The Sociological Interpretation of Dreams

Bernard Lahire is Professor of Sociology at the École Normale Superieure de Lyon. He has published over twenty books, including This is Not a Painting and The Plural Actor.

For Freud, dreams were the royal road to the unconscious: through the process of interpretation, the manifest and sometimes bewildering content of dreams can be traced back to the unconscious representations underlying it. But can we understand dreams in another way by considering how the unconscious is structured by our social experiences?
 
This is hypothesis that underlies this highly original book by Bernard Lahire, who argues that dreams can be interpreted sociologically by seeing the dream as a nocturnal form of self-to-self communication. Lahire rejects Freud's view that the manifest dream content is the result of a process of censorship: as a form of self-to-self communication, the dream is the symbolic arena most completely freed from all forms of censorship. In Lahire's view, the dream is a message which can be understood only by relating it to the social world of the dreamer, and in particular to the problems that concern him or her during waking life. As a form of self-to-self communication, the dream is an intimate private diary, providing us with the elements of a profound and subtle understanding of who and what we are. Studying dreams enables us to discover our most deep-seated and hidden preoccupations, and to understand the thought processes that operate within us, beyond the reach of our volition.
 
The study of dreams and dreaming has largely been the preserve of psychoanalysis, psychology and neuroscience. By showing how dreams are connected to the lived experience of individuals in the social world, this highly original book puts dreams and dreaming at the heart of the social sciences. It will be of great value to students and scholars in sociology, psychology and psychoanalysis and to anyone interested in the nature and meaning of dreams.

Table of Contents
 
Acknowledgements
 
Introduction: A dream for the social sciences
1. Advances in the science of dreams
The dream before Freud
The need for an integrative theory
 
Scientific progress and relativism
 
The art of limping: the end of pure speculation
 
On the scientific interpretation of dreams
 
Beyond Freud
 
2. The dream: an intrinsically social individual reality
Can the social be absorbed into the cerebral?
 
A few precedents in the social sciences
 
Limitations of environmentalist approaches: the ecology of dreams
 
Limitations of literal approaches: content analysis of dream accounts
 
In what sense are dreams a social issue?
 
A general formula for the interpretation of dreams
 
3. Psychoanalysis and the social sciences
Between biological and social
 
Psychoanalysis and the general formula for interpreting practices
 
Infantile hypothesis
 
Sexual hypothesis
 
The highs and lows of the dream: sexuality and domination
 
4. Incorporated past and the unconscious
Ways in which the incorporated past is actualized
 
The statistician brain or practical anticipation
 
The internalization of the regularities of experience
 
Oneiric schemas and the incorporated past
 
A critique of the event-focused approach
 
5. Unconscious and involuntary consciousness
The involuntary consciousness of the dreamer
 
Unconsciousness or involuntary consciousness
 
The unconscious without repression
 
6. Formal censorship, moral censorship: the double relaxation
 
The most private of the private: on stage and behind the scenes
 
All dreams are not the fulfillment of an unsatisfied wish
7. The existential situation and dreams
Dream and outside the dream
 
The driving force of emotions
 
The therapeutic and political effects of making problems explicit
8. Triggering events
The day residue: theoretical and methodological inaccuracies
 
The day residue: the inertia of habit
 
The deferred effects of triggering events
 
Nocturnal perceptions and sensations
 
9. The context of sleep
Cerebral and psychic constraints
 
Withdrawing from the flow of interactions
 
Self-to-self communication: internal language, formal and implicit relaxation
 
10. The fundamental forms of psychic life
Practical analogy
 
Analogy in dreams
 
Transference in analysis as analogical transference
 
Association: analogy and contiguity
 
11. The oneiric processes
Verbal language, symbolic capacity and dream images
Visualization
 
Dramatization-exaggeration
 
Personal or universal symbolization
 
Metaphor
 
Condensation
 
Inversions, opposites, contradictions
12. Variations in forms of expression
An expressive continuum
 
Forms of expression, forms of psychic activity and types of social context
 
The false 'free expression' of dreams and the varying levels of contextual constraints
 
The dream between assimilation and accommodation
 
The dream, as opposed to literature
 
Play and the dream
 
Dreams and daydreams
 
Psychoanalytic therapy: recreating the conditions of the dream
 
13. Elements of methodology for a sociology of dreams
The fleeting nature of dreams and dream accounts
 
Do we need to know the dreamers to understand their dreams?
 
Access to the non-dream state: associations
 
Beyond associations
 
Access to the non-dream state: the sociological biography
 
Clarifica

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