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WHO IS THE DREAMER WHO DREAMS THE DREAM?: A REVIEW ESSAY. A STUDY OF PSYCHIC PRESENCES. By James Grotstein. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press (Relational Perspectives Book Series), 2000, 347 pp.
In an engrossing poem titled "I Am Not Even Dust," Jorges Luis Borges ends with these thoughts:
That I might be allowed to dream the other
Whose fertile memory will be a part
of all the days of man, I humbly pray:
My god, my dreamer, keep on dreaming me.
(Borges, 1999, pp. 399-401)
Most North American analysts would dismiss the last line, in particular, as religious mysticism, a leftover from a predifferentiated developmental stage, something to be resolved and not celebrated. John Gedo (1999), in his The Evolution of Psychoanalysis, goes so far as to state that recent neurological findings suggest that dreams have no meaning at all, implying that to attribute meaning to them is a mentalist presupposition unworthy of a scientific, biologically grounded, psychoanalysis (p. 204). While making a didactically clear and at times persuasive argument, Gedo's position, as I read him, ignores our metaphorical modes of thinking as well as our culturally dependent awareness of a beyond in our midst, a beyond that has been articulated in terms of transcendence: either the absolute transcendence, which Western religious traditions have highlighted, or the relative everyday experience of transcendence, which Grotstein studies in his attempt to locate the dreamer who dreams the dream.
In a tour de force entailing a reading of Freud, Jung, Lacan, M. Klein, Winnicott, Heidegger, Matte-Blanco, and Bion, among others, Grotstein posits the basic function of the dream as a communication between what he categorized as "the ineffable subject of the unconscious" (the dreamer who dreams the dream) and "the dreamer who understands the dream." He sets himself the task of decoding, for lack of a better word, the psychic presences that reflect and/or deflect the ineffable subject of the unconscious. Grotstein writes that "the task of psychoanalysis is not the attainment of insight but, rather, the use of insight to attain transcendence over oneself, over one's masks and disguises, to rebecome one's supraordinate subject. This task involves a transcendent reunion with one's "ineffable subject" in a moment of aletheia (unconcealment)" (p. xxvii). Grotstein grapples with the psyche's...