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THINKING THE DREAM: DREAM AND DREAM THINKING IN SIGMUND FREUD, HANNA SEGAL, AND WILFRED BION

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Abstract

In the dream and its interpretation, psychoanalysis, in its founding period around 1900, identified the “royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious in the psychic life.” But already in the development of Freud’s work itself, the dream lost its central position: As early as in the 1920s, psychoanalysis ceased to be a theory and practice defined by dream interpretation—a caesura in a process which completed itself in 1950. Two further developments proved, up to the present day, particularly momentous for the conception of the dream: Melanie Klein’s development of the concept of “unconscious phantasy” and the extension of psychoanalytic treatment to psychosis, originally declared inaccessible to psychoanalytic therapy by Freud. This article draws an itinerary of this path and the subsequent fundamental changes in the psychoanalytic reflection on the dream affecting the whole of psychoanalysis until today, by casting spotlights on essential stations: conceptions of the dream developed by Hanna Segal and Wilfred Bion, the latter’s theory perpetuating Freud’s dream theory as well as it conceptualizes dreams, dreaming, and thinking in a fundamentally new way.

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  1. Managing Editor PSYCHE —Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse und ihre Anwendungen, Zeil 22, 60313, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

    Dominic Angeloch

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Angeloch, D. THINKING THE DREAM: DREAM AND DREAM THINKING IN SIGMUND FREUD, HANNA SEGAL, AND WILFRED BION. Am J Psychoanal 83, 178–209 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s11231-023-09396-9

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