THE NIGHTMARE...THE MASK OF THE REAL REALM

HAGENBUCH Nancy


The ancients identified in dreams any sort of meanings and, sometimes, messages from the gods. And, why would they be wrong? They used those messages. We are interested in the web that surrounds these messages, the net in which something gets caught.

...the individual is there to find himself, where the real was... the gods belong to the Real realm. The ich- the individual -is to come where the Real was. And, in order to know the individual is there, only one method is possible, to detect the net.

 

Jacques Lacan

 

The nightmare appears as the message of the gods or evils that disguises the Real.

Working on this, I come across a text, "Las siete noches" [The seven nights] by Jorge Luis Borges (argentine poet, 1899-1986). In this text, the poet describes The Nightmare, a painting by Füssli, with the following words: "A girl was lying. She wakes up and terrified realizes there is a small black evil monster on her belly. This monster is the nightmare."

In this book, the author describes one of his most dreadful nightmares. "I always dream about labyrinths or mirrors. In the dream of the mirror, another vision appears, another fear of my nights which is the idea of masks. Undoubtly, in my childhood I thought that if somebody wore a mask, he was hiding something horrible. Sometimes I see myself reflected on the mirror, but I see myself reflected as a mask. However, I am afraid of removing the mask because I am afraid of seeing my real face, which I imagine terrible. There I may find the leprocy or the evil or something more dreadful than anything I can imagine."

The way in which the poet understands the experience of the nightmare stresses the terrifying side of what it disguises.

Jacques Lacan defines the nightmare as the mask of the Real, the cover, the refuge of the Real that governs our activities more than anything else. Therefore, the nightmare is experienced as the enjoyment of the Other and is illustrated through the shape of a demond, an evil being, a creature that bears its entire burden of enjoyment on its chest and that squashes us under its enjoyment.

A questioning being that spreads in the zone called enigma appears in the nightmare and it questions the created demand.

I shall describe the following clinical material by taking the structure of the nightmare as a questioning being that offers itself as an enigma to the demand.

This case is about a woman who, at the time of the nightmare, was about to experience an important event. The latter was related to her name as she was going to face a new one: Mrs...

To carry out this act implied the signifiers of trick, deception and fraud. She was put into this position by the ideals of marriage and motherhood.

The pacient schemed the symptomatic landscape as decontrol and panic attacks (dizziness, unconsciousness, depersonalization feeling, panic). She had the feeling of not been inhabiting the place she was occupying or the record, in relation to her actions, of been watching a film. At that moment, when she did not want to stay but had to, the symptom appeared to avoid this unbearable enjoyment: being unable to find a place in her sexual position, attacks that left her without a place.

The Real of the symptom produced injuries on her skin, her flesh was exposed. There were marks of exceeding the barrier, everything that had to be protected appeared without its cover, without skin.

The demand was created through the allowance of any mean to fulfil the aim.

The nightmare appears to question the demand that concerns her basic self: being an accesory to the fraud. The nightmare implies having no place for her sexual position, inhabiting that space of deceipt and trick.

Text of the nightmare.

I was trustingly entering into a place that seemed familiar to me, it looked like a laboratory.

I was walking through a corridor and, in the middle of it, somebody was making me a gynaecological test on a bed, just in that place that seemed so inadequate.

Then I entered into a room, which was a trap because people were caught in there.

I was coming out of the building to a garden. There was a wall that separated the building from the street.

Police were telling me that there was a taxidrivers’ protest so the street was full.

I wanted to get out, I couldn’t, people were caught in the laboratory. I had been cheated to enter into that place but didn’t want to stay there, so I was desperate. Then I woke up.

 

Association:

This remainds me of a film. In the first scene, two nameless persons are thrown naked on the street. One of them is taken to a hospital. The other one dies and disappears.

In the hospital, doctors make every kind of examinations to discover his problem. Before dying, he pronounces the name of a drug that begins with F. Then he dies and the body disappears.

A doctor discovers that a neurosurgeon kidnaps nameless persons to take a substance out of their spines and then inject it into other people to let them walk. The film ends when the neurosurgeon is discovered and killed.

Afterwards, a woman, the wife of the doctor that made all those experiments, hands in a folder containing all the formulas to another doctor and tells him that the aim is good but that there must be a better way to achieve it.

The nightmare underlines the features of the dark enjoyment of the Other. The place that seemed familiar turns out to be dark, tricky, evil. There, on the bed, somebody takes out a substance of her feminine organ; the place is inadequate. From that moment, the nightmare becomes a labyrinth of tricks and deceptions. Finally, there appears the despair and the waking up.

The memory that the nightmare reveals increases the questioning being and its dark enjoyment, when the extraction of a substance beginning with F, not from her feminine organ but from the nervous system, which causes the death, is used for the enjoyment of the Other. This is an issue I shall not develop at present; nevertheless, Y shall state that it concerns the Real of the father.

I wonder about the kind of waking up that the nightmare produces.

In the seminar "The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis", Jacques Lacan refers to the waking up of the dream "Father, don’t you see I am burning?" as follows: "How can we not realize that the waking up has a double meaning? that the waking up, which places us back into a constituted and expressed reality, fulfils a double service? We have to look for the Real beyond the dream that has covered, surrounded, hidden it; as it has not been expressed in the dream, we can only find its substitute. That Real governs our activities more than anything else.

The waking up represents the Real that the nightmare disguises.

It is known that the symptom is connected to a piece of the Real; therefore, by this clinical material I have introduced, I shall compare the Real covered by the nightmare with the Real shown by the symptom. In conclusion, this item allows me to prove the lacanian hypothesis about the nightmare as one of the masks of the Real.

 

 

 

 

 

Nancy Hagenbuch.