ABSTRACT
The following brief clinical reports try to illustrate some intra- and extra-session hypotheses on “interpretation”—or, perhaps more accurately, “construction”—of dreams. They are based on at least two factors:
immanence, or experience lived with the analysand, provided by personal contact four times a week for months and years. This furnishes indications which come to our minds in a spontaneous way as the analyst’s free associations. Its initial manifestation coincides with Freud’s manifest content.
transcendence, when reality (facts, events, and people) is not what its appearance would suggest it is. We can never know ultimately what it is, but we are able to know, transitorily, what it is not. I have observed that, from “is not” to “is not”, in steps whose stuff is mistakes and/or frustrations, we might get closer to what is, without ever arriving there, but being, during this “journey”. I start from Bion’s observation that the experience of no-breast (the “is not”) may be a (or the) condition for the inception of thought processes. Or, if we become able to abandon these beliefs 128one by one, and come to base ourselves on facts, we may obtain firm (though always transitory and partial) pieces and aspects, glimpses of the reality, and can configure an approximate outline of its wholeness, however slowly. One day, one may see “that is that; it is not anything else”; or “I am what I am and I am no one other than myself”. Its manifestations encircle the latent content and are construed from the reality of the session, experienced by the analytic couple but focusing bits of intrapsychic structures and functions emanating from the patient.
