ABSTRACT

In 1908, Henri Poincare, the French mathematician and philosopher of science, gave a celebrated series of lectures at the Societe de Psychologie in Paris. In this chapter, the author wants to apply some of his thinking to the kind of clinical research that has been responsible for the central core of psychoanalytic knowledge about dreams and dreaming. Poincare’s immediate sense of what was happening in his mind was that all three stages were necessary. He reasoned that unconscious or subliminal mental processes were as important as those that were conscious and more familiar. In Poincare’s case, the objects of his unconscious thinking were mathematical. However, Sigmund Freud’s conception of unconscious mental operations was more elaborate than Poincare’s and included more intentionality. Poincare thought that to be a step towards a scientific theory a given description must enable the subject to go beyond brute facts to what he called the soul of the fact.