Reverie, countertransference dreams and joke-work
Deep into my training analysis as I struggled with longstanding conflicts around ambition that had not yielded to numerous attempts to understand the dynamics from a variety of angles, my analyst told me the following joke:
Two cavemen were talking and one asked the other, ‘Have you seen Oop lately?’ ‘No,’ he answered, ‘do you mean Oop, the one who discovered fire?’ ‘Yes, that’s the one,’ said the first one. ‘Isn’t he the one who invented the wheel?’ said the second one. ‘Yes, that’s the Oop I’m talking about.’ ‘Right,’ said the second caveman, ‘but what’s he done lately?’
I was surprised that he shared a joke, something he had never done before, which had a deep resonance in me that seemed to tap into the essence of what I was struggling with, though I could not say why. However, over the years, I have repeatedly returned to that joke and each time appreciated its value in having addressed the various layers of conflict that were unpacked in subsequent treatment and self-analysis. In retrospect, the joke was one of the most memorable interventions my analyst had made in terms of its direct and lasting impact and it served the same function similar to an interpretation, but actually more comprehensive in its reach. In preparing to write this paper I contacted my analyst and asked if he recalled telling me the joke and whether it had spontaneously arisen in the moment that he told it. He replied that it had crossed his mind before but in that particular session it arose spontaneously and he said it as it came to him.
In this paper I examine three pathways to representing the analyst’s unconscious experience of the analytic hour: reverie, countertransference dreams and joke-work, and I will discuss the similarities and differences between these modes of representation. I emphasize that each of these phenomena occur spontaneously in the analyst’s mind either in the immediacy of the clinical hour (reveries and jokes) or occurring serendipitously while asleep (dreams); thus, I see each of these as related occurrences I term spontaneous unconscious constructions that are formed by a similar process. Briefly put, each are created by a preconscious thought that initiates an unconscious process from which the dream, joke or reverie emerges unbidden in the analyst’s mind. The “end product” (joke, dream, reverie) of this development is an unconscious depiction, as the clinician experiences it, of what is occurring in the analytic field of the moment. In addition to rendering an unconscious “snapshot” of the momentary analytic engagement, I also see these modes of representation as potential markers and important elements of working through. Clinical material from the analysis of an adult man will be offered to illustrate these three forms of representing the analyst’s unconscious experience in the analytic session.
In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud (1900) detailed the process of dream formation. He observed that a preconscious thought1 that evoked an emotion during the day became linked during sleep with a forbidden unconscious wish2 and that this formation (preconscious thought infused with the unconscious wish) was subjected to a process of dream-work to disguise the unconscious wish so that it might pass through the censor that kept it from appearing in consciousness. Dream-work, therefore, engaged in an operation of representation by which one thing (unconscious wish mated with preconscious thought) was represented by another (dream symbol). The dream-work accomplished its camouflaging mission through the mechanisms of condensation, displacement, faulty reasoning, turning into the opposite and absurdity.3
In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud (1905b) introduced the notion of joke-work, which is a mental process closely allied with dreamwork and that “nonsense in jokes is made to serve the same aims of representation [as in dreams]” (p. 175). Freud pays most attention to jokes that appear involuntarily in the joke-teller’s mind: this process is launched by a barely recognized preconscious thought that “plunges into the unconscious” (p. 170) where it is linked with words and then effortlessly emerges as the joke “as a rule ready-clothed in words” (p. 167). In my view (Brown, 2016b), the true joke is a temporary structure that appears unbidden in the joke-teller’s mind, like a dream or a reverie, and is one pathway to representing unconscious (or unrepresented) psychic material (Brown, 2016a). Like a reverie and the countertransference dream, joke-work creates a selected fact (Bion, 1962b) that unconsciously and instantaneously organizes the affects permeating the intersubjective field, which through the process of evoking laughter binds the meaning conveyed in the joke as a kind of interpretation.
Each of these three spontaneous unconscious constructions demonstrates the mind’s way of representing the range of unconscious emotions active in the analytic hour by compacting these into a highly condensed, multiple layered and detailed construction. I use the word “construction” deliberately to suggest an active process of transforming the affects of the intersubjective field that yields a more or less “finished” product – a dream about one’s patient, a reverie or a joke. In Freud’s (1937) usage, a construction was a consciously formulated idea in the analyst’s mind4 about what could have happened in the analysand’s early life to explain his symptoms; however, I am emphasizing an unconscious process that forms instantaneously to depict the manifold levels of emotional meaning activated in the here-and-now clinical situation. These interwoven affective layers that are compressed into the spontaneous unconscious constructions are comprised of the patient’s affective pain of the moment, its associations in his inner object world, the analyst’s unconscious reactions to the patient’s “transfer of suffering” (Meltzer, 1986) via projective identification and the analyst’s inner objects that resonate with the patient’s projections.
Freud’s theory describes how a dream forms within an individual’s psyche and I want to focus now on the mutual unconscious process of shared dreaming that defines the analytic field. The concept of the field derives from Bion’s work on groups in which he hypothesized three kinds of unconscious basic assumptions that appeared in work groups when the task of the group was derailed, such as the shared phantasy that a savior will appear to rescue the group and reinstate the earlier calm. In the early 1960s, Willy and Madeleine Baranger (1962/2008) in Uruguay extended Bion’s concept of basic assumptions and viewed the analytic couple as a two-person group in which a shared unconscious phantasy of the couple, analogous to a basic assumption, may emerge. In this regard, taken from a field theory point of view, it is not important to ask, “Who’s thought was it?” as Ogden (2003a) has posed, but rather the shared phantasy is created through the intersection of the analysand’s and analyst’s unconscious experience in the hour. Each member of the dyad may transform that phantasy or dream in his own way, but the source of their respective transformations is a jointly constructed shared unconscious phantasy.5
I cannot overemphasize the centrality of condensation in the formation of the spontaneous unconscious constructions I am describing. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud (1900) included condensation as one of the elements in dream-work and I think it is one of the least understood components of dream creation . Freud, of course, approached the dream’s formation from an exclusively intrapsychic perspective and through the activity of condensation the preconscious thoughts (day residue) alloyed with unconscious wishes were mixed, matched and assembled together, as it were, to create the dream’s narrative through the dream-work. Interestingly, he adds a fascinating twist to this process of combining different unconscious wishes and notes that the act of condensation is preceded by a destructive process:
When the whole mass of these dream-thoughts [unconscious wishes] is brought under the pressure of dream-work, and its elements are turned about, broken into fragments and jammed together – almost like pack-ice.6
(p. 312)
This evocative metaphor captures the image of fragments of ice massing together and conveys an important aspect of the dream’s construction: that the dream is not built from whole unconscious wishes (combined with preconscious thoughts) pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle, then disguised and assembled into a narrative; rather, each unconscious wish is violently dismantled as though sledge-hammered into shards and these fragments are reassembled into the manifest dream content. Thus, Freud asserts, in the formation of a dream “a work of condensation on a large scale has been carried out” (p. 279) [italics in original]; therefore, the fragments from which the dream is built derive from many sources. For example, one may have a dream of a threatening man, which analysis shows is a composite of the sneer of a High School teacher, the hair color of a favorite uncle, the tie one’s father wore at a funeral, the perceived impatience of one’s analyst, etc. Thus, the relationship between the latent and manifest content is not veridical, which accounts for the frequent impression that a dream may never be fully understood because of the seemingly endless array of unconscious wish shards from which the dream is built.
Freud (1900) wonders, “How is that condensation brought about?” (p. 281) and goes on to detail how unconscious wishes cluster around a “nodal point” (p. 283) but leaves this idea unexamined. In the Jokes book he observed that the day residue,7 defined as a “tissue of thoughts . . . which has been built up during the day and has not been completely dealt with . . . joins with an unconscious wish to provide[s] a fulcrum for the dream-work” (pp. 160–161). This nodal point initiates the dream-work that through the activity of condensation compacts (“pack-ices”) the fragmented unconscious wishes coupled with preconscious thoughts and binds them to each other. Where Freud sees the role of dream-work to disguise the unconscious wish, Bion asserts (1992) that the origin of a dream, while asleep or awake, is an affective experience that has not yet been represented; that is, not having been transformed into what he calls an “emotional thought” (transformation from β→α elements) upon which the capacity to dream rests. In my opinion, it is the emotional event that is yet to be represented which both calls forth the associated unconscious wishes and also binds these together into the dream’s narrative. If the individual unconscious wishes are the bricks from which the dream is built, then the mortar holding these together is the affective experience that resides at the center of the dream.
However, we may wonder if it is sufficient to explain the formation of the dream solely by an emotional event that pulls the shattered unconscious wishes to its core, thereby creating the dream’s highly condensed narrative, like an impersonal magnet draws iron filings together? Or, perhaps, is there a psychic agency at work that conscientiously chooses those elements (alpha elements) that best signify the emotional experience in order to represent it, like a painter who carefully chooses the best color to capture a particular mood? If so, the handiwork of such an agency would also be evident in the creation of a joke or reverie. James Grotstein (2000) has thought about this question from an anthropomorphic perspective and proposes the existence of an internal presence8 when he asks, “Who is the dreamer who dreams the dream?” He suggests that we replace “dream-work” with the notion of a “dreaming couple,” an heir to the earliest exchanges between the infant and the mother whose containing reveries give meaning to the baby’s painful experiences. Italian colleagues have viewed this activity as a sort of stagecraft (Civitarese, 2005) with an internal “casting agent” (Civitarese & Ferro, 2013) who picks the best inner object, or creates it anew (a “character”), to represent the emotions that suffuse the field.
In my view, the same process of condensation is at work in the architecture of jokes, reveries and countertransference dreams that appear spontaneously in the analyst’s mind during the session, though these constructions are even more complex than the creation of an individual’s dream. In the analytic situation, these unbidden psychic events arise from strands of emotional meaning that flow from the unconscious activation of the analyst and patient in the immediacy of the clinical hour: analogous regions in each of their minds are mobilized and bits and pieces of their respective psyches are instantaneously condensed to forge the shared unconscious phantasy of the couple that represents the mood of the session. This shared phantasy, which seems akin to Ogden’s (1994) intersubjective analytic third, is a highly complex network that flows spontaneously from the unconscious interaction between the analytic couple. An unconscious jointly constructed affective mood takes hold of the hour and is subsequently transformed through each member’s personal metaphors.
From an intersubjective perspective, the same question may be raised: by what process and through which psychic agency is the shared unconscious phantasy of the hour organized? In the immediacy of the analytic hour affects arise as the internal worlds of the patient and analyst unconsciously communicate and a shared unconscious phantasy of the couple evolves to narrate/dream the emotional situation of which the analytic couple remains unaware. This shared phantasy is constructed from experiences in the psyches of analyst and patient that resonate with the emotional core of their mutual unconscious experience and represents their respective transformation/dream of the field’s emotional hue from within each of their respective representational worlds; thus, particular internal objects in the analyst’s and patient’s psyches are identified as best suited to represent the emotional coloring of the field. Just as Freud described how unconscious wishes in an individual’s dream have been deconstructed, so these inner objects of the analysand and analyst are subsequently broken apart and then reassembled as the images populating the dream, the reverie or the joke. These oneiric images are composite figures assembled from aspects of each member of the analytic pair that have been quarried from various levels of their individual emotional lives, resulting in an infinite number of potential chimeras to represent the shared unconscious phantasy.
I will now turn to discuss how the unbidden appearance of a joke, a reverie and a countertransference dream occurred to me at various points in the analytic work with a patient and how these spontaneous unconscious structures served to represent the emotional climate of the hours in which these appeared. These manifestations prompted self-analytic work that enabled me to grab hold of sadistic themes that hovered at the edge of our respective awareness, yet which both the patient and I defended against. I also address how a working through process was evident in the emergence of first a joke, then a reverie and, finally, a countertransference dream.
Mr. B., a man in his mid-sixties, has lived alone his entire adult life although he has had many relationships with women, some lasting several years. He has enjoyed significant success in his career that has enabled him to fashion a life in which he needs little from others. His lively imagination and sense of irony is very engaging and he is proud of a particular aesthetic characterized by simplicity: he appears to wear the same casual clothes every day, though in reality he has a large number of identical slacks, shirts and shoes. The interior of his home is nearly monochromatic, with some splashes of color, and he has a picturesque summer residence that is quiet and bucolic. In his analysis we have understood this need for sameness as offering a buffer zone against various impingements from sounds that are too loud, colors too bright, an unpredictably rageful father, a painful experience with a woman who “dropped” him, and latency age friends who would unsuspectedly physically attack him. I commented that his nickname could be Mr. 72 degrees, which he has subsequently adopted for himself, since he committed much of his life to maintaining an unwavering physical and emotional climate.
Not long into Mr. B.’s analysis, he was buffeted by numerous losses of important family members which broadsided him with unexpected waves of sadness. However, what unnerved him the most was the stormy relationship and his intense rage with R., a beautiful woman much younger than he, who embodied “aesthetic perfection.” In one session, Mr. B. expressed his fear of getting openly angry towards R. and I commented that he seemed anxious about his anger invading the quietly peaceful time with her and that it was also difficult to bring his rage into the sessions, which he preferred to keep tranquil. He went on to talk about the order of things getting disrupted, his fears of overreacting and that he easily feels overwhelmed; that “it’s a less than easy way to be.”9 I said that the phrase, “a less than easy way to be,” and took the fire out of his rage, which he acknowledged as his typical defense of smoothing things out.
At this point in the session, the following joke spontaneously came to my mind:
It is the mid-1930s in Berlin and two Jewish men, fearing that Hitler was going to be very bad for the Jews, hatched a plot to assassinate him. They followed his routine travels around the city and discovered that every Tuesday at 11 AM he passed a certain corner. They got a gun and waited for him to appear. They wait 15 minutes, no Hitler; then one-half hour and still no Hitler. Finally, after an hour, one man turns to the other and says, “Gee, I hope he’s OK.”
I assumed that this was a product of my unconscious joke-work giving representation to emotions in the intersubjective field and that the appearance of the character, Hitler, pointed to powerfully destructive affects permeating that field (Ferro, 2009a). In addition, to paraphrase Ogden (2003a), who’s joke was this? I thought of the joke as a tragic-comic story arising in my mind but sponsored by linked unconscious processes operating out of the awareness of Mr. B. and me. Furthermore, given Freud’s observation that joke-work, like dream-work, is partly created through the mechanism of condensation, I immediately detected multiple themes active in the hour, and also tied to our respective histories, tightly compacted into this joke. On one level, the two Jewish men out to assassinate Hitler were Mr. B. and me, with Hitler representing my patient’s, and I believe my, feared destructiveness. The humor disguises the terrible reality of the Holocaust, which, despite the manic feeling of being able to prevent it in the joke, nevertheless wrought its annihilating slaughter. Was I representing a feeling that Mr. B. and I were equally incapable of managing powerful hostile emotions should they arise in our relationship? Unbeknownst to Mr. B., he and I were born in the same part of New York City several years after World War II and, though neither of our families had been directly touched by the Holocaust, knowledge of its horrors permeated the emotional atmosphere of our early childhoods. For example, my mother, who was an identical twin, talked about Mengele’s inhuman twin experiments, which brought the barbarism of Auschwitz too close to home. From the angle of Mr. B.’s inner object world, we can see how his internal persecutors (his father and childhood bullies) were also folded into the Hitler figure. Thus, from a Freudian perspective, this joke expressed a shared wish that we could avert sadistic aggression from invading the analysis; from a Bionian vertex, the joke represented the immediate unconscious anxiety of the session, i.e, our shared fear that a cruel aggression might spiral out of control.
I had the sense that this joke contained a preliminary sort of interpretation and noticed that the joke came to mind immediately after Mr. B. diminished feeling overwhelmed by saying, “it’s a less than easy way to be.” It felt important to offer some statement about what I thought was going on in the moment though I was unable to extract something cogent from the joke to say and thus I decided to let the joke speak for itself. I said that when he stated “it’s a less than easy way to be” a joke came to mind that I thought had something important to say about what was happening in the session at the moment. He said it reminded him of the story of the Golem (a Frankenstein-like figure created out of earth) who came to life to save the Jews of Prague from ruin. I said that the Golem prevented a catastrophe and Mr. B. continued by talking about his pleasure in creating something good that made him feel things were under his control. I interpreted:
Putting together what you are telling me about the Golem saving everything from ruin and the joke about trying to kill Hitler, I think there’s something about preventing a devastating catastrophe that we’re talking about.
Mr. B. replied:
I have a fear that equilibrium, that existence could be knocked over – there’s a scared little boy in there, he exists within me. When I’m in my element everything’s OK, but often I’m not. I set the bar of a 72 degree room to keep from feeling vulnerable, but maybe it’s too high and I’m making myself even more vulnerable because of that.
If we pay close attention to Freud’s view of how jokes are unconsciously constructed, we can place their spontaneous appearance in the analyst’s (or patient’s) mind on equal footing with the importance accorded to dreams and reveries. Like reveries, jokes that appear unbidden in the analytic hour are instigated by a preconscious thought that “plunges into the unconscious” and is associated with powerful affective experiences that magnetically draw associated memories and internal objects together, molding these into the reverie or dream that then appears in conscious thinking as a visual/auditory reverie or as a spontaneous joke already “fully clothed in words.” Both may express a wish and also offer a “commentary” on what is happening in the unconscious intersubjective field of the moment. I want to underline once more that we cannot overemphasize the essential role that condensation plays in the formation of a reverie, joke or dream and reflects the incredible capacity of the mind, in barely a moment, to fashion a multi-layered composite that symbolically registers unconscious and/or unrepresented affects.
I will now present material from Mr. B.’s analysis several weeks after the “joke” session to illustrate the use of reverie and a countertransference dream as pathways to representing the analyst’s unconscious experience in the analytic hour. In a Thursday session, the last of the four sessions of the week, I returned a minute late from an appointment out of my office to be greeted by Mr. B. in my waiting room who said somewhat sarcastically, “Welcome home, you’re cutting it close!” On the couch he spoke anxiously about an angry argument with R. and that she was not returning his calls. I commented that perhaps it feels that both R. and I are “cutting it too close,” leaving him in an uncertain situation. He went on to speak about things being out of his control, which inevitably brought up memories of childhood friends who unexpectedly bullied him. I said that he needs to feel in control of situations in order to avoid being thrown into an unsafe and unprotected place, to which Mr. B. responded by speaking about feeling trapped doing things he did not want to do and having feelings he did not want to have. He continued, “I don’t like being that angry, I end up not feeling like a player anymore.”
I think Freud’s observation that a joke is initiated by a preconscious thought that is pushed into the unconscious and then resurfaces as a joke also applies to the formation of a reverie. When Mr. B. spoke of “not feeling like a player” the word “player” triggered the following reverie for me: a scene from the film, The Pope of Greenwich Village, in which three small time hoodlums, one of whom is an older man probably in his sixties, steal money from a Mafia boss and are found out. One of the younger men has his thumb cut off and the older thief, realizing that he would be killed, moves out of town in haste leaving behind his wife and child. The central part of my reverie is the look of having been beaten down in the older man’s face, which evokes a sense of humiliation in me. I was distracted by my evocative reverie and then “rejoined” Mr. B. as he said he would like a t-shirt with “just leave me alone” printed on it. He continued by expressing a wish for a Fortress of Solitude, Superman’s private place for rest and reflection and that, “I have no breathing room, no place to go; it would be an important place to go to for my survival.” I replied, “I think being here feels like a place of solitude and my being a minute or two late today seems to have punctured that, threatened your survival.” As the hour came to a close, I felt that my interventions had emphasized Mr. B.’s need for safety to the exclusion of sadistic themes of being beaten down, castrated and his survival threatened.
Over the weekend I had the following dream:
He and I are in a bathroom and he is on his knees washing out the tub, cleaning it. I notice that he has stacked some items, perhaps on the sink nearby, that look like they could be from my desk. I have a feeling of being intruded upon: that he has gone into my bathroom, moved my things and placed them somewhere they don’t belong and that he is cleaning my bathtub.
The dream brought to mind that even though Mr. B. is respectful of my boundaries, doesn’t ask where I go or other personal questions, that he enters the office like he owns the place: he puts his keys and cell phone on my desk and drapes his jacket on the desk chair in a friendly manner while asking me how I am, so that I have not been aware of feeling intruded on. Nevertheless, the dream evokes emotions of being controlled by and encroached on through his apparent kindness, like his scrubbing the tub as though it belonged to him. There is also something pathetic and devalued about the dream image of him on his knees cleaning the bathtub and this brings to mind the defeated and humiliated older man from my reverie in the last session. Finally, the phrase, “like he owns the place,” is an idiom my mother used and, together with the image of scrubbing the tub, brings her intrusiveness to mind.
I (Brown, 2007) view the countertransference dream as revealing the deep unconscious way the patient is being dreamed into existence (Ogden, 2005) in the analyst’s mind. This is an unconscious mental activity by which the analysand gradually comes emotionally alive for the analyst through the linkage of aspects of the patient with analogous sectors in the analyst’s mind. In addition, affects that arise within a session that exceed the capacity of the analyst and patient to represent in the hour may serve as preconscious day residues that stimulate the countertransference dream. In the session in which my Pope of Greenwich Village reverie occurred, Mr. B. began with a sarcastic comment when I was late for a minute and went on to speak about his fear of losing control of his anger, feeling bullied and needing to be in charge of situations. I interpreted that being in control was a means of feeling safe and he replied that when he is not in charge he no longer feels like a “player,” which triggered my reverie and associated emotions of being beaten down and humiliated. Thus, my reverie picked up on and represented Mr. B.’s fear that survival was at stake and his need for safety; however, by emphasizing the need for protection I unconsciously sidestepped the aggression in the hour: “cutting things too closely,” being beaten down and the sadistic Mafioso cutting off a thumb.
I believe that the theme of sadistic control that was not directly addressed in the session sponsored my countertransference dream three days later that depicted these emotions on several levels. My initial feeling in the dream was that Mr. B. was being helpful in cleaning my tub, but this quickly changed to feeling invaded by him, which brought to mind his controlling behavior in the sessions, masked by chatty friendliness, and acting “like he owned the place.” In addition, casting Mr. B. as cleaning the tub on his knees made me aware of my sadistic wish to control, diminish and humiliate him, which reminded me of the beaten down older thief in my reverie, a representation that condensed my empathy for Mr. B. with a sadistic wish to dominate him. Furthermore, the connection to memories of my mother amplified the theme of invasiveness and control and added another layer of meaning that transformed the shared emotional field into one colored by sadism, dominance and humiliation. Thus, my countertransference dream appeared to give representation to a conflict active at that moment in the analysis: two men in their sixties engaged in an unconscious struggle for dominance, hidden by friendly feelings and apparent helpfulness, and both struggling to stay oblivious to these emotions.
In this chapter, I have focused on three pathways by which the analyst represents his unconscious experience in the immediacy of the clinical hour: reverie, joke-work and the countertransference dream. There is much that these transformational processes have in common and important ways in which they differ. All three are formed by a similar process: an emotional experience that must be represented for unconscious communication to occur through the evocation of analogous affects in the receiver, what E. L. and E. M. da Rocha Barros (in press) call the “expressive function of the mind.” I want to emphasize that joke-work, reveries and dream-work in the countertransference dream are not only pathways to representation, but also offer a window into seeing the expressive function of the mind at work in the moment of the session. Thus, we can posit the same general mechanism by which all three phenomena form: an emotional event (preconscious thought/day residue) occurs that is not represented at the moment it is experienced, which then “plunges into the unconscious” (Freud, 1905a) where it is instantly condensed with a network of associations through dream-work or joke-work and then reappears in conscious thought as a reverie, joke or countertransference dream.
However, there are also differences between these psychic events. Reveries and jokes are formed in the here-and-now of the analytic hour while countertransference dreams are constructed perhaps days after the initiating emotional stimulus. Put another way, the reverie and the joke are more experienced near to the instigating emotional event and are more clearly tied to the affects alive during the session in the intersubjective field. On the one hand, since there are many interceding events occurring between the clinical hour and the subsequent countertransference dream, it is much more difficult to trace the dream images back to the original emotional residue of the session. However, on the other hand, the countertransference dream offers us insight into how these affects have been transformed by dream-work/alpha function and folded into the dreamer’s unconscious associative networks. Consequently, we see how my countertransference dream gave vivid representation to the sadistic feelings that were embedded in my joke and in my reverie, but were defended against in the here-and-now of the sessions and avoided in my interpretations.
I would like to offer some comments about interpretation. As Bion (1965) has taught us (Chapter 4), an interpretation is the analyst’s transformation of the affects active in the here-and-now of the session. How does the clinician use such data in formulating an interpretation, that is, developing an hypothesis about what is occurring in the moment? It is here that I believe the joke differs from the reverie and countertransference dream. We will recall that Freud (1905a) stated the joke emerges from the unconscious “as a rule ready-clothed in words” (p. 167), which immediately distinguishes it from the countertransference dream and reverie that are primarily visual and/or auditory in nature. The joke is a more organized structure that has already been encoded verbally at the time of its appearance in consciousness, having condensed various levels of meaning through the process of joke-work. Thus, in many instances, such as my joke about Hitler, the joke is also a sophisticated interpretation that may yield an image of the momentary emotional field, thereby evoking further associations in the patient and analyst. However, due to the fact that the joke has been created unconsciously and comprises many condensed levels of meaning, the analyst may remain unaware of what he is fully communicating to the patient, as in the joke that my analyst told me. Thus, in relating a joke to the patient, the analyst may be offering an inadvertent interpretation. Similarly, David Lieberman, the Argentine psychoanalyst, would occasionally tell a joke to a patient that he considered an interpretive action (Pistiner de Cortiñas, 2015).
In contrast, the reverie and countertransference dream also offer potential insights into the therapeutic relationship, but these require the analyst to first ferret out meanings that are less clear and have yet to be registered verbally. Thus, the Pope of Greenwich Village reverie was at first enigmatic until I was moved by the feelings of humiliation and being beaten down as well as the need for safety that the reverie induced in me. I was swayed by these anxieties to ignore the implicit sadistic trends in the joke as well as in the reverie. However, away from the pressure of the session in which sadistic control was mutually defended against by Mr. B. and me, the countertransference dream absorbed and gave expression to the affects too threatening for this analytic pair to face in the hour. In this manner, the three pathways to representing the analyst’s unconscious experience of the hour worked in tandem; each providing a unique vertex by which the patient, and the relationship between the analyst and analysand, come to life in the analyst’s mind.
What I have been describing is how reverie, joke-work and countertransference dreams have a role in working through. Although Freud’s (1914) focus in working through was on repetition of the repressed past as encrypted in the transference neurosis, he also stated that the analysand acts out his neurosis “not [as] an event of the past, but as a present day force” (p. 151). When Bion (1967b) gave his first lecture in Los Angeles recommending that the analyst forgo “memory and desire,” he introduced his talk by saying he really had nothing new to say. In another publication I commented that
What is most evident to me in “Notes on Memory and Desire” is Bion’s unequivocal emphasis on the here-and-now of the session that is implicit in Freud’s (1914) notion of the transference neurosis as a “present day force” (p. 151), but which Bion brings into bold relief as the centerpiece of his technical recommendations.
(Brown, 2015a, p. 334; Chapter 11)
In addition, just as Freud (1912) recommended that the analyst “give himself over completely to his ‘unconscious memory’ ” (p. 112), so Bion urged the analyst to be patiently receptive to “some idea or pictorial impression [which] floats into the mind unbidden as a whole” (p. 279). Thus, the spontaneous unconscious constructions of reverie, joke-work and countertransference dreams are the equivalent of Freud’s “present day force” that represent the emotions alive in the moment of the session; however, unlike Freud’s view that these are crafted from repressed memories, these constructions are highly condensed creations assembled from facets of internal objects in both the analyst and analysand adhered together by the unconscious affects permeating the hour.
Brenman Pick (1985) has written about working through in the countertransference by which she means how the analyst manages the inevitable disturbing effect of the patient’s projective identifications. She importantly asserts that the clinician must internally work through the evoked emotional disruption, what she calls “catch the illness” of the patient, in order to be able to give the analysand a “truly deep versus superficial interpretation” (p. 158). Her focus remains on the analyst achieving a clarity between what the patient projects and the analyst’s reaction to the projection in order to enhance interpretive accuracy. With regard to contemporary analytic field theory, Ferro (2009b) broadens Brenman Pick’s notion of the analyst catching the illness of the patient and comments that the intersubjective field itself may fall ill, contaminated by the shared “illness” of the analytic couple. However, for Ferro, the “cure” for this malady is the restoration of a capacity for dreaming (in the Bionian sense) in order to resume transformation of emotional experience that has been arrested by the “illness” of the field. In this regard, once transformative dreaming returns the analytic couple recover their fertility and spontaneous unconscious constructions reappear as though out of hibernation.
What, then, is the role that reverie, joke-work and countertransference dreams play in working through? As Ogden (2004a) has said, patients come to us for help with dreaming their psychotic dreams too painful to dream (night terrors) or their interrupted non-psychotic dreams (nightmares). In assisting the analysand to dream split off or inaccessible experience the analyst is helping the patient symbolize and “it is through the process of building up of symbols in the dream work that part of the process of working through takes place” (Rocha Barros, 2002, p. 1085). The process of transformation from a raw emotion into a symbol, what Bion terms an “emotional thought,” is a beginning stage in working through since one cannot work through anything unless it is first represented. Unrepresented experience is evacuated from the psyche by acting out or as psychosomatic difficulties, drug addiction, etc. The analyst’s capacity to transform affective experience through his reverie, joke-work or countertransference dreams is therefore a vital step that leads to the capacity for working through.
1 In The Interpretation of Dreams he called used the term day residue but later replaced this with preconscious thought. I will use the latter term for purposes of clarity.
2 Again, Freud (1900) appears to use the terms latent dream thoughts and unconscious wishes interchangeably, but I will use unconscious wishes for purposes of clarity.
3 With regard to “absurdity” as one of the mechanisms of dream-work, in Strachey’s Introduction to The Interpretation of Dreams he notes that the original draft of the book included many jokes as examples of dream-work. However, Wilhelm Fleiss advised him to remove most of them and Freud resolved to write an entire book dealing with that subject, which he did in the (1905) Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious.
4 Even though the construction is a consciously deliberative act by the analyst, I (Brown, 2009) suggest that it is the end product of an unconscious process within the analyst’s mind that is partly sponsored by the analysand’s projective identifications and the analyst’s transformation of these.
5 In Bionian terms, the Barangers’ “shared unconscious phantasy of the couple” corresponds to his notion of the “shared O of the session” (what I labelled as TapO) in Chapter 4.
6 “A large area of floating ice, usually occurring in polar seas, consisting of separate pieces that have become massed together,” Collins English Dictionary.
7 Freud (1922) later considered the day residue to be a preconscious thought.
8 Indeed, the subtitle of Grotstein’s (2000) book is, “A Study of Psychic Presences . . .”
9 This comment is reminiscent of a joke Freud recounted in his Jokes book: a man is about to get hanged on a Monday morning and his last words are, “Well, this week isn’t turning out too well.”