Tuesday, June 11, 2002
...the mystery of dreaming... is a critical way we have of communicating with ourselves and of processing that unconscious communication in the very act of dreaming. The remembering of dreams and their verbal narration in the analytic setting are secondary and tertiary phenomena. The dreamer who dreams the dream works in concert with the dreamer who understands the dream in their effort to give visual, narrative shape to psychic pain that can be viewed by an internal audience. That audience (the dreamer who understands the dream) understands and bears therapeutic witness to the truth of the experience that is brought to life in the experience of dreaming. This internal therapeutic dialogue, like the stars in the sky, is continuous, but visible only at night (that is, in sleep). The dreamer, never represented in the dream, is the 'Ineffable Subject of the Unconscious.' In this context, the Ineffable Subject of the Unconscious might be understood as a quality of being that is forever creating metaphoric reflections of itself: Dreams are among its most creative, magnificent, terrifying, enigmatic, unlocalizable creations. It could be said that we are most fully ourselves in the dreaming of the dreams that dream us...
The analytic quest... involves the voluntary 'unconcealment' of private, pain-ridden aspects of self. To achieve this, the Ineffable Subject of the Unconscious and the phenomenal subject join in an effort in which the Ineffable Subject of the Unconscious serves as a metaphorical 'playwright of the analytic text.' The Ineffable Subject of the Unconscious communicates (in the form of symptoms, dreams, actings-in, actings-out and so on) to the phenomenal subject formerly unexpressed and inexpressible pain. The phenomenal subject brings to the Ineffable Subject of the Unconscious the pain of current life experience (which is saturated with its historical antecedents). The Ineffable Subject of the Unconscious 'reworks' current experience, for example, in the form of dreaming, and tus makes it available in its altered form to the phenomenal subject..."
Also,
"Bion believed that the most basic driving force for human beings was not the Freudian libidinal and aggressive drives or the Kleinian death instinct, but the 'truth instinct' that involves an ability to achieve a resonance with 'O.' O is the symbol Bion used to refer to 'ultimate Truth,' which is unknowable in any direct way. O is beyond words and beyond sensory perception. The infant has a need for Truth that is as strong as his need for food. In early development, the infant projects unbearable (unthinkalbe) truth into the mother who converts it into bits of knowledge (K), which can be used by the infant for purposes of thinking and feeling that which was formerly unbearable to think or feel. This mother-infant relationship serves as a model for Bion's conception of the analytic relationship... transference itself is ultimately directed, through the analyst as object, toward the analysand's own unconscious (the Ineffable Subject of the Unconscious). The analyst in a state of reverie (a state of receptivity free of memory or desire) attempts to live with the truth projected into him by the analysand and, in a sense, 'becomes it' before transforming it into symbols (K)..."
From "Who is the Dreamer Who Dreams the Dream?" by James S. Grotstein
After a certain point, I didn't seem to be adding any more. And one day it suddenly occured to me that these were aspects, rather than personalities. At first I grouped them together into five personalities, and then one of them seemed to split more naturally into two, to make six in all. I gave each one of them a name, which at first was quite arbitrary, having to do with how they had appeared; but later I gave each one a more explicit name, making it clearer to me what function it was performing.
Then I took an LSD trip (perhaps more common then than now, but in any case something familiar to me -- I regarded myself as something of an astronaut of inner space), with the explicit object of getting into each of these personalities in turn, and asking the same eleven questions of each of them. This was an extremely useful exercise, which made anumber of things very much clearer to me, and made me feel that here was something quite powerful, which could be pushed quite a long way interms of self-understaing and self-acceptance.
The next step was to ask the question, if this works for me, does it work for anyone else? So in 1974 I got together fourteen people who wanted to explore this thing with me, and we held six meetings (for evenings and two whole days) for the purpose..."
"Subpersonalities: the people inside us" by John Rowan