Charles Rycroft on Dreams but Not Love

There are two paragraphs buried in Charles Rycroft's book,”The Innocence of Dreams,” that I think are worthy of reading at least a couple times every year. They summarize a fundamental problem facing us in our widely-accepted assumptions and illustrate their ultimate poverty and dead end.

Charles Rycroft (1914-1998)

Rycroft wrote clearly in the best British tradition, was a moderate, sensible psychoanalyst who even worked for a while with R. D. Laing, and was widely influential in the last half of the twentieth century. This particular book, “The Innocence of Dreams,” was not particularly valuable to me and seemed to be rather derivative, except perhaps in its opposition to hardcore Freudian dream interpretation. But here is a bit that I think is just a gem (pp. 68-69):

One of the obstacles to conceiving of dreams as having meaning and to recognizing that the images appearing in them are our own thoughts and not pseudo-perceptions is that, if they do have meaning, they must present the self to the self as its own object – an idea which seems puzzling and mysterious, since our usual tendency is to think of one's self as being the subject of consciousness, and whatever we are conscious of as being the object, and as being not-self just because it is the object not the subject of consciousness. Even when we look directly at a part of our own body or attempt to introspect some particular thought or feeling we have had, we seem to do so by dissociating that restricted aspect of our self from our self as subject and regarding it as temporary not-self. It becomes 'me' not 'I.' And to do anything else would seem as impossible as to see the back of one's head without using a mirror.

As Kant says somewhere, 'It is altogether beyond our powers to explain how it should be possible that “I,” the thinking subject, can be the object of perception to myself, able to distinguish myself from myself,' Yet this is what we seem to be able to do while dreaming.

…

According to Coleridge the function of imagination is precisely that of being able to convert the self into an object. 'The province (of the imagination) is to give consciousness to the subject by presenting to it its conceptions objectively.'

Now Val, you might ask, what is there about this “gem” that gets you so excited every time you read it? What is so earth-shaking about the idea that we are able to get outside ourselves and see our selves from distant viewpoints? Isn't that basically, simply, just good old common love – putting yourself in the place of an other, seeing and feeling what the other sees and feels?

Yes, yes, but it is entirely absent - “beyond our powers,” as Kant put it – from the dominant empirical and idealistic traditions.