Grotstein - Who Is the Dreamer, Who Dreams the Dream?

Who Is the Dreamer

Who Dreams the Dream?

Volume 19

Relational Perspectives Book Series

RELATIONAL PERSPECTIVES BOOK SERIES

STEPHEN A. MITCHELL AND LEWIS ARON

Series Editors

Volume 1
Rita Wiley McCleary
Conversing with Uncertainty: Practicing Psychotherapy in a Hospital Setting

Volume 2
Charles Spezzano
Affect in Psychoanalysis: A Clinical Synthesis

Volume 3
Neil Altman
The Analyst in the Inner City: Race, Class, and Culture Through a Psychoanalytic Lens

Volume 4
Lewis Aron
A Meeting of Minds: Mutuality in Psychoanalysis

Volume 5
Joyce A. Slochower
Holding and Psychoanalysis: A Relational Perspective

Volume 6
Barbara Gerson, editor
The Therapist as a Person: Life Crises, Life Choices, Life Experiences, and Their Effects on Treatment

Volume 7
Charles Spezzano and Gerald J. Gargiulo, editors
Soul on the Couch: Spirituality, Religion, and Morality in Contemporary Psychoanalysis

Volume 8
Donnel B. Stern
Unformulated Experience: From Dissociation to Imagination in Psychoanalysis

Volume 9
Stephen A. Mitchell
Influence and Autonomy in Psychoanalysis

Volume 10
Neil J. Skolnick and David E. Scharff,
editors
Fairbairn, Then and Now

Volume 11
Stuart A. Pizer
Building Bridges: Negotiation of Paradox in Psychoanalysis

Volume 12
Lewis Aron and Frances Sommer Anderson, editors
Relational Perspectives on the Body

Volume 13
Karen Maroda
Seduction, Surrender, and Transformation: Emotional Engagement in the Analytic Process

Volume 14
Stephen A. Mitchell and Lewis Aron, editors
Relational Psychoanalysis: The Emergence of a Tradition

Volume 15
Rochelle G. K. Kainer
The Collapse of the Self and Its Therapeutic Restoration

Volume 16
Kenneth A. Frank
Psychoanalytic Participation: Action, Interaction, and Integration

Volume 17
Sue Grand
The Reproduction of Evil: A Clinical and Cultural Perspective

Volume 18
Steven H. Cooper
Objects of Hope: Exploring Possibility and Limit in Psychoanalysis

Volume 19
James S. Grotstein
Who is the Dreamer Who Dreams the Dream? A Study in Psychic Presences

A Study of Psychic Presences

James S. Grotstein

Copyright 2000 by The Analytic Press, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form: by photostat, microform, electronic retrieval system, or any other means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

The chapters in this book have appeared elsewhere and are reprinted here in modified form by permission of their publishers: -Bions Transformations in O, Lacans Real and Kants Thing-in-ltself:Towards the Concept of the Transcendent Position. Journal of Melanie Klein and Object Relations (1996, 14:109142.)

Published by The Analytic Press, Inc.

101 West Street, Hillsdale, NJ 07642

www.analyticpress.com

Typeset in Adobe Palatino by CompuDesign, Charlottesville, VA

Indexed by Leonard Rosenbaum, Washington, DC

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Grotstein, James S.

Who is the dreamer who dreams the dream? : a study of psychic presences / James S. Grostein.

p. cm.-(Relational perspectives book series; v. 19)

Includes bibliographical references and index

ISBN 0-88163-305-4

I. Psychoanalysis I. Title II. Series

BFI73.G756 2000

150.195-dc21

00-036273

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4

About the Author

James S. Grotstein, M.D. is Professor of Psychiatry, U.C.L.A. School of Medicine, and a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute and at The Psychoanalytic Center of California.

In reading about this book, and now attempting to speak about it, I feel a bit like humble Dante being guided through the underworld by Virgil. The wonder, the marvel, the splendor, and the terror of the unconscious as portrayed by Grotstein is reminiscent of Dantes portrayal of the underworld in The Inferno. Grotstein brings to life for the reader the excitement that Freud must have experienced as the imminence of another order of experience first began to reveal itself to him through his exciting/frightening encounters with the female hysterics who had overwhelmed Breuer. The mystery and the awe became all the greater as Freud followed the trail of his thoughts and feelings in his journey into the underworld of his own mind and body and spirit, an underworld occupied with subjects and objects and invisible presences with their own utterly alien and utterly familiar subjects and objects and history and sense of time and space. Perhaps most important of all is Grotsteins ability to convey a sense of unlimited creative potential of the unconscious; the goal of realizing a greater share of this potential in the analytic experience itself is a pivotal touchstone for the readers reconsideration of his or her analytic technique.

I will not attempt to present a prcis of this book: to do so would require at least twice the number of pages written by Grotstein. With the caveat that any attempt to paraphrase Grotstein is as doomed as an effort to paraphrase a poem, I will discuss a few of the ideas developed in this book. As Frost put it, Poetry is what gets lost in translation. I would, however, like to offer something of a Readers Guide to Grotstein. This is a dense book that, despite its weight, moves very quickly; the writing is enthusiastically brimming over with ideas. This book requires that the reader tolerate a good deal of a feeling of not knowing, of feeling confused and lost. But this difficulty in reading is offset by the fact that the major concepts discussed in this book are revisited in each of its chapters. The return of increasingly familiar, but never static themes has the quality of a recurring musical leitmotif that accrues richness of meaning as the composition proceeds. The book builds toward its final chapter, Bions Transformations in O, where I believe the reader will find that the book comes together as more than the sum of its parts.

To turn to the text itself, Grotstein, in his preface, presents his belief that Freuds structural model, involving the interplay of id, ego, superego, and external reality, is a woefully inadequate model with which to attempt to conceptualize the mind. (The Latin terminology introduced by Strachey, despite Freuds admonitions, renders the terms abstract and experience distant.) Grotstein attempts to rediscover the energy and muscularity of Freuds insights by offering a model of the psyche in which there is a phenomenal subject (our conscious experience of ourselves as I) and an Ineffable Subject of the Unconscious. The latter term is intentionally ambiguous in that it represents a subject who is a reflection of itself and is known (and knows itself) only indirectly. This is perhaps the central paradox of the book. From the perspective developed by Grotstein, psychological health might be thought of as the degree to which an individual has been able to create a generative tension between the phenomenal subject and the Ineffable Subject of the Unconscious.