Psychoanalysis and the neurosciences: A topical debate on dreams

The author begins by pointing out that, whereas Freud first turned his atte ntion to dreams in 1895, they became an object of neuroscientific interest only in the 1950s, after the discovery of rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep an d the observation that a subject woken in an REM phase could remember and n arrate them He discusses the various brain structures found by? the neurosc ientists to be implicated in dreaming and the associated hypotheses about t heir involvement in the processes of remembering dreams, their spatial cons truction and semantic organisation, and the dreamer's emotional participati on in and narration of dreams. Attention is drawn to recent psychophysiolog ical research findings indicating that dreaming occurs in all sleep phases and not only in REM episodes. The cognitivist contribution is also discusse d. The author goes on to demonstrate the difference between the neuroscient ific and psychoanalytic approaches to dreams. Whereas the neuroscientists a re interested in the structures involved in dream production and in dream o rganisation and narratability: psychoanalysis concentrates on the meaning o f dreams and on placing them in the context of the analytic relationship in accordance with the affective history of the dreamer and the transference. The brain structures and functions of interest to the neurosciences, while constituting the physical and biological substrate of these aspects, are s tated to be irrelevant to their psychoanalytic understanding.