Notes on Erich Fromm and the Understanding of Dreams. Jorge Silva Garcia

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1 Notes on Erich Fromm and the Jorge Silva Garcia Copyright 1982 and 2009 by Dr. Jorge Silva García, Joaquin Romo 171, Tlalpan, México, 22 D.F / México; jsilvag82[at-symbol]prodigy.net.mx. In 1951 Erich Fromm s book The forgotten language was published, and for the purpose of this paper, it has an interesting subtitle: an introduction to the understanding of dreams, fairy tales and myths. (Emphasis added). This book opened important new frontiers to classical Freudian dream analysis. Fromm states in the Foreword of this book (p. vi): The term, an introduction to the understanding of dreams, etc., was chosen intentionally instead of using the more conventional term interpretation. If, as I shall try to show in the following pages, symbolic language is a language in its own right, in fact, the only universal language the human race ever developed, then the problem is indeed one of under-standing it rather than of interpreting... Fromm makes certain statements about dreams which are worthwhile mentioning (p. 4 f): But whatever the role we play in the dream we are the author, it is our dream, we have invented the plot. Most of our dreams have one characteristic in common: they do not follow the laws of logic that govern our waking thought... Indeed, in our dreams we are the creators of a world where time and space, which limit all the activities of our body, have no power. In our waking life, we seem to tap the vast store of experience and memory which in the day-time we do not know exists. Yet, despite all these strange qualities, our dreams are real to us while we are dreaming; as real as any experience we have in our waking life, There is no as if in the dream. And later further emphasizes this point (p, 3.1): in sleep existence there is no as if ; the person is present. For the purposes of this paper I will add two more quotations at this point (p. 28): Sleep and waking are the two poles of human existence and (p. 7):... all dreams have one thing in common, they are all written in the same language, symbolic language,.. Symbolic language is a language in which inner experiences, feelings and thoughts are expressed as if they were sensory experiences, events in the outer world, it is a language whose ruling categories are intensity and association... It is a language with its own grammar and syntax, as it were, a language one must understand if one is to understand the meaning of myths, fairy tales and dreams. The recollection of what we have dreamt, expressed in words and within the space-time frame of reference of our waking life, has been known, since Freud (1899 [1900]), as the manifest dream, which Freud ( , p. 183 ) subsequently described as follows: One cannot give the name of dream to anything other than the product of the dream-work that is to say, the form into which the latent thoughts have been transmuted by the dream-work, and in the New Introductory Lectures (1933 [1932], p.9 f.): What has been called the dream we shall describe as the text of the dream or the manifest page 1 of 7

2 dream, and what we are looking for.., lying behind the dream, we shall describe as the latent dream-thought. Since Freud s basic findings, extensive research has taken place and is taking place, in the areas of sleep, dreaming and dreams, this research has allowed us to change and transcend some of Freud s tenets. Psychoanalysis still holds to the early rule that dreams are the royal road to what is unconscious and, at this point, it must be emphasized, quite explicitly, that we also still hold to Freud s basic method for the fuller understanding of the latent, unconscious content of dreams: 1. The free associations of the dreamer, as a necessary requisite to clarify his past and present life context, 2. The events of the dream, day (Freud: 1899 (1900) p. 165): I must begin with an assertion that in every dream it is possible to find a point of contact with the experience of the previous day. 3. Free association to segments of the manifest dream and particularly to it s explicit affects. One of the Freudian concepts transcended by Fromm is that he no longer sees dreams as only the fulfillment of infantile wishes. Freud (1899 (1900) p. 553)stated; The dream would not materialize if the preconscious wish did not succeed in finding reinforcement from elsewhere. From the unconscious in fact. My supposition is that a conscious wish can only become a dream instigator if it succeeds in awakening an unconscious wish with the same tenor and in obtaining reinforcement from it... a wish which is represented in a dream must be an infantile one. (Emphasis in the text). Fromm (1979 p. 87) after analyzing some of Freud s own dreams states as follows: Freud, who so firmly denies his ambition as an adult, asserts that the ambitions are really those of the child and not of the adult. We find here one of the premises of Freud s thinking. Those features that are considered incompatible with a respectable professional man like Freud are relegated to childhood, and it is implied that inasmuch as they belong to childhood experiences they do not represent the experiences of the adult. The assumption that all neurotic tendencies arise in childhood is in fact the protection of the adult of being neurotic. Freud was indeed a very neurotic man but it was impossible for him to conceive of himself as such... It is here pertinent to state that Fromm s objective criticisms have never detracted Freud s greatness and by showing-up these aspects, he clarifies factors that inhibited the further flowering of Freud s work. Fromm (ibid, p. 95 f) continues to objectify and transcend: Freud assumed that all dreams are essentially fulfillments of wishes... After fifty years of interpreting dreams I must confess that t find this principle of Freud s only of limited validity. Undoubtedly he made a great discovery when he recognized that dreams are very often the symbolic satisfaction of wishes. But he damaged the significance of this discovery by the dogmatic assumption that this necessarily holds true for all dreams. Dreams can be wish fulfillments, dreams can express mere anxiety, but dreams can also --and this is the important point express deep insights into oneself and into others... While we sleep... we are also free, freer than when awake... in sleep the realm of necessity has given way to the realm of freedom in which I am is the only system to which thoughts and feeling refer. Going a step further, one could state that on listening to a manifest dream, it is of utmost importance at the very onset, to discard any idea that it fulfills a wish; to do so, narrows our possibilities of a richer understanding of that dream. If the further unfolding of the psychoanalytic experience with its associations should evince that the dream does fulfill a wish, fair enough; if not, we will understand only what is possible, at that point. to dream analysis any and all precipitancy to interpret blocks the way of understanding. Also, and not infrequently, the wishfulfilling aspect of a dream is the least revealing of the unconscious trends of a dreamer. A case in point would be Herr Pepi s dream (Freud: page 2 of 7

3 1900 p, 125): there are so many questions left unanswered if we accede to the wish element, that Herr Pepi only wanted to continue to sleep. Why is he all alone in his hospital bed? Why does no one hover close at hand? Where are his friends, camarades, family...? Why not be in a comfortable bed in his home bedroom? And so many other meaningful questions that should find an answer in the course of a psychoanalytic transaction. Dreams and their manifest context must be considered open systems of communication, whose ever deeper understanding unfolds with the analysands revelations through his free associations and the analyst s active and interested participation. Today no one challenges the fact that manifest dreams are expressed in a symbolic language, and that their analysis demands the understanding of these symbols. Through nearly 30 years of analytic experience with Erich Fromm (which began in the latter part of 1950), I learned also, that there is no urgent need to be precipitant in the understanding of the symbolic language of dreams, Frequently he would way: From what you have said, t think we could began to understand your dream thus... And weeks or months later the understanding of that dream became clear to both of us, because of a phrase spontaneously expressed or by an incident recalled, whose analogy to the dream could not be denied, On other ocasions he would say after our greeting: Do you remember this dream you told me on such and such ocasion? We have never really understood it. What response does it call forth in you? Or else he would say: I ve been thinking about the dream you told me at such and such a time, and I think it has to do with something you said towards the end of our last meeting. Fromm never left anything to mere chance. Always he sought for an ever greater clarity of our understanding. Frequently to my intense dismay I experienced his delving into what was embarrassing to me, painful, shameful, but with his love, kindness and firmness, he would never let go and I could only squirm or hope the session would come to an end. Sometimes, a sudden burst of tears of relief and joy heralded the clarification of some recalcitrant symbol thus far unconscious. Dedicated interest, patience, and the effort to con-validate awareness, bring the understanding of the symbolic language of dreams--a far-cry from intellectual constructs. I wish to quote a passage from The forgotten language (p. 11f) which has grown in its import: Are we not confronted with the same difficulty when we try to explain a feeling experience? Let us take a mood in which you feel lost, deserted, where the world looks gray, a little frightening though not really dangerous, You want to describe this mood to a friend, but again you find yourself groping for words and eventually feel that nothing you have said is an adequate explanation of the many nuances of the mood. The following night you have a dream. You see yourself in the outskirts of a city just before dawn, the streets are empty except for a milk wagon, the houses look poor, the surroundings are unfamiliar, you have no means of accustomed transportation to places familiar to you and where you feel you belong. When you wake up and remember the dream, it occurs to you that the feeling you had in that dream was exactly the feeling of lostness and grayness you tried to describe to your friend the day before... The picture you see in the dream is a symbol of something you felt. (Emphasis added). Slowly the idea grew that all dreams are global symbols; they all-convey as an initial message what the dreamer feels about himself and how he experiences himself, it is a sort of selfportrait that symbolizes his being at the moment of his dream. The dream quoted above portrays the infinite solitude of the dreamer and his feeling of utter abandonment: no one is about in those wee hours before dawn then our body is most vulnerable, in an unknown neighborhood; further more, it is a poor neighborhood and alien to his familiar milieu. He implies feelings of impotence and powerlessness for there are no available means of transportation and he does appear rather inefficient. How to arrive to some familiar environment? For all practical purposes he seems to feel himself as a lost child, albeit an page 3 of 7

4 adult, but the moment the dream portrays reveals him bereft of his adult resources. On awakening he is only conscious of feelings of lostness and grayness... did he feel no fear? Did he repress it? Can one feel so impotent, powerless, lonely and inefficient without also feeling afraid? This we could only become sure of if we knew more about this dreamer. Why is he so lonely? Why does he only see the milk wagon and not the milkman? Does this represent infantile oral remnants? What we can be sure of is that his dream day was not overabundant in felicitious nor loving events, nor did he experience relatedness to friend or kin. Why? During the psychoanalytic transaction we would have to find the answers to the above questions--better said: we would have to find the answers if we are to understand him. Which brings me to quote again Fromm s The Forgotten Language (p. 28): Sleep and waking life are the two poles of human existence. (Emphasis added). This implies that our waking life must clarify our dreams and must help us understand them. By the same token, our dreams must clarify and objectify our waking life and bring us to understand it. Both poles of our existence must corespond, must clarify one another, must validate each other. If we could analyze one dream exhaustively in psychoanalysis, we would glean quite a bit of what is unconscious to the dreamer; of course the understanding of many of his dreams would help us understand his symbolic language... for if each dream is an instantenous self portrait a series of them should reveal diverse facts of his being, since all are interrelated. The above quoted dream also leads me to repeat another most significant point emphasized by Fromm (ibid p. 5):...Our dreams are real to us while we are dreaming; as real as any experience we have in our waking life, There is no as if in the dream. The dream is present, real experience... If we think this over we come to comprehend one more reason why we should not be precipitate in interpreting, In the aforementioned dream, the dreamer finds himself in a poor, unknown neighborhood, and so on. All this is real, to the dreamer, it is happening to him, is the dream only the means to portray his mood of aloneness and grayness? I do not think so; it must be related also to unconscious factors intimately linked to these moods, factors of significant dynamic value that must be revealed, made conscious, if he is to become more aware of himself. To speculate makes no sense in analysis, one can wait for significant associative material or help to evoke it by a very interested participation. This dream and the teachings of Erich Fromm, show us that the manifest dream evinces both explicit and implicit affects as does all of man s activities and all the results of such activities, be it only that we walk, talk, eat or our most sublime creative works, if we dare to look for these explicit and implicit affects in the manifest dreams, we will be able to find them, and check them and we will increase thus, our horizon of perception. Of course, we must always remain conscious that our appreciation could be mistaken and be every ready to modify it as necessary: De omnibus est dubitandum (Fromm; 1962). It becomes ever clearer that the manifest dream in itself is revealing of unconscious trends of the dreamer, even without associations, as long as we keep in mind that we are dealing only with an initial understanding. We are definitely not proposing to do away with free associations, etc. Our initial understanding of the manifest dream, without association, posits quite frequently more questions than answers; but the questions in themselves are very important for our participation in the analytic transaction. True, we must maintain a capacity for perplexity and above all, we must even try to ask pertinent questions, not only the correct ones. The manifest dream guides us as to what questions to ask, if we are to make sense of it. The manifest dream and its implied questions becomes thus a sort of pattern, like those used to cut dresses: the dream must be understood in its global symbolism and in all its partial aspects. We must make a point of understanding our analysands dreams, at least some of them and above all the first dream after the first session, when analyst and analysand have met and dialogued. page 4 of 7

5 Erik H. Erikson (1954 p. 16 f) was also concerned with the manifest dream a propos of which he wrote: The psychoanalyst, in looking at the surface of a mental phenomenon, often has to overcome a certain shyness. So many in his field mistake attention to surface for superficiality, and a concern with form for lack of depth. Unofficially, we often interpret dreams entirely or in parts on the basis of their manifest appearance. Let us linger awhile with the first dream of a man 43 years old, a man in the applied professions; he dreamt it a few nights after our first session: I dreamt I was in my automobile and the landscape is blurred; it could be a countryside for I saw no houses. I was on a tortuous road, full of curves going down-hill and no matter how hard I pressed on the power-brakes, I couldn t stop the automobile; on the contrary it would accelerate more despite the fact that I threw all my weight on the brake, I was all alone, of course. There are no explicit affects and the implicit one found are: powerless aloneness impotent hopeless threat courage? disaster passive? What goes on in the manifest dream? A threatening force drives his car to seeming disaster and he is powerless, impotent to stop his car. He is all alone, there is no one who can help him. What is this relentless force? Is it really threatening? If so, why is there no evidence of fear? Why does this take place in his car? Why is he all alone-- of course? It is interesting that a thing (his car) is the driving force and not a living force. Why? The dream implies a feeling of hopelessness, there is no way of avoiding disaster. What in his real life makes him feel hopeless? It is strange that he shows no fear, nor does he cry out for help. Why? Is he brave? Is it the bravery of a suicide. Is he passive? Is he always alone? The man states he does not know why he should dream of himself as powerless or impotent. Sexually he is potent, also he is quite successful at his career and he has a wife and two daughters. No, he has not been happy in his marriage; his wife works and her job takes her on distant trips 2-4 times a year for a week or at most for 10 days. At first this angered him; yes, he has felt powerless to impede her trips, since he could not give her any objective reasons. Yes, he was jealous. He has been married for 20 years and in the last 10 years he has become resigned. At home he s not very communicative and he hardly ever talks to his daughters; at the utmost he will listen to them or act as if he is listening. He talks very little with his wife because their political views are disparate and she criticizes his bourgeois and conservative outlooks. They used to quarrel over his daily requirements of sex which she refused. He has become resigned to this also and gratefully accepts what she willingly offers. He states that he loves his wife and daughters but neither his life experience nor his dream, uphold this. The man portrayed in his dream could neither be considered happy nor successful except for his large automobile. He cannot be considered happy, loving nor beloved. The dream seems to imply that he is doomed, powerless to impede a probable disaster and he doesn t seem to care. He is quite alone; no one is with him and there are not even spectators about. The impotence in his dream may not be genital, but his associations reveal his psychological impotence. The dream implies a rather lethal outcome or at least a catastrophic one, yet what we know so far about his married-life doesn t sound neither lethal nor catastrophic. Am I amiss? I must admit that so far I do not belive so. Why did he say he was all alone... of course? Has he no friends or relatives? We learn that he has been distant from his sibling; his mother is cold, distant, aloof, so much so that even his daughters reject her. Could this be an added reason why there are no women in his dream? He does have problems with his wife and daughters and the absence of women also seems to add further significance. His father is of humble origin and has be- page 5 of 7

6 come successful and very rich; he works with and for his father yet he does not relate closely to him. Slowly we find out that he has always felt lonely and misunderstood; he has only succeeded as a student and in his career. He has never sought love, tenderness, warmth nor comradeship; he has no childhood friends nor from his youth, in contrast to his siblings. We learn that he loves large cars, but he doesn t change it every year; he does so every three or four. This, his detective-stories and his clothes are his sole private property. He finds that he has never expressed what he wants, not even where he would like to go. He has never gone on a pleasure trip alone. He only travels on business, sometimes alone and most often with someone else from his firm. So far we understand that he is locked in his car as if in a coffin, impelled by forces out of his control, without brakes, all alone, without being able to observe the scenery. He becomes aware that he has always been dragged along in his private life: at first by the demands of his parents and sickly sister and later, by his wife and daughters, but we are still far from understanding the diverse symbols of his dream. A year and a half after psychoanalysis he shows some clinical improvement: he relates to his wife and daughters; he now reads on political and social issues; he enjoys history and historical novels, and sometimes he asks himself what he wants and does something about it-- and he has a dream: I dreamt I was leaving my barber after a haircut and when 1 came out of the building I found I was on top of a hill which fell sharply on one side and I could see the green fields below; it was a lovely sight. I walked down a zigzagging balustraded path down the face of the scarpment till I came to a road. I looked for my automobile which I had left parked nearby and I couldn t find it. I was not alarmed. I first followed the road in one direction and then in the other and I didn t find it. I walked up the scarpment to the building, like a two or three story house and walked the streets on the other side and I didn t find my automobile. Suddenly I was at home, I didn t know how I got there and I was at ease when a large group of men, from the plant, showed up. They offered to help me find my auto and we went back to the hill. Our search was fruitless yet I still felt my automobile wasn t stolen and that I would find it. The next morning I got up, and returned to the site and found my automobile. The affects in this dream are: Hope Camaradeship Life Narcissism (a world of only men) Assurance Ease I believe the contrast between this manifest dream and the first one is rather evident: the overall scene is no longer one of hopelessness, nor impotence. He feels assured that he will find his car. The hill no longer impels him to his doom, but offers a lovely vista of life (green fields) and he walks leisurely down a sure path. He is no longer alone, his employees and comrades come to help him. At this point I have no idea why the barber, why the hill and soon. I know he has improved but the narcissistic world of only men in his dream points to a persistent conflict in his relationship with women, and of course, there is still so much to learn about him, if we are to understand him and his dream-symbols. The first dream in analysis is very useful. 1 I have tried to show with my clinical example that it is revealing of the dreamer s coreproblems: in this case his aloneness, his impotence and powerlessness, his problem in relating to women and to men. The dream suggests that as part of the transference phenomena he will not cry out for help nor show any sign that he is in dire troubles; he will at all times try to solve his problems by himself, even if there is a dim awareness that if he is left to his exclusive resources, he is doomed. The elements of the first manifest dream 1 It could become a moot question as to what one will call a first dream in psychoanalysis, but the essential point is that it becomes clear which one will be considered the first dream at all times. Methodologically I call the first dream, the one dreamt after our very first meeting. page 6 of 7

7 serve as contrasting points, to reveal in further dreams whether they show evidence of progression or regression in the therapy. At some point he will have to dream with women and his conflict with them will be better understood. The progression in therapy does not mean that the first dream theme may not recurr, but if it so happens, both dreamer and analyst will know that something in the nature of what was is happening again; it will be quite definitely an alarm-signal. The second dream above related reveals that transference-wise, although the analystanalysand relationship has improved, it is a farcry from what the relationship should become, because of the absence of peers or friends. What I hope has become obvious is that even the mere manifest dream is so revealing of unconscious trends in the dreamer: it shows his core-problems, his way of relating to people of his and the therapist s sex; his way of relating or not relating to the opposite sex, the negative or positive use of things and life symbols and above all they are a word-instantaneous portrait (in its global symbolism) of that moment in the dreamer s life. Our initial understanding of the manifest dream is a valuable tool in our psychoanalytic enterprise. Bibliography Erikson, Erik Homburger (1954) The dream specimen of psychoanalysis. American Psychoan. Association Journal. Vol. 2 p.p Freud, Sigmund (1899 [1900]) The interpretation of dreams. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (SE). Vol. IV and V. The Hogarth Press.London ( [ ]). Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. SE Vol. XV. The Hogarth Press. London (1933 [1932]) New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Standard Edition... Vol. XXII. The Hogarth Press. London Fromm, Erich (1951) The Forgotten Language. Rinehart and Co. Inc., New York. - (1962) Beyond the Chains of Illusion. A Trident Press Book. Simon and Schuster. New York. - (1979) Greatness and Limitations of Freud s Thoughts. Harper and Row, Publishers. New York. Copyright 1982 and 2009 by Dr. Jorge Silva García, Joaquin Romo 171, Tlalpan México, 22 D.F / México; jsilvag82[at-symbol]prodigy.net.mx. page 7 of 7