ABSTRACT
Fisher has made several important contributions to the psychoanalytic literature on sleep-speech. It is curious that Freud made no systematic or extensive comment on sleep-talking. Sleep-talking incidents and their content appear to be influenced by dream formation tendencies and dream-work mechanisms such as displacement, condensation, secondary revision, and symbolization. Sleep-utterance may occur after a certain cathectic intensity threshold is attained; the distribution of cathexes and countercathexes is altered so as to modify the drastic inhibition of motility during sleep and to increase the permeability of the psychic barriers involved. The chapter discusses further considerations regarding a psychoanalytic formulation of somniloquy occasioned by contemporary developments in sleep psychophysiology and psychoanalytic theory. In order for linguistic events to be classified by Freud as a dream speech, they must possess something of the sensory character of speech, with linguisticmotoric and acoustical accompaniments, and must be described by the dreamer as “speeches”.
