Perverse Dreams and Dreams of Perversion

Good, Michael I.

doi:10.1002/j.2167-4086.2006.tb00066.x

Cited by 5 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…A patient in psychoanalysis who had experienced a neglectful, depressed mother and largely absent father during the first two years of his life seemed in his dreams to assuage the resulting insecurity by eroticizing his relation with his mother (Mancia ). Persons with paraphilias often have histories of insecure attachment, and oedipal themes and promiscuity can be striking in their dreams (Good ). Conversely, men in stable relationships are less likely to dream about aggression and sex (Schredl ).…”

Section: The Dreaming Brain/mindmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dreaming About Love and Danger: A Holistic Bioevolutionary Perspective on Personality, Politics, and Culture

Ingham¹

2015

Ethos

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This article offers a holistic evolutionary perspective on dreaming and early sexual development.Going beyond Freud, and more in line with recent psychoanalysis and academic research, oedipality becomes part of understanding the development of sexual strategy, while dreaming is viewed as an evolved mechanism for moderating and updating affectively charged approach-avoidance conflicts associated with self-preservation and reproduction. The article suggests plausible evolutionary assumptions for interpretations of politics and expressive culture. [dreams, sexuality, human evolution, attachment, narrative, politics] In contrast to evolutionary psychologists who want to explain cultural practices in terms of gender differences in reproductive strategy, or who contend that human beings are essentially promiscuous and patriarchal, I propose here that a more productive and plausible evolutionary approach for anthropology focuses on love-or the lack of it-between men and women, and on how love is affected by danger, real and imaginary. Current thinking about dreaming and oedipality informs the argument. As Freud observed, dreams deal with desire and danger and, as he also observed, infantile oedipality can have consequences for love relations in adulthood, particularly for whether and how well individuals blend sensuality with affection. Drawing on neurobiology as well as evolutionary anthropology and primate behavior studies, I suggest that the major step in early hominid evolution was a conflicted and incomplete shift from dominance competition toward social cooperation and, simultaneously, from promiscuity toward pair bonding. The two orientations are seen to entail different responses to danger.For want of a better term, I use "oedipality" as a rubric for two emotional complexes, one associated with insecure attachment and the other with secure attachment. 1 In earlier articles, I reviewed studies that connect insecure attachment with multiple mating and secure attachment with pair bonding (Ingham 1999;Ingham and Spain 2005). Here, I combine further discussion of these findings with work on dreaming. Specifically, I review research indicating that early experience and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep are complementary in psychosexual development and that in adults, REM-sleep dreaming processes approachavoidance conflicts and updates emotional memories associated with mating, foraging, and threats to the self and loved ones. In conclusion, I consider implications of the argument for the interpretation of politics and ideological narratives.

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Section: The Dreaming Brain/mindmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dreaming About Love and Danger: A Holistic Bioevolutionary Perspective on Personality, Politics, and Culture

Ingham¹

2015

Ethos

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“…In a cultural atmosphere of this sort, where the body-mind relationship is marginalized in favor of stressing more evolved and symbolic levels of mental functioning, it can happen that the patient's need to organize his or her mental growth chiefly around the body is not recognized (see, e.g., Kantrowitz [2008], who takes as hostile her patient's need to spend money on clothes rather than on a higher fee for the analyst; in the light of what I have just been saying, the patient's choice seems instead to give real substance to her discovery of having a body of her own, clothed, at last, in asymmetrical elements). Alternatively, that need is read as a form of perversion (see, e.g., Good 2006) or can be faced only after having at length worked through the realm of the analytic relationship (as in Wrye 1998), thereby slowing down the course of the analytic process by several years.…”

Section: O N C Lu D I N G R E M a R K Smentioning

confidence: 99%

Through the Eye of the Needle: the Unfolding of the Unconscious Body

Lombardi

2009

J Am Psychoanal Assoc

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The body is the starting point of experience and the original source of psychic life. In the course of analysis "the camel" must "go through the eye of the needle," in the sense that the body must become the specific object of mental working through, although no link between the corporeal and the mental can be taken for granted. The body-mind relationship is explored in the light of Matte Blanco's hypothesis that symmetric and asymmetric relationships are always present in the mind in differing proportions, and that the realm of symmetry is the deep unconscious. In primitive mental states the body may be completely unperceived: just as H. G. Wells's invisible man could be seen only when dressed, so the body appears on the mind's horizon only when asymmetric thought is directed at it. Three clinical vignettes show the contribution of the body-mind relationship to the overcoming of serious impasses in analysis.

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“…Nous avons tendance à admettre trop facilement que la perlaboration, dans laquelle le corps tient une place essentielle, est confrontée à des attaques contre l'analyse sous la forme d'acting-out destructeurs (par exemple, Abih, 1991). On peut en arriver à une compréhension des représentations et des fonctions corporelles en termes de perversion, même lorsque le patient répond négativement à une telle approche interprétative (par exemple Baker, 1994 ;Good, 2006) 11 . De même, la tendance à entendre ce que l'on nomme transfert érotique de façon purement défensive ou maniaque (par exemple, Smith, 2006) conduit à négliger d'explorer certains niveaux.…”

Section: Puis Il Associaunclassified

Le corps dans la séance analytique : étude sur la relation corps/psychisme

Lombardi¹

2009

L’Année Psychanalytique Internationale

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Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour In Press. © In Press. Tous droits réservés pour tous pays.La reproduction ou représentation de cet article, notamment par photocopie, n'est autorisée que dans les limites des conditions générales d'utilisation du site ou, le cas échéant, des conditions générales de la licence souscrite par votre établissement. Toute autre reproduction ou représentation, en tout ou partie, sous quelque forme et de quelque manière que ce soit, est interdite sauf accord préalable et écrit de l'éditeur, en dehors des cas prévus par la législation en vigueur en France. Il est précisé que son stockage dans une base de données est également interdit.

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Perverse Dreams and Dreams of Perversion

Cited by 5 publications

References 33 publications

Dreaming About Love and Danger: A Holistic Bioevolutionary Perspective on Personality, Politics, and Culture

Dreaming About Love and Danger: A Holistic Bioevolutionary Perspective on Personality, Politics, and Culture

Through the Eye of the Needle: the Unfolding of the Unconscious Body

Le corps dans la séance analytique : étude sur la relation corps/psychisme

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