Select Page

A Question of Ethics: Dream Interpretation and the Danger of Acting Out

by | Vol 18 (3/4) 2000

There is a reluctance to talk about the actuality of the clinic. As a clinician, I remain convinced that it is useful to do so. One has to be clear, however, about one’s motive. Quite apart from issues of confidentiality, a clinical account often does not translate well for the reader. In this paper, my motive runs to using the example of a dream, coupled with a potential crisis in the form of an acting out, to illustrate the psychoanalytic act as an ethical act. In addition, I am challenging a critique of the so-called Lacanian clinic. Through this challenge, I am attempting to define, while working within the confines of a circumscribed clinical example, what it is that allows me say, in as much as anyone can say such a thing, that, as an analyst, my actions are ethical. I realise that this precludes other types of intervention, in particular, transference interpretation.

Download full text

Related articles

  • Dream Interpretation: The Interpretation of Dreams?

    In this article the author explores what is involved when working with dream material in a clinical setting. She starts with the difficulties Freud encountered in the Interpretation of Dreams when attempting to discuss this complicated material in a concise way. This leads the author to the matter of the interpretation itself. Using several of Freud's articles she explores different approaches to the concept of interpretation and confronts the reader with some of Freud's ideas on working with dreams. The…

  • A New Paradigm: Dream Interpretation in the Footsteps of Bion

    In contrast to Freud's theory that dream-work is necessary to disguise unconscious wishes, Bion conceives of dreaming as a filter that sorts, categorizes, and prioritizes emotional facts that are stimulated by sensory input. First, emotional experiences must be rendered capable of being dreamt. Bion equates dreaming with unconscious waking thought and with reverie. Psychotics are not able to dream; they have visual experiences during sleep, nightmares and nocturnal hallucinations which are of a different character. Bion conceives a dream as…

  • Dream Interpretation and Transference: How far does the Via Regia Reach?

    In this contribution the importance of dream interpretation in the treatment of the neurotic subject is questioned. Starting from the analogy between dream work and symptom formation, it is argued that dream interpretation constitutes for a fruitful way of exploring the unconscious in the cure. In order to relate dream interpretation to the end of the treatment, dream analysis is elucidated in its entanglement with transference. As an alternative to the kind of dream interpretation that pursues illusory completeness, or…