INSOMNIA

KOVALOVSKY Pablo

The two functions of dreams, wish fulfilment and guardian of sleep, underwent divergent fates in Freud’s work. Only since ‘An Introduction to Narcissism’ in 1914, when he unfolds the imaginary structure of the ego do certain clinical consequences of this difference appear. A year later, in his ‘Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams’ he announces he is adressing affective states such as grief and falling

in love (significantly he does not say ‘melancholia’) as well as the state of sleep and the phenomenon of dreaming.

"We are not in the habit", he writes, "of devoting much thought to the fact that every night human beings lay aside (ablegen) the wrappings in which they have enveloped their skin, as well as anything which they may use as a supplemnt to their body organs, so far as they have succeeded in making good those organs’

deficiencies by substitutes, for instance: their spectacles, their false hair and teeth and so on. We may add that when they go to sleep they carry out an analogous undressing of their minds and lay aside most of their psychical acquisitions. Thus, on both counts they approach remarkably close to the situation in which they began life".

The bareness of the state of sleep and the calm brought on by the isolation from external stimuli which he calls "primitive narcissism" concur with the Nirvana principle: the tendency to keep excitation at the lowest level. On the horizon of an imaginary formation he places the impossible of absolute Jouissance in the confines of horror.

The so called wish to sleep is now defined as a passion: "not wanting to know anything about the external world". (will nichts von der Aussenwelt wissen).

Dreams, are affirmed as disturbers of sleep and the wish, fulfilling itself in the dream, turns into knowledge. The strangeness it bears is produced by an effect of the collapse of the scenic perspective (5) which supposes the vacillation of the fantasy structure. In a dream the gaze "shows itself " and disturbs us, while the ego appears multiplied, disseminated everywhere and nowhere at one and the same time.

The function of secondary revision, on the border of the dream, watches over the dream so that it

may continue and prolong the state of sleep. If the dream is an "awakening that begins ", the secondary

revision makes it intelligible. It sets it on stage supplying it with a faV ade. It is made up by phrases and

locutions and takes advantage of the ones arising from waking life that are ready to be used, "pret a porter"

as Lacan calls them. The dreamer’s ego makes itself present in the form of a denial: " it is only a dream" that

provides the strangeness of the dream image a stage setting by which perpspective is restored and its

undetermination dissolved. Denial is the correlation of the shifter that ties the event to its legibility on the

border of a dream. This means that it not only makes it legible but it gives it the frame for the conditions of sleep. By putting a veil over its strangeness it shows up as writing.

Hein’s humour came in handy for Freud to describe this. He compared it to the ‘sleepless philosopher’ that : "With his nightcaps and the tatters of his dressing gown he patches up the structure of the universe" and says about secondary revision: "it fills up the gaps in the dream-structure with shreds and patches".

If the inminence of the anxiety brought on by the possiblity of wish fulfilment interrupts dreaming and sleeping at the same time, secondary revision separates them provoking a first waking up even within sleep.

The clinic of insomnia

The temporal gap introduced betweeen dream and sleep, is an indicator of the jouissance in suspense that supports the dream scene. This economy of jouissance linked to the introduction of the imaginary of narcissism leads Freud to ponder on a clinic of insomnia Until then it just was an annex to actual neuroses as a toxic excess of excitations.

It can be drawn from what was said above that the absence of the ego that locates the dream through denial (" it is only a dream") or in the case in which the ego does not send out the anxiety signal to the subject , waking up will not take place due to a deficit of the imaginary function of the ego. Undetermination and strangeness persist because of a lack of boundaries of the oneiric scene which has its correlation in the body. We will encounter the nightmare in which there is no awaking from the dream nor interruption of sleep. Bounded by the Other’s Jouissance beyond subjectivation of anxiety in function of the Other’s desire discloses the effect of madness characteristic of various clinical pictures that co-exist with insomnia.

Further on Freud outlines the relationship between melancholia and insomnia. It is explained either by exacerbated narcissism or by its deficit. At the point in which the object that the ego is tied to cannot be

abandoned, as a corporeal or clothing supplement, it corresponds in melancholia to an equivalent retention in which the superego is the insomniac guardian. He also talks about hypochondria in 1915. It is well known that the passion for not knowing anything about the external world he ascribes to the sleeper, i.e. the passion for ignorance, is ratified in hypcohondria as the passion for ‘only wanting to know’. This "only wanting to know" by which the body makes itself aware of through the harrassing, incessant and undetermined externalness in insomnia .

The relationship between hypnotist and hyptonized is compared by Freud with the sleeping

mother in relation to her baby’s cry. It represents the inevitable woken part in sleep. The absolute of sleeping is solved by the exceptional and, in this case, being awake for an only object.

The melancholic’s selfreproach, a consequence of the imaginary deficit of his own self-recognition

is the only differential trait with mourning pointed out by Freud. The critical agency martyrizes the ego in a

wild and incessant way. The hypnotist who will take upon himself the superego’s vigilating function acquires

the power of the object that supports the tyranny of the drive making it coincide with the ego-ideal.

In "Group Psychology" he is aware of this conjunction in the root of the passionate

phenomenon of infatuation (that he had anticipated in 1915 together with mourning) this conjunction

comparable to the hypnosis that may be exerted by enchantment or by terror.

There is in sleeping a place which is awake, and will be occupied by the wish fulfilled in the dream or by the hypnotist’s fantasy.

Freud was aware from the beginning that the hypnotist located and gave a firm frontier to that woken part of sleeping in such a way that it does not allow the subject to be at the mercy of the absolute Jouissance of primal narcissism. A conjunction of maximum Jousisance and of an incestous, imaginary horror, of a returnto the mother’s womb.

It would be convenient to interrogate the analyst’s position in certain structures or in moments of the cure in which the nightmare of insomnia appears due to the lack of the imaginary outline of the dream scene .

The passage from the fantasy screen to the dream screen implies the imaginary buouying of an object or of a place as a support from which the ego cuts itself out. That same ego will then say : "it is only a dream". The equivalence between insomnia, nightmares, melancholia and hypochondria implies on the analyst’s part a position in the direction of the cure that opens the scene to free association inasmuch hypnosis blocks the possibility of dreaming or playing.