It is well known. Dreams are, according to Freud, the royal road to the unconscious. But does their interpretation as proposed by psychoanalysis really allow a better understanding of how each person functions? Let’s take one of the most typical and terrifying dreams: teeth falling out. Your aunt will associate it with a bad omen. Your favorite women’s magazine with “an important change that is taking shape in your life”. Depending on whether they are inspired by Freud or Jung, some basic psychoanalytic interpretations will see in them a representation of sexual repression, the question of lack and separation or even the sign of a renewal. In his book Why do we dream? (Leduc, 2024), American neurosurgeon Rahul Jandial echoes a more… down-to-earth lead. “A study conducted by two Israeli researchers on 210 students revealed that dreams involving teeth were associated with feelings of tension in the teeth, gums or jaw upon waking, which could be related to clenching or grinding teeth during sleep.”
This lead will still need to be confirmed but it is not illogical according to neurologist Isabelle Arnulf: “we put our daily life elements in our dreams, and all adults have already experienced the loss of their teeth…”. “It would be rather interesting to see if these dreams of losing teeth also exist in young children who have not yet lost them” points out the head of the sleep pathologies department at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital.
On the other hand, don’t ask him if the answer lies in psychoanalysis. “It doesn’t work, but people have such a desire to know why we dream of strange things that since the dawn of time there have been attempts at interpretation.” A very ancient tradition of oneiromancy that already existed in ancient Greece and Rome. Messages sent by the gods. These beliefs that would arrive in France in the Middle Ages in the form of dream keys. A genre that would meet with real success and in which Freud would join a few centuries later. “Freud was a modern descendant of these dream interpreters. He considered dreams not as divine messages or messages from the beyond, but from the subconscious, revealing our repressed desires,” describes Dr. Rahul Jandial.
“No scientific approach” in Freud
On the question of dreams, Isabelle Arnulf recognizes at least two merits to the father of psychoanalysis: first, “he drew attention to the fact that dreams could be interesting in medicine”. Then, he brought to the forefront “the idea that we access a way of functioning of the brain during the night and that dreams cover different functions”. For the rest, “there is no scientific approach” in Freud in the interpretation of dreams, the neurologist decides: “He went looking for dreams with sexual connotations because at the time, sex was repressed but he had no approach to count and classify, otherwise he would have realized that sexual dreams are rather rare and that they concern 0.5% of women’s dreams and 2% of men’s dreams”. Freud’s obsession with sex? A “dominant discourse” that does not correspond to the reality of his work, retort the supporters of psychoanalysis today. South African neuropsychologist Mark Solms, who is about to publish a revised edition of theDream Interpretationbelieves that the Austrian neurologist has been “misunderstood”. “If you read all of his work, the question of the realization of desire is not exclusively sexual”, adds Perrine Ruby, a neuroscientist who advocates collaboration between neuroscience and psychoanalysis.
The sexual parenthesis closed, a question remains: what can we expect from psychoanalysis when it talks about our dreams? “Psychic defenses fall during the night. We are then subjected to pure images, this is why the dream is interesting for psychoanalysis”, describes a clinical psychologist in Paris, bottle-fed on psychoanalysis and who prefers to remain anonymous. Which specifies however: “The interpretation of the dream can only be done within the framework of psychoanalytic therapy, that is to say with a patient whose history and functioning we know a little”. Objective: “the lifting of repression and phenomena of unfortunate reproduction”. But “there is no traumas that are revealed in the interpretation of the dream,” she insists. Does this notion of repression as a defense mechanism for the psyche have any biological translation? In her latest work The Freudian Unconscious (Odile Jacob, 2023), psychiatrist Dominique Campion refutes the idea: “where Freud was reduced to postulating a vague sexual energy animating impulses, neuroscience now describes motivational processes based on the quest for rewards, clearly inscribed in brain functioning and whose mechanisms are increasingly better known, including on a neurochemical level. The control of these mechanisms largely escapes consciousness, there is indeed at the heart of each of us a motivational unconscious, but this unconscious is structural, it is linked to the way in which the brain manages these processes and not to the repression invoked by Freud”.
Interpreting dreams through psychoanalysis? “Magical thinking” according to Isabelle Arnulf, who highlights the progress made by the science of dreams since the 1950s, particularly through psychometry, a sort of inventory of everything that happens in everyone’s dreams, including “people who are doing well”. With statistics on large groups to try to identify the invariants. A scientific approach that has notably made it possible to establish that men dream more about male subjects than female, whereas for women it is more or less equal. Or, as Rahul Jandial points out, that men and women are more likely in their dreams to be the victims of aggression rather than the aggressors. A psychometry of dreams based on the sleeper’s narrative and which continues to this day, with a very rich scientific literature to its credit: we know that dreams at the beginning of the night contain more elements from the day before and the day before, while dreams at the end of the night contain more distant elements and more elements related to the future of the day.
Dream pathologies
Furthermore, “a real dream and nightmare medicine has developed in recent years,” insists Isabelle Arnulf. One of the lessons? Dreams can sometimes be precursors of an illness. This is the case for Parkinson’s patients: in these patients, dreams become more aggressive and their enactment (starting to scream for example) appears between two and thirteen years before the illness. Similarly, depressed teenagers who regularly have nightmares have a much higher risk of suicide in the following year. Another example: sleep onset myoclonus, or this phenomenon of falling into the arms of Morpheus. A hallucination that corresponds to the moment when muscle tone gives way and while the mental content has already gone into daydreams of falling asleep. If we wake up at this moment, this tone will be restored suddenly and will result in a kind of start. For some psychoanalysts, this bodily phenomenon is transformed into “an image of erectile dysfunction, which is based on nothing”, protests Isabelle Arnulf.
“We can’t test everything with a scientific paradigm: this is the case for everything that relates to the person’s affect. Neuroscience and psychoanalysis are different fields and contributions. They don’t overlap,” says Perrine Ruby. One point will make everyone agree: dream interpretation has its limits. Indeed, according to neuroscience researcher Rahul Jandial, “there is no objective way to know if a dream has been interpreted correctly. You can’t have an fMRI scan to get an image of your brain that would tell you if your interpretation corresponds to some objective reality. There is also no blood test or electroencephalogram that can give you the answer.” “The functions of dreams remain hypothetical, because they are difficult to test,” says Isabelle Arnulf. On the other hand, the specialist continues, “the functions of sleep are easier to test, we know them better and better.”
Advances in medicine have made it possible to diagnose dream pathologies such as night terrors, sleep paralysis, recurring nightmares for which we now have treatments, such as mental imagery therapy (by seeking to transform the nightmare into waking by creating a more pleasant alternative scenario to repeat every night). Among the major functions of sleep, we also find the digestion of negative emotions. Isabelle Arnulf takes the following image: “If you receive an unpleasant email written in capital letters with lots of exclamation points everywhere, if you respond immediately you will make an unpleasant response. If you sleep on it you are more likely to make a rational and less emotional response”. A sleep regulation function that is thought to pass more through REM sleep, because this is where dreams are richest in emotions. This has been tested: in the event of an important event the next day, the dreams of the day before are negative. “Those who failed in their dreams were most successful the next day. So you can reassure Olympic athletes: if they forget their sneakers in their dreams, they will remember them on the big day,” concludes Isabelle Arnulf.
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