STUDIES Sen piesTCHiain ame Dream and wnt ene Existence Heidegger and Psychology ‘Merleau-Ponty and Psychology Readings in Existential Psychology Sanreand Poychoeay Michel Foucault and Ludwig Binswanger Edited by Keith Hoeller 0 ‘Humanities Press New JerseyOriginally published in 1985 as Volume XIX, no. 1 of ‘Review of Existential Psychology & Psychiatry First published in this format 1993 by Humanities Press Intemational, Ine., AMlantic Highlands, New Jersey 07716 al, Ine., 1993 ‘This edition © Humanities Press Internati Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dream and existence / Miche! Foucault and Ludwig Binswanger ; edited bby Keith Hoelier. pp. em. — (Studies in existential psychology and psychiatry) Originally published in 1985 as vol. XIX, no. I of Review of, ‘existential psychology & psychiatry ‘The work by Michel Foucault translated here from the French appeared originally as an “Introduction” to the French translation by Jacqueline Verdeaux of Ludwig Binswanger’s Traum und Existenz Includes bibliographical references. Contents: Dream, imagination, and existence / Michel Foucault ; translated by Forrest Williams — Dream and existence / Ludwig Binswanger; translated by Jacob Needleman. ISBN 0-391-03783-8 (pbk.) 1, Dreams. 2, Existential psychology. "3. Existential psychotherapy. 4. Binswanger, Ludwig, 1881-1966, Traum und Existenz, I. Foucault, Michel, Dream, imagination, and existence. 1993. TI. Binswanger, Ludwig, 1881-1966, Traum’ und Existenz English 1993,” Ill, Hoeller, Keith. IV. Series. RC454,4,D74 1993, 154.6°3 420 ‘o2-19s2 cP: ‘A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced ‘or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without written permission from the publisher. Printed in the United States of America Contents Editor's Foreword 7 Keith Hoeller Translator’s Preface 19 Forrest Williams Dream, Imagination and Existence 31 Michel Foucault (Translated by Forrest Williams) Dream and Existence 81 Ludvig Binswanger (Translated by Jacob Needleman) Contributors 107A.Vige o'tomme, j'ai vu s'élever et grandir sur fe mur mitoyen ae in ie ede aso, ne deel pls n pls nt invete ‘Fan pouvoir d’evusion unigue:Teéve Voici que obser ‘Seeane, et que VIVRE devient sous la forme d'un dre asctisme tllegorgue Ta conguete des pouvoir extraordinaire dont nous Sentons confusementtraversés mais que nous n’exprimons ‘g'incompletement faute de loyaué, de discermement crust et de persevdance When [reached manhood, 1 saw rising and growing upon the wall Shared between life nd death, lade baer all the time, in ‘with an unique power of evuision: this was the dream... Now see Uarkness draw away, and LIVING become, in the form of aharsh Silegorical asceticism, the conquest of extraordinary powers by ‘which we feel ourselves confused crossed, but which we only xpress incompletely, lacking loyalty, ervel perception, and pers René Char, Fareur et Mystere (Pars: Gallimard, 1984, 2nd fe.) pp, B2-83 (Partage For mel, XXIP). Translated by ‘Mary Ann Cas. Dream, Imagination and Existence* ‘An Introduction to Ludwig Binswanger’s “Dream and Existence” ict. FoucauLT Translated by Forrest Williams 1 In these introductory pages we do not intend to retrace, according to the familiar paradox of prefaces, the path taken by Ludwig Binswanger himself in “Dream and Existence” (Traum und Existenz). The difficulty of this text suggests doing so, no doubt. But its difficulty is too essential to its line of reflection to be attenuated in a zealous foreword ad usum delphini, even if the “psychologist” remains always the dauphin in the kingdom of reflection. Original forms of thought are their own introduction: their history is the only kind of exegesis that they permit, and their destiny, the only kind of critique. Yet it is not its history either which we shall attempt to decipher here. In another work we shall try to situate existential analysis within the development of contemporary reflection on man, and try to show, by observing the inflection of phenomenology toward anthropology, what foundations have been proposed for concrete reflection on man. Here, these intioductory remarks have only one purpose: to present a form of analysis which does not aim at being a philosophy, and whose end is not to be a psychology; a form of analysis which is fundamental in relation to all conzrete, objective, and experimental knowledge; a form of analysis, finally, whose principle and method are determined from the start solely hy the absolnte privilege of their object: man, or rather, the being of man, Menschsein ‘The working dimensions of anthropology can thereby be cit- cumscribed.' It is an undertaking which opposes anthropology to any type of psychological positivism claiming to exhaust the significant content of rman by the reductive concept of homo natura. It relocates anthropology within the context of an ontological reflection whose major theme is presence-to-being, existence (Existenz), Dasein.” Granted, an anthro- ppology of this sort can validate itself only by showing how an analysis, ‘of human being can be articulated upon an analytic of existence. AS a problematic of foundations, it must define in the latter the conditions of This “tnduction” originally appeared in Le réve t Pexstence, by Liniwig Binswanger (Vi: Deslée de Brouwer, 1954), pp. 8128. The Review is extemelygrteil to Michel Hosea fr kil granting permsion to publish this frst English tanstation, According toh evolstion, twas written 1983 while he was doctoral student in Paris, (KH, Ed.) 3132 Michel Foucault possibility of the former. As a problem of justification, it must set out the appropriate dimensions and the autochthonous meaning of anthropol- ogy. Let us say provisionally (pending some later revisions) that human being (Menschsein) is nothing but the actual and concrete content which ‘ontology analyzes asthe transcendental structure of Dasein, of presence-to- the-world, Thus, this basic opposition to any science of human facts of the order of positive knowledge, experimental analysis, and naturalistic reflection does not refer anthropology to some a priori form of philosophical speculation. The theme of inquiry is the human “fact,” if one understands by “fact,” not some objective sector of a natural universe, but the real content of an existence which is living itself and is experiencing itself, which recognizes itself or loses itself, in a world that is at once the plenitude of its own project and the “element ofits situation. Anthropology ‘may thus call itself a “science of facts” by developing in rigorous fashion the existential content of presence-to-the-world. To reject such an inquiry at first glance because it is neither philosophy nor psychology, because ‘one cannot define it as either science or speculation, because it neither looks like positive knowledge nor provides the content ofa priori cognition, is to ignore the basic meaning of the project.” Ithas seemed to us worthwhile to follow for a moment this path of reflection, and to see whether the reality of man may not prove to be accessible only outside any distinction between the psychological and the philosophical; whether man, in his forms of existence, may not be the only means of getting to man. In contemporary anthropology, the approach of Binswanger scems to us to take the royal road. He outflanks the problem of ontology and anthropology by going straight to concrete existence, to its development and its historical content, Thence, by way of an analysis of the structures of existence (Existenz)—of this very existence which bears such and such ‘a name and has traversed such and such a history—he moves continually back and forth between the anthropological forms and the ontological conditions of existence. He continually crosses a dividing line that seems so difficult to draw, or rather, he secs it ceaselessly crossed by a concrete existence in which the real limit of Menschsein and Dasein is manifested. Hence, nothing could be more mistaken than fo see in Binswanger’s analyses an “application” of the concept and methods of the philosophy of existence to the “data” of clinical experience. It is a matter, for him, of bringing to light, by returning to the concrete individual, the place ‘where the forms and conditions of existence articulate. Just as anthropology resists any attempt to divide it into philosophy and psychology, so the existential analysis of Binswanger avoids any a priori distinction between “ontology and anthropology. One avoids the distinction without eliminating it or rendering it impossible: it is relocated at the terminus of an inquiry DI M, IMAGINATION AND EXISTENCE 33 whose point of departure is characterized not by a line of division, but by an encounter with concrete existence ‘To be sure, this encounter, and no less surely, the status that is finally to be assigned to the ontological conditions, pose problems. But we leave that issue to another time. We only want to show that one can enter straightway into the analyses of Binswanger and get to what they signify by an approach no less primordial, no less basic, than that by which he himself reaches the concrete existence of his patients. Detouring through ‘a more or less Heideggerean philosophy is not some initiatory rite which might open a door to the esotericism of the analysis of Dasein. The philosophical problems are there; but they are not preconditions, Therefore, we may dispense with an introduction which summarizes Being and Time (Sein und Zeit) in numbered paragraphs, and we are free to proceed less rigorously. Our proposal is only to write in the margins of “Dream and Existence.” “The taeme of this 1930 essay*—the first of the texts of Binswanger which belong strictly to the analysis of Dasein’—is less dream and exist- cence than existence as it appears to itself and can be deciphered in the ‘dream: existence in that mode of being of the dream in which it announces itself in a meaningful fashion. Is it not a gamble, however, to want to circumscribe the positive content of Existenz by reference to a mode in which itis least engaged in the world? If Menschsein does contain meanings which are peculiar to it, will they reveal themselves in a privileged way in that dream moment when the network of meanings seems to condense, where the evidence clouds over, and where the forms of presence are ‘most blurred? ‘This paradox constitutes, in our opinion, the major interest of “Dream and Existence.” The privilege of meaning accorded by Binswanger to the ‘oneirie is doubly important. It defines the concrete progression of the analysis toward the fundamental forms of existence: dream analysis does nt stop a the level of a hermeneutic of symbols. Rather, stating from ‘an external interpretation which is still only a kind of deciphering, it is able, without slipping into a philosophy, to arrive at a comprehension of ccxistential structures. The meaning of the dream continually deploys itself from the cipher of the appearance to the modalities of existence. On the ‘ther hand, this privileged status of dream experience silently encompas- ses, in this text, a whole anthropology of the imagination that requires @ now definition of the relations between meaning and symbol, between image and expression—in short, a new way of conceiving how meanings tre manifested. ‘These two aspects of the problem will occupy us in the ensuing34 Michel Foucault pages. All the more so to the degree that Binswanger has left them tunclatified. We are not trying {0 parcel out credit to be sure, but rather ‘uying to express in this way what it is to “recognize” a line of thought ‘that brings us even more than it says, while still hoping to remain properly. modest toward its history, uw A coincidence of dates is worth underscoring: 1899, Husserl's Logical Investigations; 1900, Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. Twofold attempt by man to recapture his meanings and to recapture himself in his signifi- cance. ‘With the Interpretation of Dreams, the dream makes its entry into the field of human meanings. In the dream experience the meaning of behavior seems to blur. As waking consciousness darkens and flickers Cut, the dream seems to loosen, and finally to untie, the knot of meanings. Dream had been taken as if it were the nonsense of consciousness. We know how Freud tumed this proposition around, making the dream the ‘meaning of the unconscious. This shift from the meaninglessness of the ‘dream to the disclosure of its hidden meaning, and the whole hermeneutic labor involved, have frequently been emphasized. Much importance has also been assigned tothe reification ofthe unconscious, as psychic authority and latent content. Much, and even too much: to the point of neglecting nother aspect of the problem which, insofar as it puts into question the relations of meaning and image, is our concern here. ‘The imaginary forms of the dream carry the implicit meanings of the unconscious; in the penumbra of dream life, they lend these meanings a quasi-presence. Yet, precisely the presence of meaning in the dream is fot meaning making itself fully evident. The dream betrays the meaning even as it effects it, offering it only while ephemeralizing it. The fire that ‘means sexual fire—shall we say that it is there only to point to that meaning, of fo attenuate the meaning, to hide it and obscure it by a new glow? There are two ways to answer this question. ‘One way is along functional lines. The meaning is assigned as much “counter-meaning" as necessary to cover the whole surface of the dream realm, The dream is the fulfillment of a desire, but if itis dream and not fulfilled desire, that is precisely because the dream also answers to all the counter desires" which oppose the desite itself. The dream fire is the buming satisfaction of sexual desire, but what makes the desire take shape in the subtle substance of fire is everything that denies this desire and ceaselessly tries to extinguish it, The dream is a functional composite, ‘nd if the meaning is invested in images, this is by way of a surplus, @ ‘multiplication of meanings which override and contradict each other, The imaginative plasticity of the dream is, for the meaning which comes t DREAM, IMAGINATION AND EXISTENCE 35 light in it, but the form of its contradictoriness. Nothing more. The image is exhausted in the multiplicity of meanings. Its morphological structure, the space in which it deploys itself, its temporal rhythm of development, in short, the world which it bears with it, all these coun: for nothing if they are not allusions to these meanings. In other words, the language of the dream is analyzed only in its semantic function. F-eudian analysis leaves its morphological and syntactic structure in the dark. The distance between meaning and image is closed, in the analytical interpretation, only by an excess of meaning; the image in its fullness is determined by over-determination. The peculiarly imaginative dimension of the meaningful expression is completely omitted. ‘And yet, itis not a matter of indifference that such and such an image embodies such and such a meaning—that sexuality be water or fire, that the father be a subterranean demon or a solar force. It is important that the image possesses its own dynamic powers, that there is a different morphology of space when itis free, luminous space and when the space put into play is imprisoning, dark, and stifling. The imaginary world has its own laws, its specific structures, and the image is somewhat mote than the immediate fulfillment of meaning. It has its own density, and the laws which govern it are not solely significant propositions, just as the laws of the world are not simply decrees of will, even a divine will. Freud caused the world of the imaginary to be inhabited by Desire as classical metaphysics caused the world of physics to be inhabited by Divine Will ‘and Understanding: a theology of meanings, in which te truth anticipates its own formulations and completely constitutes them. The meanings cexhaust the reality of the world which displays that reality ‘One might say that psychoanalysis gave the dream no status beyond that of speech, and failed to sce it in its reality as language. But that was ‘both sisky and paradoxical: if the word seems to lose itself in the meaning that it wants to bring to light, if it seems to exist only by and for the signification, the word is nevertheless possible only by way of a language that exists in rigorous syntactic rules and inthe solid impress of morphotog- ical shapes. The word, to say something, implies a world of expression which precedes it, sustains it, and allows it to give body to what it means. By failing w acknowledge this structure of language, which dream experi- cence, like every expressive fact, necessarily envelops, Freudian psychoanalysis of dreams never gets a comprehensive grasp of meaning Meaning does not appear, for psychoanalysis, through recognition of a linguistic sructure, but must be extracted, deduced, gleaned from a word taken by itself. And dream interpretation, naturally, becomes a method designed to discover the meanings of words in a language whose grammar ‘one does not understand: it becomes a method of cross-referencing of the sort used by the archaeologist for lost anguages, a method of probabilistic Confirmation, as in the deciphering of secret codes, a method of meaningful36 Michel Foucault coincidings as in the most traditional arts of divination. The boldness of such methods and the risks do not invalidate their results, Nevertheless, the uncertainty of the starting point is never entirely dispelled by the constantly inereasing probability that develops within the analysis itself, not entirely eliminated by the number of cases that come to sanction @ kind of interindividual lexicon of the most frequent symbolizations. Freu- ian analysis retrieves only one meaning among the many possible mean- ings by the shortcut of divination or the longer route of probability. The expressive act itself is never reconstituted in its necessity. Psychoanalysis gets only to the hypothetical, thus gencrating one of the most fundamental paradoxes ofthe Freudian conception of the image. ‘Whenever analysis tries to exhaust the whole content of the image in the meaning it may secrete, the link uniting image to meaning is always defined as a possible, eventual, contingent one. Why does the psychotog- ical meaning take shape in an image, instead of remaining implicit or dissolving into the limpidity of a verbal formulation? By what means does the meaning insert itself within the malleable destiny of an image? Freud gives a twofold answer to this question. As a result of repres- sion, the meaning cannot acquire a clear formulation. In the density of the image, meaning finds the wherewithal to express itself allusively. The image is & language which expresses without formulating, an utterance less transparent for meaning than the word itself. And, on the other hand, Freud presupposes the primitively imaginative character ofthe satisfaction ‘of desire. In the primitive consciousness, archaic or infantile, desire first finds satisfaction in the narcissistic and itreal mode of fantasy, and in the regression of the dream this original mode of fulfillment is revealed. One sees how Freud was led to rediscover in his theoretical mythology the themes that had been excluded in the hermeneutic stage ofthis interpreta- tion of dre. He thus reinstates the notion of some necessary and original link between image and meaning, and admits that the structure of the image has a syntax and a morphology irreducible to the meaning; for the meaning, precisely, manages to hide itself in the expressive forms of the image. Yet, despite the presence of these two themes, because of the purely abstract form in which Freud leaves them, one looks in vain in his work for a grammar of the imaginary modality, and for an analysis of the expressive act in its necessity. ‘An inadequate elaboration of the notion of symbol is doubtless atthe origin of these defects of Freudian theory. Freud takes the symbol as merely the tangential point where, for an instant, the limpid meaning joins with the material of the image taken as a transformed and transformable residue of perception. The symbol is that surface of contac, that film, Which separates, as it joins, an inner world and an external world; the instantiation of an unconscious impulse and ofa perceptual consciouness; DREAM, IMAGINATION AND EXISTENCE. 3 the factor of implicit language and the factor of sensible image. Nowhere more than in his analysis of Senate President Schreber did Freud try to examine this place of contact. The privileged case of a crime exhibited in effect the constant presence of meaning at work in an imaginary ‘world, and showed the structure belonging to this world through its refer- ence to the meaning. But in the course of the analysis Freud finally abandoned this attempt, and located his reflections on two different levels. On one level, he established symbolic correlations which enable one to detect beneath the image of the solar god, the Father figure, and beneath the Ahriman image, the person of the patient himself. And on another level, he analyzed meanings, while this fantasy world remains no more than one possible expression of them, Reducing meanings to their most ‘transparent verbal expression, he thus purifies them, proffering an extraor- dinary emotional declension, the magical framework of paranoid delirium: “I don't love him, T hate him,” “It isn’t he whom I love, it's she whom ove, because she loves me,” “It isn’t I who love the man, it's she who loves him’—declensions whose first form and simplest semantic character ‘amount to: “I love her,” and whose ultimate form, reached through all the contradictory inflections, emerges quite to the contrary as: “I don’t love anyone at all, [love only myself."* If the analysis of the Schreber case is so important in Freud’s work, itis just tothe extent thatthe distance has never been so shortened between 4 psychology of meaning transcribed into a psychology of language, and psychology of the image expanded into a psychology of fantasy. At the same time, nowhere in psychoanalysis has the possibility of finding a connection between these two orders of analysis been more decisively precluded. Or, if you like, the impossibility of a serious treatment of a Psychology of the Imago—to the extent that one can term “Imago” an imaginary structure taken in all its meaningful implications ‘The history of psychoanalysis seems to bear out our contention, since to this day the gap has not been reduced. We see these two tendencies, which at ene time were seeking each other out, moving further and further apart. There are analyses along the lines of Melanie Klein, which turn on the genesis, development, and crystallization of fantasies, recognized as in some way the primary material of the psychological experience. And there are analyses along the lines of Jacques Lacan, which seek in language the dialectical clement where the ensemble of existential meanings are constituted and find their destiny, just insofar as the word, remaining ‘outside all dialogue, fails to negotiate, through an Aujfhebung, the deliver- ance and transmutation of the meanings. Melanie Klein has doubtless done the most to retrace the genesis of meaning from the movement of fantasy alone. Lacan for his part has done everything possible to show in the Imago the point at which the meaningful dialogue of language seizes ‘up and becomes spellbound by the interlocutor it constituted. But forthe38 Michel Foucault former the meaning is basically nothing but the mobility of the image and the path, as it were, of its trajectory; and for the latter the Imago is but ‘a muffled world, a moment of silence. In the realm of psychoanalytic investigation, therefore, the unity between a psychology of the image which demarcates the field of presence, and a psychology of meaning which defines the field of linguistic potentialities, has not been found, Psychoanalysis has never succeeded in making images speak. ‘The Logical Investigations are curiously contemporaneous with the hermeneutic of the Interpretation of Dreams. Within the rigor of the analyses conducted the length of the First and Sixth ofthese investigations, can one find a theory of symbol and sign which reinstates in its necessity the immanence of the meaning to the image? Psychoanalysis had taken the term “symbol” as immediately valid, ‘without trying to develop or even to delimit it. By “symbolic value of the dream image” Freud really had two quite distinct things in mind. On the ‘one hand, he had in mind the set of objective indices which betoken in the image implicit structures, earlier events, experiences that remained silent. Morphological similarities, dynamic analogies, syllabic identities and all sorts of word games, these constitute so many objective indices in the image, so many allusions to that which the image does not manifest in its colorful fullness. ‘On the other hand, there is the global and significant link which founds the meaning of the dream material and constitutes it as a dream of incestuous desire, of infantile regression, or of return and narcissistic envelopment. The set of indices can multiply indefinitely as the meaning [progresses and unifies, and cannot therefore be confounded with the mean- ing. They arise along the path of inductive probabilities and are never more than the method of reconstituting the latent content or the original meaning. As for the meaning itself, it can only be brought to light in a comprehensive grasp, for it is by its own movement that it founds the symbolic value of the dream image. The confusing of these two things has inclined psychoanalysis to describe the mechanisms of the formation of dreams asthe reverse and the correlative of the methods of reconstitution, confounding the achievement of meanings with the induction of indices, In the first ofthe Logical Investigations, Husser rightly distinguished between the index and the signification.” No doubt in phenomena of expression these are intermingled to the point that one tends to confound them. When someone speaks, we understand what he says not only by a ‘meaningful grasp of the words he uses and the sentence structures he puts into play, but we also let ourselves be guided by the vocal metody, which now modulates and trembles, now assumes the hardness and glow by DREAM, IMAGINATION AND EXISTENCE 39 which we recognize anger. In this global comprehension these two attitudes, however mingled, are not identical. They are inverse and com- plementary, since it is above all when the words begin to elude me, distorted by distance, by noise, or by the stridency of the voice, that induction of indices becomes more prominent than comprehension of meaning: the tone of voice, the volume of words, the silences, even the verbal slips, will guide me and cause me to presume that my interlocutor is choking with rage. By itself the index has no signification, and only in @ secondary way can it acquite one, by the oblique route of a consciousness which uses it as a marker, a reference, or a token. see some holes in the snow, some regularly-shaped stars, some crystalline shadows. A hunter would see the fresh tracks of a hare. We have here two lived situations. It would be idle to say that one contains ‘more truth than the other. However, the essence of indication is exhibited in the later, notin the former. Only forthe hunter isthe little star pressed down into the snow, i.¢., a sign. This does not mean that the hunter has more associative material than T do, that to his perception is associated ze of the hare which, in the same situation, [lacked. The associating is derivative in relation to the structure of indication. Association only ‘g0es over with full strokes the dotted lines of a structure already given in the essence of indicator and indicated. “Association recalls contents to consciousness while leaving it to them to attach themselves to given contents according to the law of their respective essences." But this essential structure, on which the psychological moment rests—on waat does it, in turn, rest? On an actual situation that exists, ‘or will exist, or has existed. The traces on the snow refer to the real hare who has just bounded away. The trembling voice is, according to its modulation, an index of exploding anger, or of mounting anger, or of anger which, with great difficulty, is containing and calming itself Whereas the authentic sign, to be significant, does not need to rest on any objective situation: when I utter the word “hare,” I may be referring to the one that raced the tortoise; when I mentioned my rage, I was speaking of a surge of passion which I have never experienced except in pretense or in a play. The words “hare” or “rage” are meaningful, the strident voice, the trace impressed in the snow, are indices ‘A phenomenology of the dream, to be rigorous, must not fail to distinguish between indicative elements, which may designate for the analyst an objective situation they betoken, and significant contents which constitute, from within, the dream experience. But what is a significant content, and what relation does it bear to ‘an imaginary content? Here, too, certain analyses of the Logical Investi- -xutions can serve as & point of departure. It is not legitimate to allow, as psychoanalysis docs, an immediate identity between meaning and image,Michel Foucault ‘united in the unique notion of symbol. The essence of the actof signification ‘mist be sought beyond, and even before, the verbal expression or the image structure in which it may be embodied. “Theses of formulation, of imagination, of perception, are too diverse foe signification to exhaust itself now in these, now in those. We Imus ‘opt fora conception which atsbutes this function of signifieation to 3 ‘ingle act which is everywhere identical, te an act Which is fee of the Timits of» erexption that may so often be lacking.” What are the characteristics of this fundamental act? Negatively speaking, ‘one sees at once that it cannot consist in relating one or more images. As Husserl notes, if we think of a chiliagon, we imagine, no matter what, @ polygon with’a lot of sides." More positively, an act of signification, even the most thwarted, the most elementary, the most bound-up in some perceptual content, opens onto a new horizon, Even when I say this spot is red, or even in the exclamation, “This spot,” even when T lack the words and I point my finger at something before me, an act of aiming is constituted that breaks with the immediate horizon of perception and discloses the signifying essence of the lived perception: the act of meaning this (der Akt des Diesmeinens) This act is not definable (as our example suffices to demonstrate) by some “judgmental activity,” but by the ideal unity of what is aimed at in the meaningful designation. This unity is the same each time the meaning act is renewed, whatever words are used, whatever voice utters it, whatever ink puts it on paper. What the symbol means is not some individual trait of our lived-through experience, not some recurring quality, not some property, as Husserl puts it, “of reappearing identically to itself,” for we are in the presence of an ideal content presenting itself thromgh the symbol as a unity of meaning. But one must go further, if one is not to reduce the act of meaning to a mere intentional aiming. How conceive this passing of the aim over into a significant fullness, where it becomes embodied? Should we follow the Husserlian analyses to the letter and concede a supplementary act of meaning, that which the Sixth of the Logical Investigations calls an “act of fulfillment”? That is at bottom merely to baptize the problem, to give ita status within te activity of consciousness, but not to find a foundation. No doubt that is what Husser! sensed in the revision (Umarbeitung) of the Sixth Logical Investigation which he prepared in 1914." Through this text one can glimpse what @ phenomenology of meaning might be (One and the same feature characterizes a symbol (such as a mathematical sign), a word, or an image, whether the word or the symbol be uttered (or written, whether we abandon ourselves to the train of discourse or to the imagination’s dreaming; something new arises outside us, a Tittle DREAM, IMAGINATION AND EXISTENCE 4 different fram what we expected, by virtue of the resistance offered by imaginary material, verbal or symbolic, and also by virtue of the implica~ tions offered by the thing now constituted as significant: by fulfulling itself in the actuality ofthe signifying, the intentionally virtual opens upon new virtualities. This actuality in effect is located in a spatio-temporal context, the words are inscribed in our surrounding world and point to speakers atthe horizon of the verbal implications. Here is where we grasp the meaning act itself in its paradoxical nature; a taking-up of an objective theme presents itself, like a word, as a cultural object; or like an image, it presents itself as a quasi-perception. The meaning act operates as a thematic activity in which the “I speak” or the “I imagine” are brought to light, Word and image are conjugated in the first person at the very ‘moment that they achieve objective form. No doubt this is what Husserl meant when he wrote about language: (One thing is cetan..-The sigifed takes part in the accomplishing of the dead. He who speaks engenders not only the word, Dut the expresion ints ota.” It is finally the expressive act itself that a phenomenological analysis brings to light beneath the multiplicity of structures of signification This seems to us essential in a number of ways. Contrary t0 the traditional interpretation, the theory of signification does not seem to us to be the last word of the Husserlian eidetic of consciousness. In fact, it culminates in a theory of expression which remains cloaked, but for which the need is nonetheless present the whole length of the analyses. One might be surprised that phenomenology never developed in the direction of a theory of expression, which it left in the shadows, while bringing ino ful light « Wieory of signifivation. But a philosophy of expression is no doubt possible only by going beyond phenomenology. ‘At the moment, one thing should be noticed. This entire phenomenological analysis which we have sketched, following Husserl, calls for a completely different parsing of psychoanalysis with regard to the fact of symbolism. It would establish in effect an essential distinction between the structure of objective indication and that of signifying acts; oor, to stretch things a trifle, it would place the greatest possible distance between what pertains to symptomatology and what pertains to semantics. Psychoanalysis, by contrast, has always confounded the two struc- tures, defining meaning by eross-referencing of objective signs and coin- cidences within the deciphering process. AS a result, Freudian analysis ‘could see only an artificial connection between meaning and expression, namely, the hallucinatory nature ofthe satisfaction of desire. Phenomenol- ‘ogy. on the contrary, enables one to recapture the meaning in the context ‘of the expressive act which founds it, To that extent, a phenomenological2 Michel Foucault description can make manifest the presence of meaning in an imaginary content. “Thus reinstated in its expressive base, however, the act of meaning is cutoff from any form of objective indication. No extemal context can restore it to its truth, ‘The time and space it bears are but a furrow which immediately disappears; and others are implicated at the horizon of the expressive actonly inan ideal manner, with no possibility of real encounter. To understand something or someone is thus definable in phenomenology only as a new grasp in the mode of interiorty, a new way of inhabiting the expressive act, a method for reinstating oneself within it, never an attempt to situate it in its own right. This cognitive problem becomes central in any psychology of meaning and lies at the heart of any psychopathology. Along the lines of pure phenomenology, there is no principle for solving it. Jaspers, more than anyone, was troubled by this impossibility. Just to the extent that he opposed significational(sinnhafi) forms to sensible (sinnlch) forms," attributing to the former alone the possibility of valid comprehension, he managed to justify the doctor-patient relationship only by a mystique of communication." Phenomenology has succeeded in making images speak; but it has given no one the possibility of understanding their language. ‘One would not be much off the mark in defining this problem as one of the major themes of existential analysis. ‘Phenomenology has indeed thrown light on the expressive foundation cof all meanings; but the need to justify comprehension implies a reinteg- ration of the moment of objective indication on which Freudian analysis had dwelt. To find the foundation common to objective structures of indication, significant ensembles, and acts of expression, such is the problem posed. by the twofold tradition of phenomenology and psychoanalysis. From the confrontation between Husserl and Freud has emerged a double problema- tic: a method of interpretation is needed that reinstates acts of expression in their fullness. The hermeneutic journey should not stop at the verbal sequences which have preoccupied psychoanalysis. It should continue to the decisive movement in which expression objectfies itself in the essential structures of indication, Much more than verification was needed: a foun- dation was required. This fundamental moment in which meanings are knit together is ‘what Binswanger tried to bring to light in “Dream and Existence.” ‘We will be reproached for having not only gone beyond the letter of the Husserlian and Freudian texts in this presentation, but for having. constructed from whole cloth a problematic that Binswanger never formu DREAM, IMAGINATION AND EXISTENCE. 43 lated, one whose themes are not even implicit in his texts. To our thinking, this charge carries little weight, because we are fallible enough to believe istory even when it is a question of Existenz. We are not concerned to present an exegesis, but to disengage an objective meaning. We believe that the work of Binswanger is important enough to bear such a meaning. ‘That is why only its real problematic has occupied our attention, In his texts will be found the problem which he set for himself; for our part, we wanted to specify the problem to which he was responding, m1 Nihil megnum somnianti—Cicero By bringing to light a dynamic as fundamental as dreaming and expression, Binswanger rejoined a tradition left unclarified by a 19th-cen- tury psychology that Freud did not always succeed in transcending. Paychoanalysis had inaugurated a psychology of dreams or, at least, had restored to the dream its psychological rights. And yet this was undoubtedly not to recognize its full range of validity. In Freud, the dream is the clement common to the expressive forms of motivation and the method of psychological deciphering: itis at once the symbolic code of psychology and its grammar. Freud thus restored a psychological dimension to the dream, but he did not succeed in understanding it as a specific form of experience. He reconstituted the dream in its original mode with fragments of revived thoughts, symbolic translations and implicit verbalizations. The logical enalysis of the whole is a logic of discourse, the motivations and structures uncovered are woven on the same psychological warp as the forms of waking consciousness, Freud psychologized the dream—and the privilege it thus acquired in the realm of psychology deprived it of any privilege as a specific form of experience. Freud did not succeed in going beyond a solidly established postulate of 19th-ventury psychology: that a dream is a rhapsody of images. If it really were no more than that, 2 dream would be exhausted by a psycholog- ical analysis, whether in the mechanistic mode of a psychophysiology or in the manner of an investigation of significations. But a dream is without doubt quite other than a rhapsody of images, for the simple reason that a dream is an imaginary experience; and if it cannot be exhausted—as we saw earlicr—by a psychological analysis, this is because it relates also to a theory of knowledge Uni the 19th century, the problem of dreams had indeed been posed in epistemological terms. The dream had been described as an absolutely specific form of experience. If a psychology of dreams could be set forth, this had been possible only in a secondary and derivative way, on the basis ofa theory of knowledge which located it as a type of experience.44 Michel Foucault In “Dream and Existence,” Binswanger links up again with this forgotten tradition He rediscovered the notion that the signifying value of the dream tends to be tailored to the psychological analyses that can be effected. ‘The dream experience, by contrast, has a content all the richer to the degree that it is irreducible to the psychological determinations to which one tries to adapt it. It is the old idea, so constant in the literary and mystical tradition, that only “morning dreams” have a valid meaning. “The dreams of the hale and hearty man are the moming dreams,” said Schelling. " The idea goes back to a Greco-Roman tradition. ‘The justfi- cation may be found in Jamblichas of Calchis: a dream cannot be deemed divine if it occurs among digestive vapors. It has value only before the meal or else after digestion, at dusk or in the moming. De Mirbel wrote in Le prince du sommeil: “And one must maintain the most cleansed time of night is toward morning, ‘inter somnum et vigiticum.’”"* Théophile had one of his characters say to his Pyramus: “The hour in which our bodies, filled with heavy vapors, Arouse in our senses deceitful motions id aleady passed, and my quieted bain ‘Was feeding on the poppies of sleep distilled, Ave momeat the night i about to end ‘And the chariot of Dawn is yet to arive.”| Consequently, the dream is not meaningful only to the extent that psychological motivations and physiological determinations intersect and ‘cross-index in a thousand ways; on the contrary, it is rich by reason of the poverty of its objective content. It is all the more valid in that it has the less reason for being. Hence the strange privilege of morning dreams. Like the dawn they proclaim a new day, with a depth to their clarity that the wakefulness of high noon will never know. Between the sleeping mind and the waking mind, the dreaming mind enjoys an experience which borrows from nowhere its light and its genius. Baader spoke in this sense ofthis “sleeping wakefulness” and this “wakeful sleep” which is tantamount to clairvoyance, and which is an immediate return to objects without passing through the mediation of the organs." But the theme of original dimensions to dream experience is not only inscribed in a literary, mystical, or popular tradition. It can easily be discerned as well in Cartesian and post-Cartesian texts. ‘At the point of convergence of a mystical tradition and a rationalisitic method the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus posed the problem of the prophetic dream. “Not only true things, but also trifles and fancies may be useful,” Spinoza wrote to Boxel.”" And in another letter, addressed (0 Pierre Bailing,” on the subject of dreams, premonitions, and warnings, DREAM, IMAGINATION AND EXISTENCE 45 he distinguished two sorts of imaginings: those which depend solely on the body, ts complexion and the motions of its humors, and those which give sensory body to ideas of the understanding, in which one can find at once track and sign, a tracing of truth. The one form of imagination ccan be found in delirium, and makes up the physiological warp of the «dream. Bu the other makes of the imagination a specific form of know- edge. This is what the Ethics refers to when it shows the imagination in essential connection withthe idea and with the makeup of the mind.*' The analysis of prophetic dreams in the Tractatus moves at these two levels. ‘There is the imagination tied to the motions of the body which give their individual zoloring to the dreams of the prophets. Each prophet dreamed the dreams appropriate to his temperament. The affiction of Jeremiah or the anger of Elias can only be explained externally, they pertain to an examination oftheir bodies and the motions oftheir humors. But each of these dreams had its meaning, which exegesis now has the task of bringing to light. The meaning which exhibits the link of imagination to tuth is the language of God to men, to show them his commandments and his ‘ruth. Men of imagination, the Hebrews understood only the Word of images. Men of passion, they could be made to submit only by he emotions conveyed in frightening and angry dreams. The prophetic dream is like an oblique path of philosophy, another experience of the same truth, “for the truth cannot contradict itself.” It is God revealing Himself to men by images and figures.” Dream, like imagination, is the concrete form of revelation. “The prophets only perceived God’s revelation by the aid of the imagination.”> Spinoza thereby rejoined the great classical theme of the relations between imagination and transcendence. Like Malebranche, he discovered the notion thatthe imagination, in its mysterious ciphers, in the imperfec- tuon of its understanding, in its hal-light, in the presence which it always shows forth only elusively, points beyond the content of human experience, beyond even the discursive knowledge we can master, to the existence of a truth which surpasses man on al sides, yet bends towards him and offers itself to his mind in concrete species of images. The dream, like every imaginary experience, is thus a specific form of experience which cannot bbe wholly reconstituted by psychological analysis, one whose content points to man as transcended being. The imaginary, sign of transcendence; the dream, experience of this transcendence under the sign of the imagi- nary. ‘This isthe lesson of classical psychology which Binswanger implicitly reaffirmed in his analysis of the dream. But he also rejoined another tradition, nplied in the classical one.46 Michel Foucault In the dream, as in the experience of a transcendent truth, Christian theology found shortcuts taken by divine will, a quicker way in which God may distribute His proofs, His decrees, and His warnings. It is as if 1 dream were an expression of that human freedom which can be inclined ‘without being determined, which is illuminated without being constrained, ‘and which receives warnings with something less than full evidence. In the classical literature on dreams one can detect the whole theological dispute concerning Grace, the dream standing, so to speak, to the imag- ination as Grace does to the heart or the will. In classical tragedy the dream is a kind of figuring forth of Grace. The tragic significance of the ‘dream poses for the Christian consciousness of the 18th century the same problems as the theological significance of Grace. Afteran ominous dream, Tristan has Herod say: ‘What Destiny writes cannot be eased, ‘And its secret shares cannot be escaped, ‘We num the more toward them ‘When e think to escape them. ‘After a dream, a character in Ferrier’s Adraste declares: No, my’ lor, in the skies is our death inscribed, Man cannot cross that Timit ordained, And measures only plunge him down Into the very misfortune he testo avoid. ‘Thus docs the sovereign grandeur ofthe gos, Choose to play without human weaknesses." ‘Thus, the tragic dream for Jansenism. As for Molinism, the dream longer predestination, but warning or signal, more to prevent predeti nation than to declare it, In Benserade’s drama, Briseis says: Achilles, those things that mas your joy ‘Are so many counsels from Heaven. In Osman, the lesson is even clearer: But heaven yet may, during our slp, ‘Tum our minds to lend us counsel, ‘The outcome of our destiny Is not alays decided by is views, Tye murmuring thunder does not always stke as lighting, ‘Avmovement of the hear may deflect its course.” But we should not he deceived. Beneath this doubtless most literary quarrel, DREAM, IMAGINATION AND EXISTENCE 47 in which fiom one tragedy to another the characters answer each other And throw out arguments borrowed from theological treatises, lies hidden the problem, more genuinely tragic, of destiny Man has known, since antiquity, that in dreams he encounters what he is and what he will be, what he has done and what he is going to do, discovering there the knot that ties his freedom to the necessity of the ‘world. In the dream and its individual significance Chrysippus saw the ‘universal concatenation of the world and the effect of sympatheia which conspires to form the unity of the world and which animates each fragment with the same spiritual fire. Much later the Renaissance will take up the jdea again. For Campanella, it is the soul of the world—principle of ‘universal cohesion—that inspires human instincts, desires, and dreams together. And to mark the last stage of this great mythology of the dream, this fantastic cosmogony of the dream where the whole universe seems to conspire at a momentary and vacillating image, there were also Novalis and Schelling: “The world becomes dream, the dream becomes world, ‘and the outcome in which one believes can be seen coming from afar.”* ‘What has changed from one epoch to another has not been this reading of destiny in dreams, nor even the deciphering procedures, but rather the justification of this relation of dream to world, and the way of conceiving hhow the truth of the world can anticipate itself and gather together its future in an image capable only of reconstituting it in & murky form. ‘These justifications, to be sure, are still more imaginary than philo- sophical, exalting myth at the boundaries between poetry and abstract reflection. in Aristotle, the value of the dream is connected with the calm ‘of the soul, with the nocturnal dream in which the soul is removed from the agitation of the body. In that silence it becomes sensitive to the most pervasive movements of the world, to the most distant agitations, and like the surface of water is all the more disturbed by the agitation at its shores as its center is the more calm and quiet; similarly, the sleeping soul is ‘more sensitive than the waking soul to the motions of the distant word. ‘The ripples get larger as they move and soon take on enough magnitude to make the whole surface tremble; similarly, in a dream, the weakest ‘excitations end by distorting the whole mirror of the soul. A noise scarcely perceptible to the waking ear tums in dream into a roll of thunder, the least warmih becomes a conflagration, In the dream, the soul, freed of its body, plunges into the Kosmos, becomes immersed in it, and mingles with its mctions in a sort of aquatic union, For others, the mythic element through which the dream joins the world is not water, but fire. In the dream, the subtle body of the soul catches fire from the secret flame of the world and thereby penetrates to48 Michel Foucault the intimacy of things. ‘This is the Stoic theme of the cohesion of the world ensured by the pneuma and sustained by that hei which culminates in a universal fire, It isthe esoteric theme, which reached {rom medieval alchemy to the “presciemtific” spirit of the 18th century, of an “oneivo Imancy,” a sort of phlogiston of the soul. Finally, it is the Romantic there in which the precise image of fire begins to attenuate, keeping only the pPiritual qualities and the dynamic values; subtlety, lightness, flickering light casting shadows, ardor which transforms, consumes, and destroyss leaving only ashes where once had been brightness and joy. Novalis writes that “the dream teaches us in a remarkable fashion the subtlety with which ur Soul insinuates itself among objects and at the same time transforms itself into each of them.” ‘The complementary myths of water and fire maintain the philosophic {heme of the substantial unity of the soul and the world inthe dreaming imagination. But one can also find other ways, in the history of dream, {o justify its transcendent character. The dream may be the shadowy apperception of those things one senses all around oneself at night—or ontrariwise, the instantaneous flash of light, the utter brightness of intui. tion, which completes itself in its very occurrence. {t was above all Baader who defined the dream by the luminosity of intuition. The dream, for him, was the lightning flash of inner vision which, beyond all sensory and discursive mediations, attains the truth in & single movement. He spoke of that “inner and objective vision” which “is not mediated by the extemal senses” which “we experience in our common dreams.” AC first, inner sensibility stands in opposition to outer Sensibility, but finally, in the full grip of sleep, the former overwhelms the latter, and the mind emerges into a subjective world much more profound than the world of objects, and laden with a far weightier mean. ing.” The privilege that tradition accords to waking consciousness and ite Knowledge is “but uncertainty and prejudice.” In the darkest night the glow of the dream is more luminous dian the light of day, and the intuition bome with itis the most elevated form of knowledge. We meet wit the same idea in Carus: the dream reaches well beyond itself towards objective knowledge. Its that movement of the mind which, of its own accord, goes unto the world and finds its unity with the world 1 explains in effect that waking knowledge of the world is opposition, {er the receptivity of the senses and the possibility of being affected by objects are nothing but opposition to the world, “Gegenwirken gegen cine Welt” The dream, by contrast, breaks down this opposition and. goes beyond it—not in a luminous instant of clarity, but by the slow immersion of the mind in the night of the unconscious, By this plunge deep into the unconscious, far more than in state of \M, IMAGINATION AND EXISTENCE ‘asc reson the ou wil play it part in the universal interwinings ard wil allow aset tobe penetrated by everything spatial and tmp as produced inthe Unconscious.” To that extent, the dream experience would be a Fernsehen like that “farsighted vision” which is limited only by the horizons of the world, fan obscure exploration of that unconscious which from Leibniz and Hartmann has been conceived as the muted echo, in man, of the world in which he has been placed. Al these conceptions constitute a double polarity in the imaginary Philosophy of the dream: the waterfire polarity and the darkness light Polarity. We will se later that Binswanger discovers them, empirically as it were, in the dreams of his patients. The analysis of Ellen West {ranscribes fantasies of soaring toward the world of light and burrowing into the cold, dark earth.” It is curious indeed to see each of these themes branch out and take its place within the history of reflection on dreams, a history that seems ‘o have exploited all the potentialities of an imaginary constellation or perhaps imagination takes, by crystallizing them, themes constituted and brought to light by the cultural process. ‘Let us fasten for the moment on a single point: the dream, like every imaginary experience, is an anthropological index of transcendence; and in this trarscendence it announces the world to man by making itself into world, and by giving itself the species of ligh, fire, water, and darkness In its anthropological significance, the history of the dream teaches us that it both reveals the world in its transcendence and modulates the world in its substance, playing on its material character. We heve purposely left aside until now one ofthe best-known aspects ‘of the history of the dream, one of the themes most commonly exploited by its historians. There hardly exists a study of dreams, since Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, that does not feel obliged to cite the Tenth book of the Republic. One squares accounts with history thanks to Plato, and this erudite reference ensures a good conscience, as citing Quintilian does for child psychology.” One never fails to underline the pre-Freudian—and 1post-Oedipal—resonances of this famous text. “But what sort of desires do you mean?” “The sot that emerges in our dreams, when the reasonable and humane Part cf us is asleep and its contol relaxed, and ou besil nature, fl of Food nd drink, wakes and has is ing and tries to secure its Own Kind of swisfaction.” AS you know, there's nothing too bad for i and ita