Bernard Lahire - The Sociological Interpretation of Dreams

To my mother

Bernard Lahire

Translated by Helen Morrison

polity

First published in French as LInterprtation sociologique des rves ditions La Dcouverte, Paris, France, 2018
This English edition Polity Press, 2020

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The translation of this work was supported by the Institut Universitaire de France

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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3795-2

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lahire, Bernard, author.
Title: The sociological interpretation of dreams / Bernard Lahire ; translated by Helen Morrison.
Other titles: Interprtation sociologique des rves. English
Description: Medford : Polity, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: A major new account of dreams that rivals Freuds classic work-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019045571 (print) | LCCN 2019045572 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509537945 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509537952 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Dream interpretation. | Dreams--Social aspects. | Sociology.
Classification: LCC BF1078 .L3313 2020 (print) | LCC BF1078 (ebook) | DDC 154.6/3--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019045571
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019045572

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This work would not have been possible without the time made available through my delegation to the Institut Universitaire de France and the funding allocated to completing it in the context of a research programme entitled Sociology of dreams: oneiric productions between the incorporated past, the circumstances of waking life and the context of nocturnal life (Sociologie des rves: les productions oniriques entre pass incorpor, circonstances de la vie diurne et cadre de la vie nocturne).

I would like to thank Howard Becker (formerly of the University of Washington), Gary Alan Fine (Northwestern University), Christian Baudelot (ENS Ulm) and Roger Chartier (Collge de France) for their kind support in this research project; Ludwig Crespin (Universit de Clermont-Ferrand) for allowing me access to his thesis even before its submission; Perrine Ruby (INSERM) for our discussions prior to the writing of this book; Julien Barnier (Centre Max Weber, CNRS) for his invaluable schematic contribution to the thinking behind this project; and to all the dreamers who, since January 2014, have regularly shared their dreams with me and who have put up with many hours of interviews, thus helping me to test the theoretical and methodological arguments which are discussed in this work. Their stories, both real and dreamed, will be revealed in a second volume.

Finally a special thanks to Nathan for sharing my moments of both enthusiasm and doubt and for his helpful and wise suggestions for some of the titles. Thanks also to Hugues Jallon for his attentive re-reading of the manuscript, for his advice and for his unwavering support.

A dream is a sausage mill you feed your life into.

(Benjamin Whitmer,Pike, p. 168)

Dreams are both extremely appealing and extremely troubling for the sociologist. Their appeal lies in their potential to throw light on an aspect of our experience which generally remains intriguing and yet ultimately unfathomable. For any researcher with a taste for adventure, the prospect of attempting to comprehend the incomprehensible represents an exhilarating scientific challenge.

Yet the curiosity and intellectual excitement provoked by such a phenomenon can quickly give way to anxiety.

Initially this is linked to several characteristics of the object in question. The dream is a mental phenomenon, occurring when subjects are asleep and, consequently, when they are incapable of speaking. It is a product of the imagination but something which the dreamers themselves experience as though they were plunged into the most vivid reality. It is not always remembered on waking and, even when that is the case, is often quickly modified or forgotten, consequently rendering the researchers task infinitely more difficult than that of getting subjects to talk about their waking activities. Finally, the dream appears strange, incoherent, delirious or incongruous in the eyes of the person who has produced it. The task is therefore theoretically and methodologically extremely challenging for researchers, and the study of dreams can rapidly turn into something of a nightmare.

And that is not all. Like the fairy-tale castle to which we seek to gain access, the dream-object is surrounded by thorns and guarded by a dragon. These thorns, this dragon, which render access to the dream so difficult, represent all the many past attempts to interpret dreams, and especially that associated with psychoanalysis. For a twenty-first-century researcher, it is difficult to dissociate dreams from the name of Sigmund Freud. The extent of Freuds work, with its multiple shifts, whether acknowledged or unspoken, the abundance of commentaries it has inspired, and the schools or trends which have shared its heritage are all enough to dampen the desire for knowledge and to keep the inquisitive at bay.

The social sciences have been notably absent from the history of scholarly study of sleep and dreams. In contrast to the sustained involvement of all forms of psychology, from psychoanalysis to cognitive psychology, or more recently of the neurosciences, from neuropsychiatry to neurobiology, the contribution made by the social sciences in general, and sociology in particular, remains extremely peripheral.

Some people will consider all this as only normal given that dreams are after all an activity which is both universal (everybody dreams), individual (everyones dreams are unique) and par excellence involuntary. That sociologists, anthropologists or historians can speculate on the way in which the dream has been viewed, approached, interpreted by different eras, societies or groups is hardly surprising. But for them to try to probe into the logic of dream creation, to see it as the result of a process which is linked to the situation of dreamers within the social world is, on the contrary, far from obvious.

It was during a period spent at the University of California at Berkeley in 1997 that, during the course of my reading, I by chance stumbled, to my great interest, on the beginnings of a sociology of dreams.

If we consider the dream-object as a problem which needs to resolved, then we must be able to define all the terms of this problem and to express them in a coherent manner in order to reach a satisfactory solution, both from a theoretical point of view and from one which is compatible with the empirical facts. An involuntary psychic activity occurring during sleep, the dream can also be characterised as a specific form of expression through which the dreamer works on all the various problems preoccupying him or her, with varying degrees of consciousness, during waking life. I will attempt to demonstrate that such a form of symbolic expression can only really be understood by taking into account a number of elements relating to the incorporated past of the dreamer, to the recent circumstances of his or her life, and to the specific context of sleep in which the dream occurs and which is characterised notably by a withdrawal from the flow of ordinary social interactions and demands, by the slackening of the reflexive control of mental activity, and by the establishment of a self-to-self communication which is predominantly visual and largely implicit.