ABSTRACT
Many clinical psychoanalysts, when they think of neuropsychoanalysis, become anxious. The reciprocal flow of information between psychoanalysis and neuroscience already has several precedents. The area of dreams is one in which psychoanalysts have the potential to make major discoveries of use to neuroscientists. This chapter highlights how clinical psychoanalysts can contribute unique and crucial data to the scientific understanding of dreams. Psychoanalysts can analyze the dream in many new ways. If psychoanalysts listen to dreams, not just for psychodynamic meaning, but also with neurobiological questions in mind, they may be able to outline some neurological processes based on the phenomenology of dreaming. Disjunctive cognitions may have important implications for understanding the organization of the mindbrain. The clinicians think of disjunctive cognitions in terms of their psychodynamic meaning. It suggests a manifestation in dreams of two fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis – transference and object representations – and holds out the possibility of identifying the neurobiological mechanisms of the phenomena.
