Dreaming the unrepressed unconscious and beyond: repression <em>vs</em> dissociation in the oneiric functioning of severe patients

Abstract

Starting with Freud and Jung, dreams have always been considered a core source of information for psychoanalysis. Nowadays, neuroscientific findings suggest that dreams are related especially to limbic and right emotional brain circuit, and that during REM stages they engage self-related and visual internally generated processing. These neuroscientific findings together with contemporary psychoanalysis suggest that dreams are related to the sense of self and serve the purpose of re-integrating and re-structuring the integrity of the psyche. However, while dreams are still viewed as ‘the via regia to the unconscious’, it is the unconscious that has been reconsidered. The repressed unconscious seems to be related with left brain activity while the unrepressed unconscious based on dissociation seems to be associated with limbic and cortical areas of the right hemisphere. This notion of the unconscious might be seen as an implicit self-system encoded in the right brain that evolves in the interaction with a primary caregiver developing through preverbal and bodily stages of maturation enhanced by signals of dual communication. What kind of dreams for which unconscious? What are the differences regarding the capacity to dream for neurotic and borderline personality organizations? Our research aims to integrate psychodynamics, infant research, and neuroscientific findings to better understand the role of dreams in the assessment and treatment of, especially, traumatized and borderline patients. The capacity to dream is here proposed as a sort of enacted manifestation of emotional memories for the development of a more cohesive, coherent and symbolic vs fragmented, diffuse and alexithymic sense of self.

The nested hierarchy of self and its trauma: In search for a synchronic dynamic and topographical re-organization

“…Neural activity in these regions may be diminished and reduced in the face of such severe trauma which is indeed supported by various results (Mucci, 2018a(Mucci, , 2021aScalabrini et al, 2020a;Mucci and Scalabrini, 2021). The self as mental baseline or default mode of the brain (Northoff, 2016;Scalabrini et al, 2018Scalabrini et al, , 2021a is put "out of order." The mental self as the most upper layer of self is consequently diminished.…”

“…The most upper layer, the mental self, is now abnormally "shrinked" which, relatively speaking, renders the interoceptive and exteroproprioceptive layers of self abnormally strong. This is, for instance, reflected in the often observed increase of anxiety with extreme interoceptive awareness in these subjects that often suffer from various psychopathological syndromes, such as depression, anxiety, trauma-related, and personality disorders (Mucci, 2018a;Scalabrini et al, 2018Scalabrini et al, , 2021a.…”

Lockdown dreams: Dream content and emotions during the COVID-19 pandemic in an italian sample.

“…Recent neuropsychological findings (see Caviglia, 2021;Fischmann et al, 2013;Hopkins, 2016;Scalabrini et al, 2021;Solms, 2000Solms, , 2015 provide strong support for the classical cultural and psychoanalytic (Freud, 1900(Freud, /1953) notion that dreams have a biological and psychological function (Hoss & Gongloff, 2019). Specifically, it appears that one of the main functions of dreaming is to transform and/or increase the dreamer's mastery over the events of waking life.…”

Referential processes in dreams: A brief report from a COVID-19 dreams analysis.

“…It seems that the experience of dreaming has an emotional nature and can have an adaptive, regulative, and elaborative function for emotions, as well as promoting associative learning (Perogamvros et al, 2013). Scalabrini, Esposito, et al (2021), presenting the difference between the repressed and the unrepressed (or dissociated) unconscious, and integrating psychoanalysis and neuroscience, suggest that dreams are related to the sense of self of the individual, and to his personality organization and functioning, acting as enacted manifestations of emotional memories with the function to reintegrate and restructure the psyche.…”