradoxical sleep (referred to as ‘active sleep’) becomes important.
According to Jouvet, there are many studies that show a positive correlation between the immaturity of the nervous system and the fragility of the thermoregulation system of the neonate mammal, and the increased proportion of time spent in paradoxical sleep. A human neonate will spend 50 to 60 percent of its sleep-time in paradoxical sleep. A kitten or baby rat can spend up to 80 or 90 percent of its sleep-time in paradoxical sleep. This significant increase in paradoxical sleep has also been found to apply in utero for the fetuses of many mammal species. Jouvet points out that it is precisely at the time the nervous system is finishing its initial maturation and genetic programming that the amount of paradoxical sleep, which in due course will become dreaming sleep, attains its greatest proportions. After this initial maturation process the amount of paradoxical sleep gradually decreases. This has to be a very significant phenomenon.
Jouvet’s primary research as a neurophysiologist was to locate the mechanisms in the brain responsible for paradoxical sleep. According to him the topography of neurons (more than likely cholinergic) that constitutes the endogenous generator of the activity ponto-geniculo-occipital (PGO) of dreaming has been defined precisely. It is situated in the reticular formation of the pons in the brain stem. The routes are also known whereby the PGO activity reaches the centers for motor ocularity, which causes the rapid-eye movements of dreaming sleep. The ascending paths leading to the cerebral cortex, either directly or via an intermediate thalamic relay, have been equally defined with great precision.
By blocking the inhibitory system which prevents motor discharges during paradoxical sleep, Jouvet found that a sleeping cat will perform certain characteristic behavioral patterns as if it is acting out its dreams. The animal will get up quickly and start walking as if it is stalking an imaginary prey. It will then stop and demonstrate the characteristic gesture of catching a fish. Other stock actions can quickly follow. It may demonstrate fear with its ears back, or open its jaws wide in the snarling hiss of feline rage, or even feign an attack with quick backward movements of its paws and biting movements in thin air. It will also groom itself by licking its paws and flanks but it can equally start licking the perimeters or floor of its cage. Jouvet stresses that these behaviors occur without any external visual or auditory stimulus, and thus indicate that the dream is a programmed activity of the brain. In this context, he recalls a remark made by Piaget that a dream resembles a game inside the brain.
Jouvet fundamentally poses the perennial question of nature versus nurture. If dreams are a genetic programming mechanism for the brain, then they would be responsible for the individual variations in the instinctive activities and behaviors of animals as well as being responsible for human personality traits to the extent that they are innate or inherited. That is to say, that part of our psychological heritage which can not be attributed to our environment, our culture or learning. If Jouvet is correct, the importance of dreams during our formative years cannot be overemphasized and our dreams continue to iteratively program the subtlest reactions of our waking consciousness throughout life.
Fetal movements are without doubt the expression of motor discharges caused by the genetically programmed formation of synapses during the maturation of the central nervous system, according to Jouvet. It is impossible to deny the influence of the environment in utero in the behavior and comportment of the neonate, and it is equally certain that the genetic program plays a predominant role in the stereotypical movements of approach to the mammary, of twitching and sucking which occur during periods of paradoxical sleep in the neonate.
For Jouvet, it is difficult to understand how a definitive genetic program established at the end of the initial maturation period can efficiently organize future innate behaviors given the plasticity in modifications of the synaptic connections induced by environmental causes. Furthermore, the definitive genetic program of hundreds of billions of synaptic connections would require a great many more genes than are known to exist in the genome. For these reasons, the concept of a recurrent or periodic genetic programming appears more satisfactory. This endogenous periodic process would excite at regular intervals the synaptic structures responsible for the recognition and processing of stimuli which produce stereotypical innate behavior. An obvious candidate for such a periodic genetic programming is paradoxical sleep.
However, Jouvet also raises various questions about his theory. There is no proof of the existence of paradoxical sleep in the vertebrates (fishes, amphibians, or reptiles) although fishes and amphibians do display the alternative states of activity and repose, and variations of electrical activity can be detected in the brains of sleeping reptiles. The question therefore arises as to how the brains of these other species are programmed if not through paradoxical sleep.
Another major doubt is the proposition that the sleep of the mammal in utero is not true paradoxical sleep but merely the forerunner of paradoxical sleep. This sleep of the fetus has been termed active, and is characterized by movements that reflect the intrinsic property of each motor element to activate strongly without central coordination. The ontogenesis pre- and post-natal is accompanied by a transition, the limits of which are uncertain, between the end of the genetic programming by neurogenesis of the central nervous system and the appearance, at first slowly and then more rapidly, of a new mode of programming effected by paradoxical sleep.
Jouvet also raises the issue that the suppression of paradoxical sleep through the use of certain drugs does not seem to produce any symptoms that can be attributed specifically to the absence of paradoxical sleep. He cites the case of patients being treated for narcolepsy or depression who take drugs for several months (inhibitors of monoamines oxydases and tricyclical antidepressants), which suppress totally or almost totally their paradoxical sleep. Also the literature concerning the retention of learning and paradoxical sleep seems to contain a similar number of positive and negative results, according to Jouvet. These results certainly do not prove that paradoxical sleep is responsible for an iterative genetic programming process. However, they do suggest that it is illusory to test the effects of paradoxical sleep deprivation on a genetically heterogeneous population because each member can react in a different fashion.
The final, and potentially major, concern is caused by the fact that some people dream a great deal and others claim to dream very little, if indeed at all. Jouvet quotes in English a statement by Mayr: “Genetic variability is universal, a fact which is significant not only for the student of morphology but also for the student of behavior. It is not only wrong to speak of the monkey but even of the rhesus monkey… The time has come to stress the existence of genetic differences in behavior… Striking individual differences have been described for predator-prey relations, for the reactions of birds to mimicking or to warning colorations, for child care among primates , and for maternal behavior in rats. It is generally agreed by observers that much of this individual difference is not affected by experience but remains essentially constant throughout the entire lifetime of the individual. Such variability is of the greatest interest to the student of evolution , and it is to be hoped that it will receive more attention from the experimental psychologist than it has in the past…” (Mayr, 1958)
Jouvet’s book was written prior to the controversy about paradoxical sleep introduced by Solms in 1997. By studying patients with neurosurgical lesions, Solms was able to differentiate REM sleep, as defined by purely physiological criteria, from dreaming, a psychological process. These two processes occur simultaneously, but that does not mean that they are one and the same thing. Solms makes two assertions. He found that patients with lesions in the brain stem continued to dream. This fact is very surprising because as outlined above, the work of Jouvet is based on PGO activity being responsible for initiating paradoxical sleep. By the same token, other patients that had lesions in the parietal and frontal lobes of the brain did not dream at all. Solms concluded that the anterior structures of the brain are essential for dreaming, but not the structures in the brain stem (Bléandonu, 2002).
Following the work of Solms it becomes even more reasonable to assert that the fetus is actually dreaming in utero. The fact is that by the third trimester of gestation the anterior regions of the brain of the human fetus are largely developed. Taking the work of Jouvet, Roffwarg et al. and Solms together, it is highly likely that the active sleep of the fetus is a key factor in the development of the central nervous system (including the anterior regions of the brain), which means that it is a genetic programming mechanism for our innate behavior and psychological heritage.
The dreaming aspect of REM sleep becomes an extension or continuation of the original active sleep. Fetal dreams commence at a time when the central nervous system is substantially developed and is in the nature of a window into our genetic programming. Dreaming is not of itself a programming mechanism, but as a result of our dreams, we can get a glimpse of what our genetic programming is all about. To dream or not to dream becomes a non-essential phenotype of the genetic code which some of us experience but others do not, and recalls the statement made by Mayr above concerning the individual differences in our psychological heritage. In this way we can still assert, consistent with the theory of Jouvet, that our innate passions are being genetically programmed in utero during the active sleep.
A biological basis for desire Jean-Didier Vincent advances a concept of a fluctuating central state on which he founds a biological explanation for passion (Vincent, 1986). In a later work, he speaks of opposing processes (Vincent, 1996). The evolution of the species consists of a progressive increase in the number of intermediaries between information coming from the external world and factors responsible for our actions. The degree of liberty or free will of the animal increases with the number of these intermediaries. But it is because of the liquid element, and the substances transported therein, which introduces a solution of continuity in the organization of cells that this liberty or free will is possible. His approach to explaining the passions is therefore preceded by a study of the body’s humors, that is to say the liquid elements of the organism and the substances which, in opposing and fluctuating processes, permit the communication
Dispersed throughout the body, either scattered or grouped within glands, specialized cells introduce into the blood stream secretory products or hormones. These cells are called endocrine to distinguish them from the exocrine glands which secrete their sugars and liquids externally or in the digestive system (sweat glands, salivary glands etc) The endocrine glands are a familiar element in the anatomical landscape. Some of the better known ones are the thyroid gland, the gonads or sex glands, the hypophysis, and the pancreas. The same gland generally contains many types of cells. The anterior hypophysis, for example, contains at least five types of cells which each secrete one or more hormones. The endocrine pancreas, as distinct from the exocrine pancreas which has a digestive function, secretes three hormones; Insulin which reduces the amount of sugar in the blood, glucagon which increases the amount of sugar, and somatostatin which inhibits the two preceding secretions. The same hormone can be secreted from different sources. Many hormones secreted by the digestive tract are also released in the brain. The walls of the digestive system is an extended gland with a large repertoire of endocrine secretions; the gastro-intestinal hormones. Other organs and tissues, while not directly endocrine glands, also are capable of secreting hormones (liver, kidneys, blood cells etc). The nervous system itself also acts as a multifunctional gland liberating neurohormones and neurotransmitters with hormonal actions.
In general terms Vincent explains that the hormones have a double function. On the one hand, by assuring communication between the cells, they integrate the chemical and physiological functions to maintain a constant state, and adapt the responses of the organism to changes in the environment. On the other hand, they are indispensable for the complete and harmonious development of the neonate, the growth of the individual, and the proper functioning of the bodily organs in adulthood. For the most part the hormones are directly synthesized from the genetic code and their presence and interaction within the brain and body of the organism is in the nature of programming determined by the genetic code.
Again in general terms Vincent states that desire is located somewhere between joy and need, profit and loss. The satisfaction of a need that leads to reinforcement is the basis of learning theories. Desire also holds a central place in Freudian psychology based on need and the experience of satisfaction. But more than need, it is perhaps the sense of lack, the anticipation or simulation of need, which is at work in a sustained feeling of desire.
One of the primary characteristics of a desiring behavior pattern is found in the association between an affective or emotional component and the anticipation of the outcome of the action. Vincent tells us that this involves visceral manifestations and hormonal secretions that offer a veritable somatic translation of the emotion. The emotional landscape that accompanies a desiring behavior pattern is the hallmark of desire, and demonstrates the difference from a simple instinct, that is an affective desert by comparison. It is suggested that fetal dreams are responsible for the affective or emotional component of desire that occurs simultaneously with the programming of the hormonal milieu in utero. The affective or emotional component is our psychological heritage.
The catalogue of substances that contribute to the central fluctuating state is extensive. For example a noradrenergic pathway acting in the brain of a female rat will cause her to accept the advances of a male rat. By the same token, luliberin, in conjunction with the male hormones, will transform a timid hamster afraid of an aggressive female into an intrepid and willing lover. Acetylcholine modulates the activity of the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system. The morphine peptides, the receptors for which abound in the cerebral cortex, regulate the level of sensory input. Finally there are the neuropeptides, the list of which never ceases to grow, that are the ingredients of our central nervous system and whose workings are often mysterious.
The multiplicity of chemical substances is not the only complicating factor. The dispersion of nerve terminals, their interdependency, and the magnitude of their numbers contributes to the confusion. The same nerve terminal can liberate many substances; dopamine for example as well as cholecystokine. In addition this amine is not only liberated at the terminal level but equally within proximity of the cell bodies at the dendrite level. Dopamine is also capable of controlling its own release.
Vincent speaks of a non-specific activation for which dopamine is responsible. This non-specific activation is a general phenomenon that applies to all behavioral patterns or comportments independent of sensory input. This is desire devoid of all specificity and, as such, is considered as the foundation of spontaneity. However, for this desire to have full and optimal effect it has to attain a level above which its operation is harmful. Lesions of the hypothalamus that interrupt the operation of the dopaminergic fibers of the reticular formation which communicate with the anterior regions of the brain, will cause an animal not only to cease to eat and drink, but also to display a state described as akinesy or catalepsy. The animal loses all spontaneity (shows zero desire), ceases to move and retains the posture in which it is put by the experimenter.
The lateral hypothalamus is also considered to be a pleasure center in the brain. Vincent refers to Panksepp’s definition of the lateral hypothalamus as a ‘goad without goal’, a non-specific prod. As an adjunct to desire, the prod activates the appropriate behavior. The choice of behavior is determined by the principal object present in the environment. Given that the conditions of the interior milieu are right (hormones, composition of the blood etc) the vision or scent of a consenting female will cause the animal to copulate, or the presence of food will stimulate the animal to eat. When the lateral hypothalamus is stimulated electrically, the behavioral response will be determined by the nature of the stimulus present. In this regard it is considered that the lateral hypothalamus maintains a non-specific behavioral tension.
The lateral hypothalamus is also a site for auto-stimulation. A rat that is wired in such a way that it can electrically stimulate this part of its own brain by pressing on a lever will soon become addicted to the sensation. It becomes incapable of denying itself this pleasure. A starving animal that has the choice of two levers, one which will furnish food and the other which will allow it to auto-stimulate, will choose the latter even at the cost of its own life. The animal is insatiable and shows no signs of becoming accustomed to the pleasure. Depriving it of the lever is the only way to stop it. The lateral hypothalamus is not the only pleasure center in the brain. There are others in the limbic and striatal structures of the anterior brain and in the brain stem.
Auto-stimulation and the pleasure derived from it will have no physiological significance if it cannot be combined with a natural action. Consequently it has been found that electrical stimulation of all these sites of auto-stimulation induces, depending upon the place and conditions, all the behaviors of which a rat is capable; sniffing, eating, drinking, grooming, transporting and collecting objects, digging, copulating, killing mice, gathering its young. Vincent says that it is hard to escape the idea that neuronal circuits developed according to plans laid out in the genetic code, revised and corrected by learning, are responsible for these different behaviors.
Vincent tells us in his later work (Vincent, 1996) that the same hormone seems to be at work in religious and mystical ecstasy that plays a large part in sexual orgasm. In both cases there is a massive liberation in the hypothalamus of the hormone oxytocin. This same hormone can also act as a neurotransmitter in the neuronal networks implicated in the regulation of functions of attachment and to social memory. Oxytocin is effectively a neurohormone synthesized by the hypothalamus and liberated by the anterior hypothysis at the time of breast-feeding; its secretion being in the form of pulsating discharges as a reflexive response to the suckling of the baby causes a periodic ejection of milk. This substance is also liberated inside the brain at the level of nerve terminals in the hypothalamic and limbic (preoptic and septum) system. A massive secretion occurs at the moment of orgasm for both sexes.
In explaining love from a biological point of view Vincent says that there exists a need for an other just as there is a biological need for water or for proteins, and this need for an other is what constitutes the desire called love. For the biologist, the state of being in love is only a particular form of the central fluctuating state, as it expresses the presence of the other in external space. The sexual partner epitomizes the other. The state of being in love is accompanied by a transformation of the body for both parties. The role of the sexual glands is a determining factor. The sexual hormones act directly on neuronal receptors in the brain. Hormones such as prolactin and luliberin are concerned with the genesis of being in love. However, the secretion of the sex glands alone does not bring about this state of being in love. Desire is universal and is tied up with the proper functioning inside the brain of the desiring systems of which sexuality is just one aspect. Love represents a fusional state in which the individual can realize its own unity with the other. And in the case of humans, language becomes the essence of love in which the sexual organs play a minimal role. In other words, over and above the secretion of hormones and the fluctuating state of the central nervous system as a matter of pure biology, love is also intimately dependent on our psychological heritage.
In addition Vincent cites with approval a passage by Freud that there are many other types of love apart from the common conception of sexual love constituted by a sexual union. We can’t separate the love of self, parental and familial love, friendship and the love for humankind in general any more than we can separate attachment to material objects and to abstract ideas and causes because all these varieties of love are expressions of one and the same tendency; a tendency that in certain cases invites a sexual union but in many other cases is directed towards other ends. The word love brings about a synthesis in language of a multiplicity of significations. They all express in one way or another the operation of desire which brings us back to a biological need for the other, and a sense of lack as part of our psychological heritage.
Vincent maintains that our subjectivity, that is to say, our psychological heritage is derived from the body of the mother. An infant knows its mother even before meeting her. A new born rat, crawling and blind, finds its way with the certainty of someone who knows to the maternal mammary. To detach it from its mother is a sensation comparable to picking a fruit from a tree. If its sense of smell is destroyed , or if the maternal mammary is washed with detergent, it is no longer able to find the mammary. However if the maternal mammary that has been washed with detergent is then covered with amniotic fluid collected at the time of birth, the newborn rat is again able to find its way to suckle. The mother rat instinctively licks the amniotic fluid from its newborn and licks its own mammary, so that her young are attracted to the mammary by the odor.
If the natural odor of the amniotic fluid is changed by injecting a lemon flavor into the uterine environment some time prior to birth, the baby rat will elect to attach itself to a lemon flavored mammary if forced to choose between several mothers. The story does not end there. The male adult demonstrates the same affinities towards a female with a lemon flavored vagina. The male adult will take twice as long to ejaculate with a female rat that does not exude a scent of lemon. Vincent argues for a perfume of infancy which will play a key role in the sexual attachments of the adult, whether male or female. It seems clear, at least, that the heterosexual male will seek to find in the female the olfactory image of its mother, an image derived originally from the amniotic fluid. Vincent refers to the conclusion drawn by Chateau that there exists in the brain of the mother and the infant a biogrammar that fixes, of which the rules of syntax determine language, the behavior of attachment between mother and infant. These are the constituents of our psychological heritage; programmed emotions, gestures and language that form the base of what sociolinguists call intersubjectivity.
In his later work, Vincent reminds us that the study of grammar amounts to the analysis of true functions (expansion, coordination, subordination etc) to the point where it is no more absurd to talk of the physiology of language than it is to talk of its genetic origin. (Vincent, 1996) A statement by Paul Guillaume is quoted with approval that it is a banal fact that the advent of vocal reactions is under the influence of the general infantile state, of emotions and needs. In the initial period of life the cry corresponds to suffering, to physical discomfort and to hunger; later to more complex feelings of displeasure. One can distinguish at the end of the second postnatal month cries characteristic of desire, impatience and deception. Later other vocal reactions develop with the state of well-being and agreeable excitement. The direct action of the affective state on the vocal organ does not find its expression simply through the cry of an infant; potentially here lies the natural root of developed language. It is impossible to separate the acquisition of language with its related affects and emotions. Language merges into our psychological heritage and, according to Jouvet’s theory, is programmed into the brain of the fetus during paradoxical sleep.
Life before birth
It is never too early to speak of a human being, declared Françoise Dolto at the end of the 1970s. It is an être de parole (a being capable of communication) even as a fetus, and it is easy to understand why a mother and father speak to the fetal person who is in the uterus of the mother. Dolto explains what she means by an être de parole: a being who has a need to be spoken to, to be addressed directly, a being for whom language is essential, vital, because it has a thirst for communication and knowledge. This is the human being from the beginning to the end of its existence. For the infant the need for communication is as necessary as nourishment for the metabolism of the body. Dolto was convinced of the existence of a symbolic function peculiar to humankind. As vital as our vital functions, this factor is at work during the life of the fetus in utero at the very heart of the exchanges between the mother and her progeny. The fetus is not just living, it is desiring, perceiving, communicating and memorizing. At the heart of the fetal night it has joys and torments, it knows happiness and unhappiness. It is a communicator in the making (Canault, 2001).
Dolto formulated the concept of an unconscious archaic memory of life in utero. A memory of an affective relation with its umbilical cord, of its liquid environment immersed in amniotic fluid, with the placental envelopes. In other words a memory of its universe at the time; the matrix, that is to say the maternal womb. The fetus in effect bathes in the amniotic fluid. That archaic image of self linked to its mother in utero, symbolizes in the infant unconscious its basal security. This unconscious archaic memory of life in utero is, according to Dolto, also the beginnings of the unconscious image of the body for the being to be born. These are the concepts that make up our psychological heritage, that Jouvet would have us accept is programmed into the brain by the paradoxical sleep of the fetus. By the same token Dolto speaks of sleep in the adult as a state of natural regression to the fetal stage.
For Dolto every human being is a desiring subject. Human beings aspire to communicate from conception onwards. The unconscious image of the body is the concept which permits Dolto to take into account a continuity of being , before and after birth, which is the subject. What separates the body of the infant from the body of the mother, and makes it viable, is the umbilical cord and its ligature. The umbilical originates the body schema within the confines of an envelope that will become the skin (the placenta and the envelopes contained in the uterus having been cut away). The image of the body, made up partially of the rhythms, the warmth, the sonorities, the fetal perceptions, finds itself abruptly modified with the change in perceptions at birth, in particular the loss of the passive auditory pulses of the double heartbeat that the fetus heard in utero. This modification is accompanied by the advent of breathing through the lungs, and the activation of the peristaltism of the digestive tube which, when the infant is born, emits the meconium accumulated during the fetal period. The umbilical scar and the loss of the placenta, a fact in the course of human destiny, can be considered as the prototype of all the experiences that will be called castrations (including genital). This first separation should be called umbilical castration. It is contemporaneous with birth, and it is the foundation, in the modalities of joy and anguish which accompanied the birth, of the infant’s subjective relations of desire for others (Dolto, 1984).
The first attachment The expulsion of the placenta is hardly talked about in most prenatal groups that prepare the mother for the birth, but the infant is born with the placenta. Almost a half an hour can pass before the expulsion of that thick spongy mass, beautiful for some, formidable for others, with a very particular odor. The expulsion of the placenta often surprises the mother because of the pain and the contractions that it reinvoques. Mothers often consider that it’s all over when the baby is delivered. Doctors and midwives on the other hand monitor with vigilance the expulsion of the placenta, for if retained in the uterus, even with modern medicine, it can be a source of important complications, at times even dramatic. The echoes from the birthing room can be a matter of life and death.
But what is actually delivered? Is it simply an anatomical mass, an organ which no longer has a function, and is only of interest to research laboratories and to the cosmetics industry. Or is it a profoundly intimate companion which is no longer of use to us, from which we are forced to separate by nature, and which, after the first loss, that of the amniotic fluid, prefigures the first lost object, and evoques the paradise lost common to so many, if not all, originating myths (Rapoport, 1989).
The placenta, the perfect union between two beings, rises to a state that no other organ can equal. It can not be considered as a parasite and is in the nature of a transplant, expressed by both organisms and rejected by neither. It is the symbiosis and parabiosis of two beings united in the flesh, and yet the blood remains separate. The placenta is the seat of all the transfers of nutriment or waste product, oxygen, carbon dioxide, sugars, lipids, proteins and vitamins. The placenta plays an active role; it is the indispensable relay between the two organisms. At its peak in the thirty-fifth week of gestation, the maternal blood flow to replenish the villosities will attain thirty-six litres an hour (Clément-Faraut, 1989).
Certain analysts maintain that, at the outset, the infant sees itself and thinks of itself as being one with the mother. That it is not the mother who incorporates the infant into herself, but it is the infant that achieves unity with the mother, and lives as if it is a part of the maternal body, just like a leaf on the branch of a tree. When one studies what occurs between the maternal circulation and the fetal circulation, it is clear that the placenta creates a barrier, a frontier, strictly delimiting two territories; certain substances pass through the placental barrier, and others are stopped. The placenta is an obstacle to the unification fantasy, the desire to be at one with the loved one, a fantasy fundamental to humankind. In playing this role as obstacle it is also an organ protecting the fetus from the mother (This, 1989).
After the birth the mother does not disappear. She is there, attentive, taking care of the infant. It is precisely the placenta that has disappeared. The cut is located at this level, between the infant and that part of itself. So why do we so often describe the birth as a separation between mother-infant? Why don’t we talk of an umbilical cord that has to be sliced between the mother and the infant? Instead it is necessary to cut the umbilical cord. Everything happens as if the umbilical cord unites the mother and the infant, as if they communicated with each other, as if the umbilical cord was in the nature of a mirror where each is a reflection of the other, that each is the double of the other and yet, at the same time, contained within the other (This, 1989). The placenta is actually an amputated limb of the neonate, and as such remains in our psychological heritage as a phantom.
The fetus is inside; but this ‘inside’ is already an ‘outside’ because its sensory organs are continually informing it about what is happening from afar. We know that it is listening attentively when it is awake, perceiving from a distance, obtaining information about everything that is happening in its neighborhood, in what we could call its territory. Listening to our words, participating in its own way, living in a world structured by language. The mother eats curry and the amniotic fluid has a curry taste. The fetus is permanently savoring this liquid; it drinks two and a half litres per day, and we know that its tongue, its mouth and the upper part of the esophagus are constellated with gustatory papillae that will disappear at the time of birth. Because of the placental function, the infant, so tiny and weak, has an astonishing power of attraction, and of suction of liquid elements and of their dissolved content. It is this power of suction that causes the milk to rise in the maternal breast. The placenta is the window for the fetus to the world outside preparing the fetus for its future life. Because of its operation the fetus is neither inside nor outside (This, 1989).
Now we can appreciate the anguish of birth, the emergence from the primordial aquatic milieu when it exits from the amniotic fluid; the leap into a world where its lungs come into play, where it has to breathe air in order to survive. The trauma of birth is not separation from the mother per se but the strangeness of this new milieu so strikingly different. Lacan attributes to this moment the anguish of birth, inherent in life, inevitable, an anguish which can project its shadow for the rest of life. The infant has lost in this adventure of birth that part of itself from which it becomes separated, discarded, abandoned, the ‘book of flesh’ that was the placenta engaged in signifying relations with the mother and the external world. The important thing is to know that this abandoned object is at the base of all that is desirable in life, because now it has disappeared, it instills in reality a sense of lack, of an emptiness (This, 1989).
If the subject that is born situates itself and constitutes itself in a rapport with the Other, because it is born to the extent that it is represented by the signifier (the signifier brings the subject into existence because it only has meaning as a signifier for other signifiers), we have to recognize with Lacan that, in this operation, something remains which becomes ‘object-cause of desire’, the lost object where the function of cause can take root (This, 1989).
Therefore at the base of subjectivity, in front of all other objects, at the horizon of being, there is this object irretrievably lost, and the desire functions inside a bubble which, although burst, still contains the trace of what it originally enclosed inside the envelope. We desire because we have been deprived of the liquid world, of our envelopes, of our placenta. This means that the experience of that severance marks the subject in all its development, the relation of subject to object being always felt as unsatisfying. It can not bring contentment, it can not bring security. The object will always be the cause of desire, according to Lacan, the cause of an unsatisfied desire. “Where the Thing was, one could say, I have to be” because we are desiring subjects. A fact of nature divides us… in order that we may be born (This, 1989)
Desire according to Lacan Lacan’s theory of desire stems originally from the ideas of Plato that on the one hand desire is fundamental movement of living beings and that the soul is the living principle, and on the other hand that desire implies the essentially psychic process of memory. The body, which is only capable of grasping what is actual and immediate, is incapable when confronted with a void or emptiness of experiencing the feeling of repletion or of being satiated. It is only the soul that can ‘have contact’ with what is presently absent, because the soul possesses the memory of a repletion that has already been experienced. This is why there is no bodily desire.
Only the soul can, by virtue of memory, anticipate the pleasure that an object that is missing can procure, and instigate, by that anticipation, the movement towards the object; this is what desire consists of. Desire is incapable of being reduced to a bodily affectation. It is essentially a movement of the soul towards a satisfaction previously experienced (Baas, 1992) Plato’s theory is therefore enhanced by the theory put forward by Jouvet, that we are born with this satisfaction previously experienced as part of our psychological heritage that has been programmed into our memory by fetal dreams. What Plato refers to as our soul is what Jouvet would consider our psyche that is based in our fetal dreams.
For Lacan, over and above desire in terms of an articulated desire towards a desired object, there is the Thing. In terms of a lost object the Thing recalls the Freudian concept of an ‘experience of satisfaction’ to be understood certainly as an original experience. For Freud there is certainly the original experience of the mother, of which the memory traces constitute a sort of dissolved image in the psyche of a satisfying object. This image determines the elaboration of desire and engages the subject to find what is lost according to a logic of identity. If we follow the maze of representations, the associative knots, the fantasies and the dreams we will always find ourselves there; the body of the mother. This is what, according to the Freudian tradition, will give a meaning to the ‘lost object’, the body of the mother is the embodiment of the Thing (Baas, 1992)
Lacan attempts a transcendental theory of desire. To the question what is there in the subject which renders the loss possible from which the desire proceeds, Lacan employs this word - the Thing - precisely because the Thing is not discernible, even less representable, because to give a content to this thing means that one has already entered into the game of the signifiers, one has already confused the thing with the desired object, the Thing is already reduced to something desirable for its own sake. Consequently the Thing is above the signifying game through which operates the desiring function of the subject, even if – or rather – because it is the condition which renders the game possible.
For Lacan, the Thing is ‘hors-signifié’ which means impossible to signify. The loss is anterior to what is lost. This means that if there is desire, and if the desire permeates all the detours of the substitutive process, of the signifying metonomy, it is not by virtue of the loss of some origin of sorts, but it is precisely because the loss is itself the origin. That is why the object of desire, the desired object, is always an object that has been found again The Thing is the loss itself, the fundamental and original lack, a pure lack which constitutes the subject in terms of being a divided subject (Baas, 1992).
It is necessary therefore to distinguish the desired object and the ‘object which is the cause of desire’; the latter, always qualified in these terms by Lacan, is what he refers to as l’objet a, which literally means the object ‘a’ in lower case. The letter A stands for Other (Autre in French). L’objet a is always designated as an object separated, detached, from whatever may be the desired object, the maternal breast, the feces, the voice, or the regard. It is not reducible to the desired object, nor is it identifiable with the subject of the desire, the desiring subject. It is simply articulated by the desiring subject which is itself a subject divided. This division comes about in the subject because its desire proceeds from nothing tangible, but only from the pure lack of the Thing. It is the lack of the Thing which bars the subject from desire. No matter how desire expresses itself, always articulated within it is the fantasy of l’objet a. The fantasy of the lack renders possible the synthesis of the facultyof desiring and of the empirical desired object (Baas, 1992).
Before the separation, that is before birth, there is neither subject nor object. It is the separation which produces at the same time both the subject and the object. Alienation and separation are therefore the constituents of the subject. In Lacan’s theory the subject does not come into existence until approximately six months after birth with the commencement of the mirror stage. The loss therefore occurs at a time prior to formation of the subject, and therefore logically prior to the feeling of desire itself. The desire can only abstract itself from the signifying order in which it is constituted. In desire derived from the signifying order there is a sort of small remainder which rises up from the (anterior) pure lack, that is to say l’objet a. (Baas, 1992). Lacan’s theory therefore reinforces the theory of Jouvet. Evidently the fetal dreams have no subject per se. The fetus is dreaming of its circumstances in utero which provide for it a psychological heritage. It is only after birth when the umbilical cord is cut, and the subject begins to constitute itself, that desire comes into play. Because the loss preceded the subject we can understand Lacan’s assertion that l’objet a exists only in the fantasy of desire and not in reality.
The Thing is not an object of this world and is not a part of this world, even if it is true that the world is what constitutes itself for the subject through the network of signifiers. Nor is the fetal dream experience of the placenta and the fetal envelope of this world. It truly predates the advent of the subject itself. The Thing, or the pure lack, here occupies the place of an unconditioned absolute, in as much as it is from what desire proceeds, and yet it can not be articulated by this desire through a signifier. To cover the Thing, the pure lack, by a signifier is to constitute a ‘myth’ according to Lacan.
Thus for example, (and evidently it is not important what example) to identify the Thing as the body of the mother is a myth to use Lacan’s word, that is to say with exactitude, the transcendental illusion (Baas, 1992). What the fetus experienced in its dreams was of another world. What the fetus lost was the aquatic milieu in the amniotic fluid, the link with the mother via the placenta and the umbilical cord. However, to say this is obviously to reenter the world of signifiers. We are again in the grip of the transcendental illusion. It is actually impossible for us to conceive the precise nature of the fetal dream of its intrauterine experience, which is why it will always be for us a pure lack.
The myth consists of giving a figure to the Thing (it is the figure, the mythical figure of the great maternal goddess), but it also consists – and this is why it is an illusion – in supposing a consistent or substantial reality behind the figure, a reality of which the figure can only be an appearance or the symbolic manifestation (it is the body of the mother in the supposed experience of the original satisfaction).
In order to avoid such an illusion, it is necessary, opposed to the myth, to affirm that behind the figure there is nothing, that there is nothing else than the Thing, that is to say the pure lack (Baas, 1992). The fetal dream can not be proved as a fact. The content of fetal dreams is not of this world and has no place in the order of signifiers which we take to be reality. From the point of view of a living subject, the fetal dream that forms the base of our psychological heritage is precisely what Lacan suggests – nothing. Nothing, that is, in the sense of no thing. And yet it is the fantasy…
REFERENCES
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