In every time and every place, humans have wondered about their dreams. Mythologies, prophecies, and religions of every culture have taken an interest in dreams, referring to them directly or through allegories, and even going as far as using them for material purposes. However, the merit of discovering and formulating the personal meaning of the dream, its infantile and sexual origin, and its unconscious dimension, lies with Freud.

On May 28th 1899, telling Fliess of his intention to publish The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud confided, “it is my finest and probably my only lasting discovery”¹. Published in 1900, 
the book marks a break with Freud’s neuroscientific itinerary, which started in 1877 and culminated in 1895 with Project for a Scientific Psychology (originally titled Psychology for Neurologists!).The Interpretation of Dreams is revolutionary for various reasons, but above all because it provides a definition and model with respect to a new category of thought – the psychic, distinct from the mental, as understood by nineteenth-century psychology and psychiatry, and because it introduces an original method to investigate this category: the free associations. It is also revolutionary because in order to lay the foundations of what would then become metapsychology, that is, the systematisation of psychic phenomena in a single theoretical model, Freud starts from a physiological product common to all humans – the dream – rather than from psychopathology, which, until then, was the centre of his research and practice. In this way, Freud broke the barrier between the pathological and the normal, prefiguring the “psychic ribbon”, of which Fanti liked to say, “Man oscillates naturally and perpetually between normality-neurosis-psychosis”².

It is worthwhile dwelling on the evolution between 1895 and 1900 of Freud’s discoveries regarding the dream. The associative course of his thought, the stages and passages which it overcomes, are highly revealing for the proper understanding of the birth of psychoanalysis. Indeed, the Freudian research progressively moves through and synaptically articulates: neurosis – infantile sexuality – dream – psychism – unconscious and psychoanalytic method. Thus, it becomes clear that, trying to reveal the mystery of neuroses and acknowledging the primary role of infantile sexuality in their origin, Freud discovered the hidden sense of the dream; and it was the study of dreams – his own and those of his patients – that made it possible for him to discover the psychic dimension, in particular the unconscious, and gave him the psychoanalytic solution to neuroses.

For my part, following Fanti’s technical innovations and theoretical fine-tunings, I have taken a close interest in the dream for over thirty years, giving it a central position in both my daily practice of long sessions and daily self-analysis. I have several oniric series, each of which has from three hundred to over two thousand dreams and is spread out over thirty years. Indeed, with psychoanalysis in long sessions, once the analysis has ended, many people continue the work of self-knowledge by keeping a diary and, now and then, writing down a dream. In addition, at any moment of their life, a person can do “maintenance sessions”³, to take stock of the situation, to deepen and widen this or that aspect of their analysis, a certain repetitive scheme or symptomatic event. In this maintenance work, studying a number of dreams and listening to recordings of previous sessions provide determining reference points and are a decisive resource for regaining or strengthening pyschobiological homeostasis. The oniric series obtained in this way make possible fascinating research into the evolution of the dreams over the years, the psychosomatic context of their emergence, the changes in their form, expression and content, the repetitiveness of certain themes and feelings, and their cyclicity or extinction.

The aim I set myself here is to give you an idea of the dream that is at the same time simple and scientific, so that you will be left with something practical and concretely useful in life. I shall consider the meaning of the dream through a dual approach: first, starting from the unconscious, and showing that the dream is its principal activity, and that the work of the dream not only largely blends in with the unconscious processes but constitutes the heart of psychic life; second, starting from the dreams, understood as privileged manifestations of the unconscious at a preconscious-conscious level, as deformed performances which require interpretation to be understood.

You have all read somewhere or heard that for Freud the dream is the royal road to the unconscious. 
Well, this assertion is not only inexact, but also unfortunate, if not dangerous, with regard to the reality of things. Freud’s exact words were: "Die Traumdeutung aber ist die Via regia zur Kenntnis des Unbewußten im Seelenleben"⁴. In other words, it is the interpretation of dreams which should allow us to familiarise ourselves with our psychic life and, starting from here, to grasp the unconscious.

But what is psychic life? As I said, psychism is Freudian in its discovery and systematisation; it is the specific field of psychoanalysis, its own sphere of action and intervention, its object of exclusive study based on the method of free associations. The resulting theoretical model, or metapsychology, makes it possible to recognise, evaluate, and classify the psychic facts, and to draw a grid of an original nosology of the neurotic and psychotic disorders. The psychic is different from the mental, where the cognitive, intellectual, imaginative, memory and affective functions are directly connected to the brain, on which they are completely dependent. Of course, this does not mean that the psychic has no connection with the central nervous system – it constantly interacts with the body, and therefore with the brain, and its various structural levels: systemic, organic, tissue, cellular, molecular, atomic, particle… energetic; permanently informing and being informed by it.

But the mental is the specific field of psychology, psychiatry, and the neurosciences. It is interesting to note that still today, as in the period when Freud outlined his Project, these disciplines lack a sui generis, theoretical model, a precise epistemological picture of mental functioning. However, the neurophysiopathological work carried out for the past ten years by various researchers, in particular Mark Solms⁵, Joseph LeDoux, Antonio Damasio, Jaak Panksepp, Vilayanur Ramachandran, and Eric Kandel, has been addressing this shortcoming. Interestingly, these researchers now conclude that Freud’s metapsychological model “still represents the most coherent and intellectually satisfying view of the mind”⁶. Interdisciplinary groups of neuroscientists and psychoanalysts which have sprung up far and wide are now trying to establish agreement between the unconscious processes defined by Freud and certain processes inherent in the complex networks formed by the neuronal synapses. A new science is born: neuropsychoanalysis!

But let us go back to psychism. There are three clear organisational levels of psychic facts: 
the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious.

The conscious concerns thought insofar as it objectifies both its own ideations and emotions and the phenomena of external reality. Thus, the conscious belongs more with psychological than with psychoanalytic investigation, with the exception of awarenesses, which prolong certain passages to consciousness arising from the associative working through and mark the authenticity of a psychic fact that was until that moment unrecognised, rejected, forgotten, or even repressed.

The preconscious concerns the processes of thought and affectivity which are not currently conscious, and may never become so, but which are in any case constantly at the disposal of consciousness. Thus, these processes correspond to psychic facts which can be objectified at any time but are not currently objectified by thought. We all have first-hand experience of this in certain situations of forgetfulness when we use explicit expressions such as, “it’s on the tip of my tongue”, “it escapes me at the moment”, or “it’ll come to me later”. Situated between the unconscious and the conscious, the preconscious has long been belittled, at times taken for one, at times for the other. With the long sessions and technical supports, the preconscious acquires importance and reveals its position as a crossroads of information and its function of specific memory. It presents itself as a revolving psychoneurobiological platform, a synaptic place of exchange, binding and organisation of all kinds of information. This information come permanently not only from the unconscious, that is to say, from our repressed memory of uterine-infantile life and phylogenesis, memory which is particularly active during sleeping-dreaming, but also from the entire body, from our cells, and from the outside world, starting from our sense organs. All this information is mixed together and connected by the preconscious according to similarities, correspondences and elective affinities, from which meaningful chains of themes, which I have defined “preconscious objects”, are made. These develop into rough drafts of ideas, images, emotions, words, and actions at the disposal of the central nervous system. As you will have realised, the preconscious is the privileged field of the free associations and the primary terrain of psychoanalytic investigation, and therefore of the study of 
the dream. This level is where the associative work of the analysand positions itself, that is, the verbalisation of their current and past history and the recounting of the warp and weft of their life, as they let themself go, starting from anything or anyone and going in any direction. This is the place of origin of the working through, abreactions, and passages to consciousness which are the true work of recollection, work which comes and corrects or purges pseudo-memories of infancy. Likewise, positioning itself here is the analyst’s work of suspended attention, neutral listening, associative retrieval of overdetermination along the force lines, towards the unconscious determinants (uterine-infantile subjective experiences and desires), and, lastly, ordering the material into equations which act as a suitable foundation for the synaptic interventions and their catalysing effect.

As for the unconscious, it represents the third level of organisation of the psyche. 
The working hypothesis on which Freud judiciously built a model, the unconscious is elusive yet as real as an iron bar. Proof of this are the repetitions which, unbeknownst to us, mark our lives from early childhood. But the unconscious is precisely that – unconscious, that is to say, it belongs to another level of reality, to a dimension which totally escapes us and obeys completely different laws to those governing our psychomaterial world. This means, as well, that the unconscious is unreachable, ungraspable, and therefore uncontrollable, and that our representation and knowledge of it can only be very approximate and have, in any case, no effect on it, although it is duly made 
aware of them.

Now, a slight historical digression, which will perhaps help us to better understand the nature of 
the unconscious. At the time Freud was making his great discoveries about the dream and the unconscious, a number of physicists (Planck, Bohr, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Dirac and others) were bringing to light quantum processes and mathematically defining subatomic fields, even though these were inscrutable, and studying their manifestations at our level of reality. In return, the equations they established (based, may I repeat, on inscrutability, on energy potentials belonging to an unmeasurable world) made possible such fantastic discoveries and applications as electrical conductivity, radioactivity, the transistor, and superconductors. In other words, at the same time and with no knowledge of the others’ work, Freud and the physicists defined another dimension, governed by laws which have nothing to do with those of our universe but which allowed psychology and technology to undergo a revolution. What is even more extraordinary, is that the laws which Freud postulated to specify the primary process characterising the functioning of the unconscious are identical to the laws which the quantum physicists calculated mathematically as characterising subatomic fields. It is what my friend Charles Lasquier called “the historic coincidence”⁷.

Simplifying and keeping to the Freudian unconscious, in the light of the model which Fanti called Energy organisation of the void, these laws can be formulated as follows:

1) The unconscious is driven by a free energy which moves and condenses completely autonomously, expands or comes together without distinction, and distributes and exchanges without limitations the information it carries. This means that the unconscious tends towards the infinite and that its potentials are infinite.

2) At a certain threshold of accumulation and concentration of the information (tension), this energy is immediately discharged (pleasure principle), possibly actualising some of those informative potentials at our level of psychomaterial reality, which exists thanks to them. This means that psychically and psychobiologically we are completely dependent on the unconscious, of which we are nothing but fleeting flashes.

3) The properties of the unconscious are: absence of time, space, logic in all its forms, and negation; the coexistence of opposites, contradictions, and multiplicities. It follows that as far as its beginning, evolution, and end are concerned, the question neither arises nor is part of the probabilities of our universal laws.

This approach to the unconscious as a psychic system gives rise to three questions which, as we shall see, inevitably involve the dream: what does the unconscious contain, how can the unconscious be grasped, and can it be influenced?

I shall start with the answer to the second question: how can we get an idea of the unconscious? 
Given that, as you will have understood, being unconscious, the unconscious is part of a level of reality which is completely foreign to our world, and can be grasped only through its manifestations.

The unconscious permanently nurtures our psychobiological life: all our thoughts, emotions, and actions in one way or another come from the unconscious and can be associatively traced back to it; but there are privileged manifestations of the unconscious, actualisations in which it is, as it were, trapped and where it betrays the shadow of its content. Above all, we have the dream, which takes advantage of sleep to repeat the secret story of our origins, the repressed intimacy of our uterine life and early childhood. Then there are the repetitions, happy and unhappy, which punctuate or invisibly organise our lives and which, without our knowing it, we manufacture to then discharge, when necessary and according to their original schema, the infantile gratifications and frustrations. 
There are, of course, also neurotic symptoms, with more or less obsessive anxieties, often phobic fears and fluctuating somatisations. Lastly, there are parapraxes and other lapsus, the forgettings and errors of all kinds, jokes… all those strange lies of daily life where great pains are taken to hide a truth which the lies themselves then reveal all of a sudden.

Nevertheless, even in its privileged manifestations, the unconscious does not reveal itself as such. 
Its content must undergo a work of distortion to pass into our dimension and must be subjected to a secondary revision to conform to the needs of psychomaterial reality. For example, the delirium and hallucinations of psychosis, which are more or less direct irruptions of the unconscious into the preconscious-conscious, are neither psychically nor sociopsychobiologically sustainable.

When talking about the work of distortion, we tend to focus on its aspects of camouflage or disguise. It is, in fact, more a work of transposition or, better, transmutation, in that there is the transformation of one reality into another, completely different one: an irreversible passage from one state where the energy has absolute freedom of movement and infinite potential to one where it is bound in psychobiological actualisations which have relative and specific probabilities.

The work of distortion uses four processes to allow certain unconscious potentials or information to actualise themselves, that is to say, to succeed in transmutating and in circumventing as incognito as possible the censorship between the unconscious and preconscious-conscious:
1) symbolisation, which consists in an analogue, often conventional transposition that avails itself of stylisation;
2) dramatisation, which regulates a transposition through a mise-en-scène;
3) considerations of representability, which ensure a transposition mainly in visual images(but also aural, olfactive, tactile, or gustative);
4) considerations of intelligibility, which guarantee a transposition in a meaningful and coherent whole.

The work of distortion continues at the level of the preconscious, which must ensure that the derivatives of the unconscious adapt to our level of reality, in particular to space, time, mathematical and syntactic logic, the principle of non-contradiction, to morality. It is the secondary revision which establishes “bindings” (Freud), synapses, connections, and concatenations between the messages emerging from the unconscious and the information of certain life experiences memorised by the preconscious. Thus, associative chains create themselves and form increasingly stable sets which, processed at the mental level, give rise to the processes of thought, ideation, spirituality, imagination, artistic creation, affectivity, language, and motricity.

We can now better understand the associative nature of the preconscious and its essential role in the connections between the information by virtue of reciprocal correspondences, as well as its determining function in transcoding the information from the unconscious and in joining this information with that from the pyschocorporeal and surrounding reality. We can also see its technical usefulness for the analyst as a grid for tracing and deciphering the significant associative sequences.

Thus, interpreting the unconscious at the level of the preconcious at this point depends only on the setup of the metapsychological model and the clinical experience, which confirm or invalidate the value of the psychic referents identified in the analysand’s material. These psychic referents, which I have called “preconscious objects”, consist of privileged themes or subjects which tend to repeat themselves in the same associative context during the sessions. Some of these themes or subjects present constant interrelationships of equivalence and thus form genuine equations. The associative working through of these themes or equational equivalents leads to the highlighting of “unconscious objects”, which condense the subjective experiences internalised (memorised in the unconscious) during uterine-infantile life and the aggressive and sexual desires.

We start to understand the dual movement on the basis of which I consider the meaning of the dream. First, in the actual dream-work, it acts as an activator of unconscious objects which put into circulation some of their uterine-infantile information nurturing the preconscious objects and, through these, our psychoneurobiological lives. Second, in the analytical work, it acts as a stimulator of the associative working through and activator of preconscious objects which, by facilitating the return of the repressed starting from the corresponding unconscious objects, favour the specific passages to consciousness of the unconscious.

For example, here is a fifty-year old woman’s dream.

“I am watching a play in a large meadow surrounded by green trees. I am naked, sitting on the edge of a large cream-coloured pouffe. I am sitting upright because my buttocks keep sliding backwards over the soft part of the pouffe. Holding this position is at the same time exciting and tiring. I am wearing large, 1950s’ style sunglasses. The main actress looks at me mischievously, as if she wants to tell me something. Suddenly, she sticks out her tongue at me. I tell myself that the play is about to end and that I will need to call a taxi”.

The associative working through of this dream, to which the analysand spontaneously returned over a number of sessions, led her to relive a series of events in her life, as far as scenes from early childhood, and reminded her of certain phantasies, some of the photographs studied and sequences from other dreams, essentially centred on themes concerning sexuality and femininity. The persons mentioned, men and women, lead invariably to the mother; the action common to all the different recalled situations relates to the pleasure of touching, of sucking, and to masturbating; the body parts most often involved are mouth, breasts, and buttocks; the geography described always highlights a natural element (grass, earth, water) with which an element of the maternal body (skin, stomach, eyes) is immediately associated; the affective tonality of the descriptions is characterised by a mixture of playful excitation, sweetness, and nostalgia. It is important to underline that most of these associative details are corroborated by the study of the photographs, in particular ten or so where the analysand is a baby in her mother’s arms, being breastfed in a pergola.

With regard to this oniric working through, I would like to mention how actuality, particularly that of the analytical work, affects the dream. Obviously, current events do not in any way influence the latent or unconscious content of the dream. They are to be taken into consideration only at the preconscious level, in the work of distortion combined with the secondary revision, and take part in the construction of the manifest content of the dream, that is to say, in the formation of the oniric scenario which presents itself on awakening or which is recounted in the session.
Going back to the example: the day before the dream, the analysand had received a telephone call from her mother, who, laughing, had made this comment about a comedy film, "You would have loved it, especially the hilarious scene in the countryside where a rejected lover is swearing under the hot sun at the taxi which hasn’t arrived".

It is immediately clear that the general atmosphere, as well as certain details of the telephone call, can be found, practically unchanged, in the manifest content of the dream. In this case, we even have the impression that the call has been used to stimulate an infantile sexual atmosphere, before taking part in its preconscious reorganisation. Indeed, the joint working through of the dream and the content of the call confirms that both situations have involved and motivated preconscious objects in factual and affective resonance with the same unconscious objects, that is to say, with identical uterine-infantile subjective experiences and desires.

Thus, by virtue of unconscious concordances subsequently revealed by the associative working through, a scene or detail from the day before is used by the dream-work to facilitate the passage to consciousness of the dream’s latent scenario, disguising it and making it as insignificant as possible.
It is the same for certain sequences or themes of the analysand’s material, as well as for certain points of an intervention by the analyst, which reappear in the verbalised dream the following day, proof of their adaptation to unconscious objects which are revealing themselves. These elements from twenty-four or forty-eight hours before the night of the dream which group together in the manifest content of the dream, mostly without the analysand being aware of it, are called “day’s residues”, and provide an important indication of the uterine-infantile subjective experiences reactivated during the dream and the aggressive and sexual desires realised there. In relation to the analytic situation, the day’s residues, particularly those which recall certain details of interventions, are invaluable in that they give the analyst reference points on the associative quality, progress of work, and transferential impact in the analysis of the vital repetitions.

To sum up: with this associative working through, considered in the whole of the history of the analysand as well as in the current circumstances, the analyst knows that this dream expresses, in a particular way, unconscious subjective experiences and desires from the oral stage (the first fifteen months of life); can even specify that it concerns the fusional period (the first six months) during which the mother and baby form a single psychobiological whole and the father is not included; knows that the unconscious has memorised the good mother, that is, one who is present, attentive to the child’s needs and rhythms, and lovingly shares tenderness and pleasure; and, lastly, visualises more clearly the somatic compliance at the root of certain hysterical symptoms, especially cutaneous ones, while at the same time managing to frame the abandoning component of this woman.

I can now answer the first question previously posed: what is the content of the unconscious? 
The credit goes to Fanti for defining structural entities, which I have called “unconscious objects”, to explain the economy of the cathexis processes (displacements-condensations) produced within the elementary energy of the unconscious. In truth, the representations and affects postulated by Freud are functional units which are too elementary: they lack sufficient informative or mnemonic complexity and the operative compactness to account for instinctual projects, such as those which lead to unconscious desires, defence mechanisms, and phantasies. Well now, these instinctual schemes preside over the functioning of the unconscious and the psychobiological, the genesis of the dream, aggressiveness and sexuality, and neurosis in general. It is a little as if we kept to particles and atoms, scotomising molecules, to understand and explain the complexity, as well as the consistency, of the physical-chemical processes which make biological life possible.

The unconscious objects constitute the truly functional and operating structural entities in psychism and the psychobiological. They carry instinctual experiences memorised in the course of parental and ancestral life (phylogenetic nuclei), during uterine life and the first months (mnestic traces), and during ontogenesis (strictly speaking, internalised subjective experiences). The unconscious objects thus contain the phylo-ontogenetic memory, that is to say, the information coming from our psychic heredity and the information arising from certain experiences, certain joyful or sorrowful subjective experiences of our uterine-infantile life. For the foetus and the small child, happiness and unhappiness correspond to satisfactions and frustrations, excitations and their easing off, and ultimately to the pleasures and displeasures which combine according to two fundamental activities: aggressiveness and sexuality. The unconscious objects are in constant energetic interaction with the somatic and, from the psychic point of view, permanently nurture the preconscious. This continuous flow of information from the unconscious is considerably reinforced during sleep, in the course of the dream, as we shall see when addressing the dynamic content of the unconscious.

The dynamic content of the unconscious concerns desires, defences and phantasies. The notion of desire is one of the most difficult to define in psychoanalysis, unless made poetically. With Fanti’s energetic-structural model, completed by the notion of unconscious objects, the task becomes easier. The forces in play between the unconscious objects, and between these and the rest of psychism, the body, or the outside world, are the drives which, I repeat, are essentially aggressive and sexual and have pleasure as their one and only aim. An activated object, that is, one which is fully charged or loaded, is deactivated by generating drives which ensure its discharge, a synonym for pleasure.

The particular whole of the aggressive or sexual drives mobilised by an activated unconscious object to deactivate itself is what specifically constitutes desire, its birth and realisation. Like the drives of which they are the expression, the desires are aggressive or sexual. The activation-deactivation of the unconscious objects, the birth-realisation of desires, happens all the time but is potentiated during sleep, and this nocturnal switching-on of the unconscious desires and their realisation form the very essence of the dream, its intimate nature and vital function.

As far as the defences are concerned, I shall simply say that these come physiologically from the turnover of desires and correspond to the instinctual wholes mobilised to control, in a specific way, the birth of the unconscious desires, their intensity and the quality of their realisation. Like the desires, the defences are unconscious, aggressive and sexual by nature, and specific to this or that stage of the uterine-infantile development.

As for the phantasies, they are usually said to represent compromises between desires and defences. For my part, I would, with slightly pithy wording, point out that desire, essentially instinctual in its pressure and aim, is a question of pleasure, whereas the phantasy expresses the desire in its residual connection to the content of the unconscious objects, that is, it carries fragments of the uterine-infantile subjective experiences from which it comes. Like the dream, but in a less deformed way, the phantasy keeps certain aggressive and sexual ontophylogenetic experiences on the scene, in such a way as to keep the involved desires alive.

I still have to answer the third question regarding the unconscious: is it possible to have any effect on it at all? As I said previously, being unconscious, the unconscious belongs to a dimension we can only hypothesise about, we have no hold on it, even if our hypotheses are verified in practice and scientifically consistent. I have also tried to show that the analytic work is associative and carried out at the preconscious level, for both analysand and analyst. Little by little, this associative work makes the preconscious permeable, opening gaps which facilitate the passage of unconscious information across the censorship. The relaxation and equilibration of the preconscious thus indirectly affect the unconscious. In reality, it is a question of tension of energy between the two memory systems: everything happens as if the lowering of tension in the preconscious created an inflow of energy or unconscious information to maintain the psychic homeostasis. Now, the dream is active in two areas: on one side, the associative working through of the dream favours the relaxation of the preconscious, above all in the long sessions, where the dream has the time to be dreamed awake; on the other, as we have just seen with regard to the unconscious objects, the dream is a veritable pump of desires which frees the uterine-infantile aggessiveness and sexuality and makes their vital information available to the preconscious.

At this point, a definition of the dream is required. I could also have started here, but preferred this metapsychological approach in order for you to discover that the landscape of the dream merges with psychoanalysis itself, with the free associations, psychism, the preconscious and unconscious, desire, aggressiveness and sexuality, uterine and infantile life. As for the dream, it is defined as follows:

The dream is the unconscious repetition of internalised subjective experiences from conception to five years of age and the unconscious realisation of aggressive and sexual desires of uterine-infantile and even phylogenetic origin.

As can be noted, this definition has two elements: the repetition of subjective experiences and 
the realisation of desires. This distinction is very important and occurs during the long sessions, 
where the dream has and takes the time to tell itself in detail, to expand and unfold and then recover without a pause. Aiming straight for the desires means manhandling the dream, disrespecting it, and falling into symbolic interpretation, which is no better than the most sophisticated and popular keys to dreams. The interpretation of the dream must be associative, slow, and patient, and correlate the details of the manifest content to the details of current and past life and those of the family tree, and to the photographs and hand-drawn floorplans of places lived in. Then, some associations of details start to sparkle in the preconscious, sending out signals of recognition or belonging, and establish synapses, often unexpected, with the messages coming from the countless facets with which the uterine-infantile subjective experiences have been internalised in the unconscious. And memory makes an appearance, true memories take shape and come completely to life with their refound affective charge, at times sublime, at times cruel. Then, from this associative working through, which goes through the whole life back to conception and even to the intentions leading to it, the aggressive and sexual desires emerge with naturalness, almost despite themselves. In this way, the interpretation of the dream no longer has anything abusive or artificial about it and no longer limits itself to a forced retrieval of the unconscious desires and relative symbolic labelling which ultimately neither affects nor involves the analysand; the interpretation is physiological, personal and tailored, and cathartic in bringing out and piecing together again the uterine-infantile intimacy with its ancestral roots.

From the theoretical point of view, the model of the energetic organisation of the unconscious gives explanatory consistency to these practical observations. The physiology of the unconscious objects described before accounts perfectly for the two elements which characterise the dream: the activation-deactivation of the unconscious objects during sleep corresponds to the tightening up of the tension and, later, to the relaxation of memorised uterine-infantile and phylogenetic experiences, and thus to their unconscious repetition; which leads to an instinctual mobilisation, which, in turn, leads to the birth and possible unconscious realisation of the aggressive and sexual desires connected to those experiences. All this mass of information being put into motion in complex interactions and connections exerts pressure on the censorship between the unconscious and preconscious. The passage across this censorship is equivalent to a total change of reality and thus requires a work of distortion to ensure the transfer of the unconscious messages to the preconscious. Therefore, drawing every night on the ontogenetic and ancestral memory of the unconscious objects, the dream nurtures and programmes the memory of our preconscious objects and, through it, animates our psychoneurobiological life day by day.

So, in the end, what does it mean to interpret a dream? Interpreting a dream consists in making sense of and giving meaning to the manifest content of the dream, that is to say, to the dream as it presents itself on awakening, comes to mind during the day or is referred to in a session. It, therefore, consists in taking the reverse path to that taken physiologically overnight by the dream: following back along the work of distortion, going from consciousness, from the scenario performed, its action, characters, places, themes, and feelings, as far as comprehension of the latent content of the dream. This is a difficult operation, nothing like deciphering a rebus or enigma and even less like solving a mathematical problem. The difficulty of the task is more like that of following the natural course of a phenomenon back to its origin; for example, a river, from its mouth and the silt of its flood deposits to its tributaries and lakes, then to the torrents and glaciers, then to the clouds and their droplets of water vapour, moving and condensing at the mercy of the rising currents of the atmosphere, whilst the energy dissipates into the cosmic infinite.

The manifest content of a dream is, therefore, the point of arrival of a long story, of a complex transcription into words and a complex staging, where the original plot has undergone multiple disguises, metamorphoses, transformations, additions, subtractions, abstractions, and all kinds of permutations. In truth, the manifest content of a dream does not mean much, whether it is given in three words or three thousand. Despite what might be thought, it does not reveal our identity as do fingerprints or DNA, and I would challenge the most experienced analyst to identify, for example, the age, sex, state of physical or somatic health of a person on the basis of the manifest content of a dream.

Interpreting a dream is, primarily, recounting it, several times, slowly – very slowly, at first without comments or worrying about its inconsistencies or dark sides; letting it infuse itself into the associative currents of the current material and the vital material which enrich the empty spaces and gaps, and fill the cracks between one part, scene, or sequence, and another. In this associative working through at the preconscious level, the dream gradually acquires the consistence, coherence and affective tonality of a real story or, rather, the authenticity of an episode which is part of the continuity and repetitiveness of a long story, the story of our life, where experiences, desires, emotions, memories, reminiscences, impressions, phantasies and other dreams blend together⁸.

Thus, the associative interpretation of a dream merges with and stimulates the analytic work itself. The free associations leaven the manifest content of the dream, and the resulting oniric dough ends up associatively integrating life in its entirety and expressing, again associatively, our internalised experiences, desires, uterine-infantile affects, and phylogenetic traces.

In conclusion, I would like to say that it is possible to profit greatly from the dream, even without a psychoanalysis. However beautiful or horrible, clear or weird it is, the dream must be taken for what it is: a story, a story which comes from our infancy and before, a cartoon, a fairy tale with its Sleeping Beauties and evil ogres, a saga with gaps, an intimate and intimist tale, a story of 
mummy–daddy–wee-wee–poo, of baby bottles and nappies, a story of passionate or platonic love, with its unheard-of pleasures and tragic frustrations, its sublime exaltations and fathomless fears. Also a story of jealousy and hate, if only because disappointed love always turns into hate, a story of injustice, starting with the injustice that we did not ask to be born, a story of punishment and revenge, of suffocating dependence or desperate abandonment, of struggles to survive in safety, to be recognised as the fairest or strongest of them all, to be in control of the situation or simply to have power.
In short, a secret story where the modalities and language are those of early childhood and the world of the night, a night which goes back to the dawn of time, so, a story to be forgotten or, at any rate, deformed or disguised, in order to appear insignificant or extravagant, banal or grotesque if it is to have any chance of sneaking into our sleep; in other words, a story which needs to be humbly respected, taking it as it comes, with simplicity and a certain smile, without expecting to interpret it literally, without manhandling it and, especially, without fearing it, because however horrible or frightening it may be, it is part of us, it is our story, which we are not responsible for and cannot change in the least, but can only listen to in silence, allowing the images to fluctuate and giving them the time to recompose the puzzle, or tell it to ourselves in a low voice, slowly, trying to visualise it like a film in slow motion and freezing the image every so often, to then perhaps write or draw it, make a rough draft thinking of episodes from our own existence, of certain places, people, emotions, photographs, letters ... other dreams.

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In a more didactic manner, I now present three schemes which I have created for the interpretation of the dream, whose efficacy has been verified by numerous psychoanalysts in long sessions:

1. the simple working through of the dream
2. the systematic study of the dream
3. the comparative study of the dream.

These three schemes can be applied solely in the setting of the long sessions, because they are based on the associative continuity and nuclear stages that a psychoanalysis in long sessions follows physiologically, and are progressive in that each serves as a springboard to the next. However, it is clear that during a psychoanalysis in long sessions it is not always possible to cover everything and that the carrying out of the work at times goes beyond the expectable reference points. The analyst will choose the appropriate scheme or schemes according to the personality of the analysand, their associative capacity (insight), the type of neurosis, and the progress of the work. If the analyst deems it opportune, the schemes may also be combined.

1. Simple working through

This consists of a first approach to the dream; it is the dream taken in the literal sense of its manifest content, certain elements of which directly join the material of the analysand. The simple working through has no pretensions to revealing, partially or totally, the latent content, but only to correlating and associatively connecting the various aspects of the manifest content with the vital material and, possibly, the current material. It makes it possible to integrate the story of the dream into the story of the life of the analysand, while, as we shall see, a deeper study of the dream makes it possible to integrate the entire life into a single dream.

The interventions concerning the simple working through follow the explanatory technique of the fundamental rule. They proceed by degrees: initially, the dream is recounted slowly, very slowly, without worrying about its intelligibility, any likelihoods, or unlikelihoods; it is the dream recounted like a story, a child’s story, a child’s drawing. Little by little, this story is described with as many details as possible; the analysand tries to visualise it and live it emotionally, like a film where they are at the same time screenwriter, actor, director, and spectator. When the analysand is truly in the intimate part of their oniric story, not only do visual images appear, but also smells, sounds, tastes, tactile perceptions, and affective-sensorial impressions, which are difficult to describe and, probably, go back to fusional life. This is why the considerations of representability of the work of distortion of the dream should be seen in a wider sense, as considerations of sensoriality.

The simple working through associatively connects the manifest content of the dream, its working through, and the vital and current material of the analysand. In this way, it favours the work of working through in its totality and stimulates recalling: certain passages to consciousness lead to 
true awarenesses. Little by little, it allows the expression of vital repetitions as far as into their current dimension, as well as into the manifest content of the dream. Its specific function varies depending on when it is used in the analysis.

The simple working through of the dream can be undertaken at any phase of the analytical work, but especially starting from the approach to Oedipus, since from that moment on, the analyst has at their disposal all the vital material to carry out a true equational work; in certain cases, it may be undertaken earlier and can even help to unblock an analysis initially facing particular resistances.

Let us take two examples:

a) We are in the “approach to Oedipus”, that is, between 180 and 250 hours. The analysand has already mentioned, without dwelling on them, certain fragments of dreams in the first part of 
their work. For some days now, the dream has become more insistent; the analysand not only talks about it, but every so often describes a part of it in direct relation to one or another element of the vital or current material. The dynamic of the sessions is globally associative and the resistances are not very active. In these circumstances, the analyst can intervene after the recounting of a dream to explain the technique of the simple working through; it is an intervention which starts from the material as such, directly from the dream or the first associations it arouses. If the analysand does not continue with the working through the following day, it is preferable to not intervene but to wait two or three days to see whether they spontaneously return there, and in which context. The use of the simple working through during the approach to Oedipus, has the specific function of stimulating the verbalisation of corporeal. sexual, parental, and familial intimacy and of drawing as close as possible to the notion of desire.

b) We are in the “in-depth analysis of Oedipus”, that is, generally between 300 and 400 hours. The idea here is to introduce the technique of the simple working through or, if it has already been used in the approach to Oedipus, take it up again. For some sessions now, every day the analysand has brought the dream of the night, at the start of the session as well as during the material. Here, too, the verbalisation must be globally associative and the resistances not very active. In technical terms, the intervention is made as in the first example, but taking into account the equational equivalents which are taking shape. In the in-depth analysis of Oedipus, the simple working through has the specific functions of associatively deepening the incestuous and the homicidal Oedipal poles as far as their substitutive repetitions, assessing their symmetry or asymmetry taking into account the disappointment in love which turns love into hate, bringing to light the percentage of positive Oedipus and negative Oedipus, freeing the expression of incestuous fidelity as well as guilty infidelity, possessiveness-jealousy, the elements of castration, the family romance, and the primal scene.

2. Systematic study

This consists in associatively describing the dream from the following five points of view: geography, characters, themes, action, and emotions. This study presupposes that the analysand has familiarised themself with the dream, and has already carried out one or the other simple working through. 
The indispensable conditions for starting a systematic study of the dream are the sharpness of the preconscious objects and the rough draft of their status as equational equivalents which is drawn in the material of the analysand; the associative work proceeds without resistances of note and the equational fluidity which is coming into being allows the unconscious objects to appear. 
In chronological terms, the systematic study can start from the final third of the in-depth analysis of Oedipus or, better, when facing what is defined as the “primal mother complex”, centred on the 
child-penis of the mother and the precocious subjective experience of absence of penis of the mother⁹ (at around 500 hours).

a) Geographical point of view

The detailed working through of the geography of a dream leads the analysand to associatively revisit certain places they have lived or have sketched during the work. Fairly rapidly, they come to a psychobiological geography: the aggressive and sexual geography of their body, but also of their psychism, the parental and familial geography (primal scene), maternal geography, and uterine-foetal geography... and, perhaps, a perception of the geography of the energy of the void. The geographical point of view is of great importance in resolving certain anxieties-fears, in particular those of a phobic nature, and in defusing the equation anxiety-fear of castration = anxiety-fear of death = anxiety-fear of the void.

b) Point of view of the characters

Clearly, the one and only character involved in the latent content of the dream is the dreamer. 
The characters used by the work of distortion are substitutes who often become part of an associative chain (equation) which leads back to the privileged substitutes of the parents and ancestors. 
The analysand thus moves more easily from Oedipal mother to fusional mother, from Oedipal father to totemic father, from phallic castration to primary castration, and from sphinteric function to synaptic function. Rediscovering their onto- and phylogenetic traces, the analysand manages to place themself in the maternal and paternal bloodlines, which means the relativisation of the persons involved in the substitutive formation and, consequently, of love and hate. In addition, the point of view of the characters plays a key role in the progressive analysis of the various repetitive facets of the transference.

c) Point of view of the themes

As noted before, the themes (including the conceptual and symbolic ones) are privileged subjects, that is, subjects which tend to repeat themselves in a single associative context throughout all the material of the analysand. For the analyst, the themes constitute psychic referentials, whose retrieval is particularly important, in that they are synonyms of preconscious objects in equational resonance with the unconscious objects. The systematic study of the dream brings out, in what I would call a macroscopic way, the preconscious objects, their status as equational equivalents, as well as the equations as such, from which there emerge the unconscious objects, and their accompaniment of uterine-infantile subjective experiences and aggressive-sexual desires.

In every analysis, two general themes merit the analyst’s particular attention: money and religion (and the latter even if the analysand is or says they are atheist). Although money and religion do not exist in the unconscious, they play a principal role in life and in their own way run the world. How can something that does not exist in the unconscious be so determining in politics, sociology… character and neurosis? The long sessions, in particular during the systematic study of the dream, show that money and religion are preconscious objects and nuclear equational equivalents, in the sense that they crystallise in themselves the aggressiveness-sexuality of all the stages, moments, and periods of the ontogenesis and of certain events of the phylogenesis: the original and existential injustice, fusional omnipotence as well as the annihilation deriving from it, narcissistic omnipotence and its egotism, the power of mastery and of sphincteric control, phallic power, Oedipal power with its corollaries of the right to incest and the right to kill. It is, therefore, understandable that money and religion are the natural refuges of the resistances, whether these are due to the return of the repressed during the analytic work or are, more generally, resistances to psychoanalysis itself. The spontaneous and progressive working through of these two themes is an invaluable criterion for the analyst of the overcoming of the resistances and of progress of the work. In any case, money and religion must be the object of a wide equational intervention in every analysis, starting from the in-depth analysis of Oedipus.

d) Point of view of the action

In the manifest content, the dynamic expresses itself both directly, through the actions which take place or are blocked, and indirectly, through the instinctual movement implied by most of the verbs. 
The working through of the dynamic leads to the heart of the psychic conflict and makes it possible to list, from an ontogenetic perspective, well-defined elementary drives, specific unconscious desires and corresponding defence mechanisms. Moreover, it favours the taking into consideration of the three pairs of opposites which, on the basis of love/hate, are in charge of the development of identity: dependence-lack, control-loss of control, and penis-absence of penis. Assigning to the sphinteric function its psychobiological meaning of macroscopic replication of the synaptic function, this point of view explains the determining role of the anal mechanics, its retroactive influence on the initiatic-oral stage and the anteroactive repercussions on the phallic stage. Lastly, it makes it possible to visualise certain elements of the unconscious’ own mechanisms: displacement, condensation, repression, projection, and identification.

e) Point of view of the emotions

This concerns the sensations, affective manifestations, sentiments, anxiety, the fears and guilt which appear in the manifest content or during its working through. All these emotions are expressions of the unconscious affect, connected more to the quantity (intensity, width, and frequency) of the internalised experiences than to their quality (manner, mode, circumstances, and conditions). 
In other words, the point of view of the emotions is an excellent revealer of the repressed, that is to say, of the forces which tend to oppose recalling and keep such experiences and the associated desires out of the reach of the memory. This is the case, for example, for the uterine war, trauma of birth, primal scene, primary castration, false presence, double bind, parental arguments, and the desires for incest and to kill…

3. Comparative study

The comparative study of the dream arises naturally from the systematic study. In effect, a dream studied in detail from the five points of view will associatively awaken another dream, and then another … which together form an oniric chain. The comparative study of the dream consists in the joint working through of a number of dreams (from five to ten) which the analysand has progressively assimilated in the course of the work. The current dreams gradually come to graft themselves onto these basic dreams. The comparative study of the dream is the culmination of a very deep personal analysis. In this context, I habitually stay with the systematic study, using the comparative study for training analysis.

Basically, the comparative study of the dream starts from the systematic study of a chosen dream, to then move on to another, and then to yet more. Little by little, the oniric sequences of a dream, 
whether direct or triggered by the working through, emit associative pseudopods towards a sequence from the same or another dream. This pseudopodic system goes into more and more detail and becomes synaptic. The end result is an oniric blend which associatively integrates all the dreams, vital material, current material, and technical supports (including the recorded material which is often studied in this phase). The oniric weave articulates and merges with the vital weave, associatively developing the equational weave which leads the preconscious objects to their unconscious equivalents, from which emerge uterine-infantile subjective experiences, aggressive-sexual desires and phantasies, and successful or unsuccessful defences.

he comparative study of the dream, embracing the systematic study, puts us in direct contact with the life-death drive and with the overdetermination which opens onto the infinite complexity of the unconscious: one oniric element explodes into a thousand associative details, which fit together with a thousand oniric details, each of which explodes associatively into a thousand details, which in turn dissolve into the infinity of the unconscious… The dream is infinite!

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1. Masson, J. M. (1985). The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904,42:352-354. ^⬆︎
2. S. Fanti and coll. (1983), Dizionario di psicoanalisi e di micropsicoanalisi, Borla, Roma 1984, def. 404. ^⬆︎
3. Ibid., def. 14. ^⬆︎
4. “The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activity of the psychic life”. The Standard Edition translates it with "The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activity of the mind” (The Interpretation of Dreams. SE 4:ix-608), which leads to confusion between psyche and mind. In fact, Seelenleben means "inner life" or "psychic life".^⬆︎
5. M. Solms, "Neuroscience", in Textbook of psychoanalysis, Washington DC, American Psychiatric Publishing Inc, 2005, p. 534-546. ^⬆︎
6. E. Kandel, "Biology and the future of psychoanalysis", in American Journal of Psychiatry, vol. 156, n° 4, 1999, p. 505-524. ^⬆︎
7. C. Lasquier, "L’Inconscio e i fenomeni sub-atomici", in Bollettino dell’Istituto Italiano di Micropsicoanalisi, Tirrenia Stampatori, Torino 1986, n° 2, p. 21. ^⬆︎
8. Proust intuitively realised this: in his texts, he used the dream as a narrative process which took him to the remotest intimacy of our origins. Cf. N. Deschamps, "Le sommeil-rêve comme laboratoire du texte proustien", in L’infini, l’inachevé, Etudes Françaises, Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 30-1, 1994, p. 59-79. ^⬆︎
9. See my article "L’aggressività: pulsioni alla stregua di quelle sessuali, ontogenetiche di origine filogenetica", in Bollettino dell’Istituto Italiano di Micropsicoanalisi, Tirrenia Stampatori, Torino 1997, n° 22.^⬆︎