Undreamt Dream

each analysand unconsciously (and ambivalently) is seeking help in dreaming his ‘night terrors’ (his undreamt and undreamable dreams) and his ‘nightmares’ (his dreams that are interrupted when the pain of the emotional experience being dreamt exceeds his capacity for dreaming)

Ogden’s foundational thesis: analysands present with two distinct categories of failed dreaming—the undreamable (psychotic/foreclosed) and the interrupted (neurotic)—and seek the analyst’s help to complete what they cannot dream alone.

Ogden, Thomas, This Art of Psychoanalysis: Dreaming Undreamt Dreams and Interrupted Cries, 2004thesis

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A ‘yet to be dreamt dream’ is a neurotic or other type of non-psychotic phenomenon; an undreamable dream is a psychotic phenomenon or one associated with psychic foreclosure.

Ogden draws a sharp diagnostic distinction between the ‘yet to be dreamt’ (neurotic, recoverable through analytic partnership) and the ‘undreamable’ (psychotic, requiring more radical containment).

Ogden, Thomas, This Art of Psychoanalysis: Dreaming Undreamt Dreams and Interrupted Cries, 2004thesis

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Psychological events occurring in sleep that resemble dreaming, but are not dreams, include ‘dreams’ for which neither patient nor analyst is able to generate any associations… These ‘dreams’ that are not dreams involve no unconscious psychological work, nothing of the work of dreaming.

Ogden establishes the negative criterion for undreamt dreams: they lack the unconscious psychological work constitutive of genuine dreaming, appearing as dream-like events that remain outside symbolic elaboration.

Ogden, Thomas, This Art of Psychoanalysis: Dreaming Undreamt Dreams and Interrupted Cries, 2004thesis

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It was an undreamable emotional experience that required considerable analytic work on my part in order for me to begin to be able to dream the foreclosed thoughts and feelings.

Through clinical self-disclosure, Ogden illustrates how undreamable experience—here, a psychosomatic residue—demands sustained analytic labor before it can be transformed into genuine dream-work.

Ogden, Thomas, This Art of Psychoanalysis: Dreaming Undreamt Dreams and Interrupted Cries, 2004supporting

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a movement between largely unstructured, freely associative states of mind (on the part of both patient and analyst) and more focused, sequential, secondary process forms of thinking

Ogden situates the analytic conditions that enable the dreaming of undreamt dreams within the formal structure of the analytic setup, emphasizing the dual participation of analyst and patient in reverie.

Ogden, Thomas, This Art of Psychoanalysis: Dreaming Undreamt Dreams and Interrupted Cries, 2004supporting

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In the very act of making this transformation from having an emotional experience to saying what it felt like, we are creating not only a new experience, but also a form of self-awareness mediated by verbal symbols

Ogden links the project of dreaming undreamt experience to the acquisition of metaphoric language, arguing that verbal symbolization is the medium through which foreclosed affect becomes conscious.

Ogden, Thomas, This Art of Psychoanalysis: Dreaming Undreamt Dreams and Interrupted Cries, 2004supporting

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lead us to undreamt-of heights of perfection

Freud employs ‘undreamt-of’ in a purely colloquial, aspirational sense—indicating unimagined possibility—entirely distinct from the clinical-technical usage Ogden will later develop.

Freud, Sigmund, Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930aside

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