ABSTRACT
This chapter indicates the directions in which the deficit in the phenomenology of dreaming in psychosis, especially the attempt to reconstitute it through group analysis, could be further investigated by neuroscientific research. Patients with psychosis are unable to dream because they can depict the primal scene solely as a sensual and fragmentary experience on the ontological level. People with psychosis fragment the images in their dreams by means of excessive projective identifications against themselves. For S. Freud, dreaming was a psychotic-like process, which in the case of neuroses was transcended by the fact that its ontology was effectively repressed by depicting it with refined imagery on the phenomenological level. W. R. Bion further explored M. Klein’s views on dreaming. For him, contrary to Freud, the ontological nucleus of dreaming is not desire but the imagery of the primal scene, which is the phenomenology of dreaming.
