ABSTRACT
In Chapter 4, I turn to the central theme of image formation, beginning with early accounts of the nature of representation and representability, considering theories of how images form – particularly in the idiosyncratic, at times hypnogogic, context of the clinical setting. I consider the relationship between images and words, also in these unusual conditions, and draw on the work of a few writers (mainly American) who paid considerable attention to this area of experience, such as Warren, Isakower, Lewin and Horowitz, alongside others who expanded on and developed work in this field: that is, the prevalence of imagery in the hypnogogic state.
My emphasis here is how that state may encourage such imagery in the therapist as a form of countertransference, and I introduce the key theme of the therapist’s daydream, how it relates structurally to the sleeping dream, (or those processes that may be applied to the daydream, in parallel to the ‘dream-work’ within the dream) that is open to a related form of interpretation that may benefit the patient. I discuss the elements of condensation, overdetermination, displacement, representability as well as the relationship between the ‘day’s residues’ and the patient’s material. I refer to Velasquez’s Las Meninas, on the one hand, and to Freud’s ‘Specimen Dream’, on the other, as illustrations of the complex and layered nature of imagery, whether as dream, daydream or painting and its accessibility to interpretation.
