The polyphonic texture of intersubjectivity in the dream.

René Kaës

The interest for the dream in the groups carried on following the freudian psychoanalitic pattern, produced three main research courses. The first one is based on the analogy of the group with the dream. D.Anzieu proposed this approach, claiming that the group is like the dream. The second course studies the statute and function of the dream, whose report takes part into the association process of the group; it pays a particular attention to the group oneirism, meaning the common dream or the shared one.
I suggested a third research axis: it is based on the hypothesis that the dream is developed in the polyphonic texture of the interdiscourse. The dream is one of the most peculiar and private of our symptoms .The emphasis I put on the interdiscourse in the dream and in the group, owes a lot to the work of Bakhtine and his followers . Regarding the analysis of the literary structure, Bakhtine introduced the idea that it is elaborated at the crossing of other structures, just as the word is a polyphony of several writings: that of the writer and his characters, that of the addressee, of the historical context, the ethical and the cultural one ; The trace of the overdetermination of the word is revealed by its ambivalence or , better, by its polyvalence.

The polyphonic organization is typical of the very area of the language: Bakhtine extends this principle to the whole semiotic production: the logic organizing it, is not the logic of the linear determination and of identity, but, instead, the transgressive one, that of the Dream or of the Revolution: another law is ruling.

The conception of polyphony is interesting here, because of another reason: it questions the belief of the author's unicity. In conclusion, Bakhtine believes in the idea of an inner social audience, which is specific for every individual, in the " atmosphere of which his deductions, reasons, appreciations are produced...".

Finally, Bakhtine says, the word is oriented by two determining factors: " It is at the same time determined by the fact it proceeds from someone, and by the fact it proceeds towards someone (...) Every word is used as a form of expression to the one related to the other one...the word is the common territory of the locutor and the interlocutor ." I tried to work on these ideas as far as the dream is concerned. My hypothesis of research about the polyphonic texture of the intersubjectivity in the dream rests on two corpusese. The first deals with the analysis of the dreams that are born from the group associative process (R.Kaes, 1994, La Parola e il Legame, Roma, Borla; 1996). The second, with the dreams whose manifest content stages a group and that are recounted on the couch. Could the analysis of such dreams clarify the general processes of the dream?

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