For Freud, dreams were the royal road to the unconscious: through the process of interpretation, the manifest and sometimes bewildering content of dreams can be traced back to the unconscious representations underlying it. But can we understand dreams in another way by considering how the unconscious is structured by our social experiences?This is hypothesis that underlies this highly original book by Bernard Lahire, who argues that dreams can be interpreted sociologically by seeing the dream as a nocturnal form of self-to-self communication. Lahire rejects Freuds view that the manifest dream content is the result of a process of censorship: as a form of self-to-self communication, the dream is the symbolic arena most completely freed from all forms of censorship. In Lahires view, the dream is a message which can be understood only by relating it to the social world of the dreamer, and in particular to the problems that concern him or her during waking life. As a form of self-to-self communication, the dream is an intimate private diary, providing us with the elements of a profound and subtle understanding of who and what we are. Studying dreams enables us to discover our most deep-seated and hidden preoccupations, and to understand the thought processes that operate within us, beyond the reach of our volition.The study of dreams and dreaming has largely been the preserve of psychoanalysis, psychology and neuroscience. By showing how dreams are connected to the lived experience of individuals in the social world, this highly original book puts dreams and dreaming at the heart of the social sciences.  It will be of great value to students and scholars in sociology, psychology and psychoanalysis and to anyone interested in the nature and meaning of dreams.

Bernard Lahire is Professor of Sociology at the École Normale Superieure de Lyon.  He has published over twenty books, includingThis is Not a Painting andThe Plural Actor.

Table of Contents Acknowledgements Introduction: A dream for the social sciences 1. Advances in the science of dreams The dream before Freud The need for an integrative theory Scientific progress and relativism The art of limping: the end of pure speculation On the scientific interpretation of dreams Beyond Freud2. The dream: an intrinsically social individual reality Can the social be absorbed into the cerebral? A few precedents in the social sciences Limitations of environmentalist approaches: the ecology of dreams Limitations of literal approaches: content analysis of dream accounts In what sense are dreams a social issue? A general formula for the interpretation of dreams 3. Psychoanalysis and the social sciences Between biological and social Psychoanalysis and the general formula for interpreting practices Infantile hypothesis Sexual hypothesis The highs and lows of the dream: sexuality and domination 4. Incorporated past and the unconscious Ways in which the incorporated past is actualized The statistician brain or practical anticipation The internalization of the regularities of experience Oneiric schemas and the incorporated past A critique of the event-focused approach 5. Unconscious and involuntary consciousness The involuntary consciousness of the dreamer Unconsciousness or involuntary consciousness The unconscious without repression 6. Formal censorship, moral censorship: the double relaxation The most private of the private: on stage and behind the scenes All dreams are not the fulfillment of an unsatisfied wish 7. The existential situation and dreams Dream and outside the dream The driving force of emotions The therapeutic and political effects of making problems explicit 8. Triggering events The day residue: theoretical and methodological inaccuracies The day residue: the inertia of habit The deferred effects of triggering events Nocturnal perceptions and sensations 9. The context of sleep Cerebral and psychic constraints Withdrawing from the flow of interactions Self-to-self communication: internal language, formal and implicit relaxation 10. The fundamental forms of psychic life Practical analogy Analogy in dreams Transference in analysis as analogical transference Association: analogy and contiguity 11. The oneiric processes Verbal language, symbolic capacity and dream images Visualization Dramatization-exaggeration Personal or universal symbolization Metaphor Condensation Inversions, opposites, contradictions 12. Variations in forms of expression An expressive continuum Forms of expression, forms of psychic activity and types of social context The false free expression of dreams and the varying levels of contextual constraints The dream between assimilation and accommodation The dream, as opposed to literature Play and the dream Dreams and daydreams Psychoanalytic therapy: recreating the conditions of the dream 13. Elements of methodology for a sociology of dreams The fleeting nature of dreams and dream accounts Do we need to know the dreamers to understand their dreams? Access to the non-dream state: associations Beyond associations Access to the non-dream state: the sociological biography Clarifications, associations, partial or systematic biographical accounts Conclusion 1. A dream without any function Conclusion 2. Dreams, will and freedom Coda. The formula for interpreting practices implications and challenges Bibliography Index