19 th International Congress of the ISPS, New York 2015 - Psychodynamic psychiatry according to the Teoria della nascita: dream interpretation*

Abstract

Readers of handbooks like Psychodynamic Psychiatry by G. O. Gabbard (1990) get the impression that dream interpretation has lost much of its centrality in the psychoanalytical practice. However, therapists who refer to M. Fagioli’s Teoria della nascita umana (Human Birth Theory) still consider dream interpretation as a central element in their work because it allows a diagnostic improvement and a precise monitoring of the clinical changes that would be otherwise impossible to obtain. Their ideas about the function of dreams diverge from the classical theory of dreams as fulfilment of unacceptable wishes. In their view, dreaming is a not-conscious thinking process regarding the reality of human beings and their interpersonal relationships. This “not-conscious thinking through images” is able to express striking levels of intuition but can also show pathological alterations. Three thousand years ago, Homer distinguished between “dreams that tell the truth” and “dreams that lie”. Similarly, in 1972 M. Fagioli described a psychopathological dynamic that he called negazione. After clarifying the difference with the Freudian concept of negation (Verneinung), this paper describes negazione as a dynamic that starts from the intuition of a positive quality owned by someone else (“the therapist cares about me”) that then turns into its negative contrary (“the therapist doesn’t care about me”). By giving some examples of dream interpretation, the paper discusses negazione as an element that induces a first level of loss of contact with reality, still limited to the unconscious level. The paper also outlines the transition from negazione to more serious types of disordered thinking.