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jessicarizzo's picture

Dreams

Yes... I think when we hear confabulation spoken of in a clinical psychology/psychiatry context we're usually hearing it being described as a kind of pathological phenomenon. What you're suggesting is that it's not only not wrong or diseased, it's actually the more accurate (less wrong) model for understanding the way our brains are always in the process of creating and revising what we know about our pasts, that undifferentiated experience-matter from which we construct an identity. I think this is super interesting to keep thinking about for it's own sake, but also because figuring out how to be in relationship to our past selves has got to tell us something useful about how to be in relationship to our future selves. 

In Freud's early thinking, he theorized the appearance of neuroses caused by early childhood events/traumas like witnessing the "primal scene" or being, as a young girl, seduced by the father or other older male relative.  Later, he revised this thinking, positing that these traumas needn't have occured in actuality for his theory to work just fine, for the neurosis to be explainable according to the model he'd laid out.  The patient might have merely fantasized the disturbing scene or seduction (for the record, the latter hypothesis has been thoroughly shredded by feminist critics).  But I think the point to take from Freud is that it's really all about the narrative you create.  If you "remember" something and believe it happened, if it colors your interactions with people, shapes your understanding of yourself... well, then how can we say it's less real than the event that "really" happened? The analyst has to take it into account, and the patient has to work through it in the same way she would work through any other memory of an experience. 

I think about this in relationship to dreams sometimes.  Not that we often have a hard time telling the difference between dreaming and wakefulness... once we're awake.  But have you ever dreamt about a person you know, maybe even someone you're quite close to, and felt your wakeful (conscious) relationship to be irrevocably changed based on the events of the dream?  This may sound melodramatic.. or just kind of strange.. but in at least a one-sided way, the relationship (built out of past experiences) is different... because the dream (unconscious) experience goes into the bank of stuff you've consciously shared/experienced with this person.  You wouldn't hold someone accountable for something they said or did in your dream, but even if you're not going to let yourself interpret it as some kind of sign, you might not be able to help looking at that person kind of funny, or having a slightly different attitude towards them, which sets different conscious experiences in motion.  Then it becomes harder to separate the conscious and unconscious. 

Freud would say I'm having this dream in which this person says or does this thing because I'm repressing feelings about the person that I can't deal with consciously, so they show up in the unconscious... I wonder if what we've learned about the brain would actually encourage us to depriviledge the conscious even more and focus on what the infinitely fecud unconscious is telling us.  Not just as a receptacle for "unacceptable" conscious impulses, but rather a free, id-governed (or ungoverened) space, id sans the negative moral connotation.  Closer to Jung's description of the unconscious?

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