My Approach to Understanding Mental Processes
Have you ever wondered how your perceptions, dispositions, emotions, feelings, thoughts, and deliberations arise? As a rule, whatever happens in consciousness simply “arises”. Reflect for a moment: Your thoughts are complex and usually syntactically correct, that is, they make sense. Yet you do not “prethink” your thoughts. Well, maybe you do, but if so, how does your “prethinking” arise? The fact is that whatever comes to consciousness already has been processed through mental activity outside of conscious awareness. What you speak and what you think, and even when you do so, your choice of words, your grammar, and the logical order are all “pre-processed” outside of conscious awareness.
Occasionally, we experience a window into this preprocessing. As a general rule, persons spend somewhere between 40 to 50% of their waking time “zoned out”, that is, they are not consciously thinking or imagining anything in particular, but if you call attention to what they are thinking or imagining, they become conscious of whatever was happening and can report what was on their minds.
Researchers have investigated mind-wandering through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies that reveal areas of the brain active during this process. When engaged in mind-wandering, different areas of the brain “light up” than when engaged in consciously directed, “aware” activity. The same areas become active whenever persons are not engaged in conscious or aware activity or behavior –and these areas functionally interact. For this reason, the neural pattern during mind-wandering has been dubbed the “default network”.
The default network describes neural activity organized around a set of neural “hubs” that are active when persons are not engaged in consciously directed tasks. The purpose of default network activity is to integrate, prioritize, and direct self-initiated attention, cognition, and behavior.
Dreams are another window to unconscious mental processes, that is the activity of mind that underlies conscious thought and discovery. Just as the mental processes engaged by the default network occur without conscious intent, so do dreams; and just as default network material is often never remembered because never attended, so too dreams are quickly forgotten, if not consciously attended at or near the time of occurrence.
Dreams oftentimes reveal facets of self and relationships unknown by the conscious self. Dreams arise from networks that feed or even supercede the default network. What the default network and networks mobilized for dreams have in common is that both are organized and operate outside of conscious intent.
Given the role of “mind-wandering” and dreaming in the organization of mental life, my approach to psychodynamic psychotherapy pays particular attention to these processes. These processes provide a window into what is going on in the “here and now” as the client grapples with life issues. My clinical experience strongly supports the practice of “translating” dream images to symbols and dream events to processes that underlie conscious experience.
The premise that the dream aims to communicate and not to disguise is a technical principle embraced by a large and eclectic group of psychoanalysts. These include Carl Jung, Erich Fromm, Walter Bonime, and members of the Existential school of psychoanalysis. The central premise that dreams do not dissimulate is the foundation of the author’s method of direct interpretation. The dream communicates through direct portraiture, symbolism, metaphor, simile, and the full range of methods available to figurative speech (van den Daele, 1992).
My approach to the understanding of dreams rests upon the following assumptions:
- First, a dream does not dissimulate. A dream reflects mental activity that is a normal neural processing that prepares the individual for both immediate and distant tasks and challenges.
- Second, a dream communicates through sensory channels, dream thoughts, feelings and emotions, images, actions, plots, and symbolism.
- Third, non-specific features of a dream, such as dream mood, intensity, and tempo, contribute to the meaning of a dream as a whole.
- Fourth, the import of a dream element is context-dependent.
- Fifth, each and every element of a dream makes a contribution to the dream as a whole.
- Sixth, dreams are of different types and the successful interpretation of a dream requires the proper assignment of a dream to a dream type.
- Seventh, different types of dreams possess different conventions of symbol and metaphoric arrangement.
- Eighth, a dream has a correct interpretation. This is a working assumption that arises from causality. If a dream is a product of neural activity, then the dream must be understood as any casual or systemically determined process or product.
An extended discussion of these principles for understanding dreams is found in: van den Daele, L.D. (1992). Direct interpretation of dreams: Some basic principles and technical rules. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 52, 99-118.
The method of Direct Dream Interpretation further identifies three categories of dreams. Within each category, dreams vary in complexity and reflect different levels of cognitive maturity. The categories are Dreams about the Inner World, Dreams about the Outer World, and Dreams about Interpersonal Relations.
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