(2020).

IJP Open, (7)(28):1-26

Dreaming Consciousness through the Unconscious

Guy Barak MA 
Philosophy, Psychotherapy, Epistemology, Metapsychology, Chaos theory, Conceptual Research,
Epistemology, Physics, Theory of Thinking, Bion, Wilfred, Winnicott, Donald, Ogden, Thomas,
Lacan, Jacques, Freud, Sigmund

This paper explores theories from the fields of psychology, physics and
philosophy in a playful and experiential manner. These theories are analyzed as
a projective test, in an attempt to draw meaning and conclusions about the
nature of the minds that created them. By juxtaposing these fields, I wish to
delve into several notions: the idea that insights and interpretations manifest
invention as much as discovery; the idea that the construction of thoughts is
effortless and occurs naturally and independently through the function of
dreaming – for which I propose the term “mental gravity;” and the idea that it is
not the subject who dreams, but dreaming that creates both the subject and
consciousness. Above all, I will repeatedly try to establish the notion that
human beings wander a world constructed by their minds and, when they open
their eyes to see it, they are not looking outside but rather inside.

The core and the surface

Are essentially the same,

Words making them seem different

Only to express appearance.

If name be needed, wonder names them both:

From wonder into wonder

Existence opens

(Lao Tzu, 1986, p. 31)

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This paper depicts the emergence of the psychic apparatus and the manner in
which the categories of time, space, the subject and the unconscious form
within it. The proposed analysis is, by and large, a conceptual-
phenomenological one, drawing on terms from the field of physics as analogies
for the establishment of the psychic apparatus. This paper was written without
any preexisting conclusion in mind and only when it finally arrived at its
eventual destination, it discovered that it outlines the very path it had taken to
get there; when there is nothing to perceive, perception itself is revealed and,
like a dog chasing itself in circles, tries to bite its own tail. However, that is the
final step of the journey and one would do well to begin in the beginning. When
discussing psychoanalysis, it is only natural to begin with its mother - dreaming.

Dreaming, Gravity and Dialectics

Long before the development of thinking and dreaming, at least as the

physicists tell it, certain dramatic events took place in an unwitnessed universe.
According to the “big bang” theory, which describes the evolution of the
universe, in the beginning there was only an immensely condensed point - a
‘singularity.’ A certain imbalance within that point led to a tremendous
explosion, which sent particles of matter flying all over a ‘space’ and a ‘time’ that
did not exist prior to this explosion. In time, due to some manner of force,
matter began to coalesce, heat up, collapse into itself in colossal implosions
and come together again in new forms, until all the structures of the universe
we are now capable of recognizing came to be (Singh, 2005). The fundamental,
hidden and elusive force of nature, which was eventually responsible for the
emergence of both human beings and their psyches, came to be known as
‘gravity.’ Its workings have remained rather vague until this day.

A similar vagueness has always enshrouded ‘psychic gravity’ - the basic dialectic
function charged with the transformation of sensory data into that intricate and
complex universe of phenomena which comprises the human mind. Various
philosophers and psychanalysts have already associated psychic gravity with
‘thinking’ and ‘dreaming’ and it was the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion who gave it
a name that is most abstract: the alpha-function (Bion, 1962; Symington and
Symington, 1996). The theoretical discourse that emerged around it gave rise to
an image of an invisible function which, to the extent that it can spontaneously
play and err with the raw materials of thought, will always find a way to link
them (Bion, 1962; Symington and Symington, 1996; Ogden, 1985, 2003, 2014;
Winnicott, 1971; Author's Name, 2018).

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The deeper one delves in contemplating the notion of dreaming, the more
complicated and confusing things become. In fact, it is in the very fact of being
confused, as well as in one's willingness to wander in this confusion and
wonder at it, that dreaming is hiding. Therefore, I must

ask the reader to have considerable patience as I demonstrate, in an active and

confusing manner, the qualities of dreaming. What one is about to read will not,
in all probability, make immediate sense and one must trust one's psyche to
dream some meaning out of it, at its natural and effortless pace - by virtue of its
sheer physical interaction with the text.

Thus, in order to begin confusing and complicating things, it seems appropriate

to start with a depiction of the process of dreaming taking place in the mind of
the reader, as they are reading these very lines. Whoever they are, the reader is
allowing these sequences of letters - the different visual frequencies woven into
this paper - to enter their mind and engage in transformative interaction with
its existing structures. For example, this paragraph is comprised of forms such
as ‘forms,’ ‘structures’ and ‘transformation,’ with which the reader has had some
previous experience. While it is likely that the structures in the mind of the
reader resemble those in the mind of the author, certain minor differences,
based on their singular lives and experiences, no doubt mark things with a
slightly different hue. In other words, the gravitational relationship between the
various forms in the reader's mind is a little different than the one in the
author's mind.

Nevertheless, the author has woven these words and forms into his text in a
manner that seeks to offer a precise imitation of the dynamics they maintain
within his mind, in the hopes that the reader's experience will be affected by it
and become synchronized with it, so that the two of them could dream in a
similar way. This process does not require any effort but, in my view, works
rather like gravity, which creates and synchronizes structures by the very fact of
the transformative physical interaction between particles. As such, this process
requires one to relinquish the familiar and surrender to newness and change,
to a wandering and a wondering that allow these different relationships to
meet and unsettle each other.

Despite Bion's famous claim that it takes two to think or to dream, I believe that
the mind is capable of dreaming itself by itself, because it contains internal
interactions between more and less developed structures. However, in this case,

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its growth potential is limited to its own closed system. If the mind wishes to
enrich its world (and all minds are, to some extent, obliged to do so), it is
capable of communicating with other minds and synchronize itself with their
experiences. One can also view the familial, cultural, religious or any other
context in which the individual is embedded as an entire universe - a kind of
collective and global relationship of experience, into which they are born and
against which they attune themselves throughout their lives (Jung, 1959; Kant,
1781; Lacan, 1988; Zizek, 2001; Hegel, 1807).

Another example of the process of dreaming concerns the infant's mother.

When the infant encounters a particular convergence of shapes, sensations and
colors, the mother calls out to it: “that's a chair!” The mother dreams for her
infant and helps them structure (or metabolize) the fragmented elements in
their mind into a new and aggregated representation that they are able to bear.
In this case, dreaming creates a new meaning1 - an averaged perception or
image - ‘chair’ - out of more disjointed perceptions such as shapes, colors and
so forth, while excluding perceptions and details that are irrelevant, such as
‘floor.’ In other words, the operation of dreaming carries out a process of
‘abstraction.’ From a philosophical perspective, David Hume would argue that
the coalescence of sensory data into mental structures results from spatial
contiguity and similarity, which give rise to a fabricated internal association in
the form of a causal relation (Hume, 1888), an argument that is also made by
certain psychological theories of learning (Hebb, 1949; Pavlov, 1928).

1
In my discussion, I wish to highlight the mathematical connotations of the word
“meaning,” as an instance of ‘averaging’ or ‘measuring a central tendency,’
alongside its conventional use. I ask the reader to try and keep both these
options in mind.
5

In this vein, I have previously suggested that such linking occurs according to
passive and physical principles of frequential harmony (See Author's Name,
2018).

To this point, we have only scratched the surface of the dreaming function but,
once the semantic associations of author and reader have met and become
synchronized, our shared dreaming will be able to penetrate even deeper into
its essence.

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The Dreaming of Consciousness as the Formation of Space-
Time

Like two sounds that meet and effortlessly, by the mere fact of their physical
encounter, give birth to a harmony that neither contains in and of itself, or two
colors that mix and become a new shade, so do psychic dialectics give birth to
another dimension, which seems to be composed and abstracted from them
but, at the same time, entirely different - consciousness (Bion, 1962; Winnicott,
1971; Hegel, 1807).2 Many theories have tried to depict the evolution of
consciousness and its emergence through the perceptual process. In this
section, I offer a novel theory, which expresses the manner in which some of
these notions have been dreamed together and attained harmony in my mind.

The first theory I resorted to manifests a synthesis of the ideas presented in The
Phenomenology of Spirit by philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1807), A
Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume (1888) and Critique of Pure Reason by
philosopher Immanuel Kant (1781); the second theory is derived from Wilfred
Bion's theory of thinking, as depicted above (Bion, 1962); the third is presented
by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (Dawkins, 1976) and, among other
things, refers to Graham Bell's theory on the question of consciousness

2As explained later in this paper, the use of this term refers to its portrayal by the

philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel as the emergence of opposites from

unity and their eventual resolution.
6

(Bell, 1982); the fourth is derived from Jacques Lacan's theory, as interpreted by
Slavoj Zizek in Enjoy the Symptom!(2001); the fifth concerns the notion of the
“unthought known,” coined by psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas and depicted
in The Shadow of the Object(1987); the sixth concerns notions of ‘self’ and ‘not-
self’ in Buddhist philosophy in general and Zen-Buddhism in particular (Watts,
1957; Biderman, 1980); the seventh draws on the theory of general relativity
developed by physicist Albert Einstein (1916/2013). The broad and diverse
theoretical foundation of the proposed theory has introduced into this paper
various concepts connected to its subject, such as “consciousness,”
“awareness,” “cognition” and “space-time.” Throughout the paper, I have used
these concepts interchangeably, in a manner that, to me, suited the context
and in attempt to link and parallel these various notions, which, in my humble
opinion, describe the very same phenomenon - the mental image in which
human beings experience their existence.

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When the infant is only learning how to conceptualize a certain object, such as
a ‘chair,’ there is still no subject per se that is able to perceive and bear the chair,
there is only the ‘chair,’ which entails the sum of its fragmented qualities, the
exclusion of other, irrelevant qualities, and nothing else. Accordingly, we should
not expect to hear the infant, who has just learned what a chair is, saying “I see
a chair;” at most, we will have to make do with hearing them say “this is a chair”
and “this is not a chair.” The concept of ‘this’ defines the sum total of raw
perceptions, which had been discrete until that moment, whereas the more
abstract concept of ‘chair’ aggregates them in line with some common
denominator and adds a new global meaning to them.

This process of abstraction, the transition from ‘this’ to ‘chair,’ constitutes a

dialectic leap of thought, a transformation of thoughts of a lower order to a
thought of a higher order. This higherorder thought entails these lower-order
thoughts and expresses a common denominator they share; it is composed of
their essence, it contains, defines, aggregates and means them and is thus also

‘aware’ of them. For example, the thought ‘furniture’ entails the thoughts ‘chair,’
‘closet,’ ‘table’ and so on, which, as mentioned, themselves entail thoughts that
are more limited and fragmented. These structures function as thought-
pyramids, which are slowly erected, become interwoven with other pyramids
and are indicative of the individual's accumulated experiences. Thus, as time
goes by, psychic gravity fuses and abstracts sensory data into the sum total of
representations that amounts to one's personal universe. One may also
understand this by imagining a spider (a highorder thought) standing at the
center of its web and trying, by the vibrations that traverse it, to imagine what
is happening through its web with the utmost precision. Just as the spider is
aware of what is happening on its web, colors are aware of the oscillations of
receptors, the chair is aware of colors, furniture is aware of the chair and, in a
manner that is still unclear - consciousness is aware of all of these.

At the very end of the abstraction process, when there seem to be no more
similarities by which one could aggregate and collect global thoughts, a single
and extremely abstract principle still remains, which can contain and apply to
all psychic material. This ultimate common denominator does not stem directly
from sensory data, but from the general form of the means of cognition
themselves. In neurological terms, all receptors share the fact that they fire at a
certain frequency and are thus sometimes active and sometimes inactive; in
psychological terms, all thoughts and perceptions share the fact that they
sometimes occur and sometimes do not. In other words, each and every

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perception has an ‘is’ and an ‘is not,’ ‘presence’ and ‘absence’ - these two modes
are the very foundation of sensory data and the means of cognition and
therefore constitute the most general and abstract common denominator that
can be extracted from any psychic material whatsoever.

The aggregation and abstraction of thinking on the basis of ‘is’ and ‘is not’ gives
rise to two phenomena: the first is a representation of space, through which
things may appear and disappear; the second is a representation of a timeline,
on which this shift between appearance and disappearance may occur. Thus, in
the same way that dialectic dreaming abstracts certain sensory data into a local
image (for example, turning colors and shapes into a chair), it also abstracts the
sum total of sensory data into a global super-representation, which essentially
simulates that ultimate common denominator. Meaning, the thought-dialectics
of presence and absence eventually and inevitably gives rise to an overarching
and immense matrix that constitutes ‘the space where things are and are not.’
This space, which contains each and every psychic structure, is in fact
consciousness and, given the features just attributed to it, I will occasionally use
term interchangeably with the physical notion of ‘space-time.’

The space of consciousness is the world the reader sees when they open their
eyes; it is the screen through which the tips of Freud's icebergs appear; the
mental image in which you find the paper you are now perusing; the
experience of existence per se, which is called ‘self;’ and the meaning of reality -
the subject who is under (sub) the totality of pro(ject)ions and is subjected to
them. There is no higher or more general psychic composition which is
aggregated or abstracted at a higher level than the space of consciousness,
which is why the latter is so elusive. It cannot truly be perceived because it is
the perceiver and each perception it has of itself is but a mere memory. Thus,
for example, one can be aware of what is happening right now or of having
been aware of the previous moment; but one can never be aware of being
aware right now - that would only amount to a loop being wrapped around
itself (Hofstadter, 1979, 2007).

As mentioned, space-time is born through the play of personal and collective

dreaming with itself. Therefore, despite its size, circularity and complexity, it is
still its creation - a kind of

byproduct that is dreamed like any other image that results from the
aggregating, abstracting and awareness-bringing operation of dreaming and

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nothing more. Meaning, even though one believes that one's life takes place in
a universe that includes a plethora of objects that are essentially separate from
one's mind, this is not the case. Human beings, objects and even the space in
which everything appears and disappears, whether or not they represent things
that actually exist beyond reason, are created in one's mind by the natural force
of dialectics, dreaming or gravity. Therefore, one can play with words and say
that the mind dreams itself, its world and its awareness - a claim that may
indeed be unsettling, though one can take comfort in the fact that, as
mentioned, one's dreaming is (often) synchronized with the dreams of other
minds and of reason in general.

Therefore, the oneiric-dialectic process of abstraction, when performed freely,

inevitably gives rise, at its final and most global stage, to the ultimate
abstraction, which constitutes a single representation of space-time into which
the sum total of psychic materials are interwoven and in which they appear and
disappear - a dream that embodies the dreaming of dreams.

Dreaming through the Unconscious

Various Eastern philosophies have also came to understand awareness as a

byproduct of dreaming through emptiness and have even concluded that the
elimination of the illusory separateness between subject and world is the high
road to alleviating suffering (Watts, 1957; Biderman, 1980). In line with this and
as proposed by Bion, it is rather likely that, when the operation of dreaming is
suppressed, such as in psychotic and dissociated states, the suffering inherent
in aware and separate existence is averted by resorting to non-existence and
non-awareness (Bion, 1962). In contrast, psychoanalysis has always sought to
achieve greater awareness and went to great lengths

10

to combine all opposing ‘self’-experiences into an integrated ‘super-self’

(Erikson, 1950; Kernberg, 1985; Mitchell and Black, 1995; Jung, 1951/2014).

If so, what advantage is there to consciousness over unconsciousness? Why

should one bother becoming more aware? One of the possibilities opened by
moving, through increasing awareness, up the chain of thought is the ability to
put one's mind in order and under control: “where Id was there Ego shall be”
(Freud, 1933). One can, for example, imagine abstract and opposing objects
such as good and evil which, before making their appearance in that space-
time, had dwelled in parallel universes and had assumed forms that never met

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(Klein, 1946). Another example would be that of impressions left by a traumatic
experience, which have failed to find a way to become woven into the subject's
narrative or semantic grid, remaining detached from consciousness and
“invisible” (Herman, 1992; Amir, 2014). On the one hand, these notions suggest
that, when an object that has been invisible and latent awakens into
consciousness and appears in space-time, the subject - now aware of it - can
engage it constructively and, supposedly, shape it in any way they please. On
the other hand, the spirit of the present paper has portrayed a somewhat
different picture, by which the subject themselves is the very space in which
these constructive events take place anyway and thus functions only as a
passive observer, with no control over what is happening.

Therefore, how much ego can one “put” in the id? To the extent that we
nevertheless situate the subject in a different position within the psychic
constellation and attribute them with some degree of control, it seems easier to
accept the notion that the subject is capable of actively combining and
separating abstract ideas in a manner that actually changes them, than the
notion that they can transform inanimate objects. However, in the mind's pre-
conscious period, representations of inanimate objects were all in a jumble and
constructed piecemeal - they were

11

not always there in their complete and ordered form (Bion, 1962; Ogden, 1989).
If so, would it be absurd to imagine that the subject can reach out their arms
and play with the most fundamental elements of objects as well? This possibility
is tantamount to the ability of a programmer to access the code that lies
beyond the interface of a computer software and play with the elements
comprising it so as to change what is displayed. Analogously, it is possible (and
perhaps also dangerous) to view the therapist as a “psychic programmer,” who
is capable of playing with thoughts and shaping them to alter their ‘iceberg
tips:’ behaviors, sensations, presentations and symptoms. Indeed, the dialectics
between therapists and patients achieve just that (see, for example, Author's
Name, 2018; Cash and Deagle III, 1997).

In order to understand the underlying mechanism of the programming of the

unconscious, one can play with its definition and such play may indeed
manifest that very mechanism. In my view, the notion of the “unconscious” in
psychoanalytic theory and conventional therapeutic discourse contains and
invokes three essentially different qualities: first, the ‘raw unconscious’ refers to
sensory material that is not sufficiently processed in order to achieve
awareness; second, the ‘potential unconscious’ is the sum total of possible

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forms into which such raw material can be processed via dreaming; third, the
‘formal unconscious,’ which constitutes the base of Freud's iceberg - an unseen
‘mass’ of processing, which comprises the associations already linking raw
particles.

I will try to explain this through a fictional example which highlights these three
terms. In the interaction between therapist and patient, the therapist absorbed
into his mind the dreams of his patient, who suffers from an eating disorder.
These were fragments of stories about an inattentive mother who was
preoccupied with her self-worth; about a father who was repulsed by feminine
sexuality and seemed to ask his daughter, in an unspoken way, to stay “small
and pure”

12

forever; and about a placating girl who kept her desires hidden deep in her
daydreams and her nighttime conversations in internet chatrooms. In addition,
the therapist also felt comforted and relieved every time this patient sat in front
of him, to the extent that he occasionally thought that he is being kept from
thinking that the person next to him is in pain. The therapist allowed these
thoughts to generate friction among themselves and with the other
gravitational relationships of his mind, until a certain insight was woven into his
space of consciousness: “I think that you are trying to disappear in order to
save your parents' love.”

The therapist's interpretation was not there before, in either mind. While it did
stem from pre-existing building blocks of thinking, the verbal and ordered
relationship the therapist eventually presented to the patient with the sentence
he formed was a creation of his mind and of the singular therapist-patient
encounter. This thought-creation that the patient has received - to the extent
that it was indeed able to organize the raw material - will become a new
associative dynamic in her mind (formal unconscious): the product of the
metabolization of several of her raw and un-self-conscious thoughts (raw
unconscious).

It is curious to note that this ‘raw unconscious’ could have been woven and
given awareness in various other forms, such as: “I think that you are trying to
take revenge against your parents through your suffering and that this is your
contorted way of expressing your anger” or “perhaps you feel as though you
don't deserve psychic nourishment, that your parents barely have enough for
themselves - could you be trying to scrimp at your own expense?” These
insights are, more or less, comprised of the same raw dream-thoughts - both
constitute higher order thoughts capable of resolving conflict in the patient's

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semantic grid. The surprising significance of this variety of potential ways for
weaving (potential unconscious), is that insight is not merely a revelation
concerning the past but is also a creation, a choice and a decision - a made-up
reality.

13

However, is this potential for creation boundless? Meaning, is it possible to

program the mind and shape perception in any manner one desires? Such an
argument would be tantamount to the absurd claim that the astrophysicist is
capable of shaping the universe in any way they please. While this notion
seems absurd, I invite the reader to engage in a small thought experiment and
imagine how they would have perceived the stars, had he or she never
encountered any theories about them - would they merely be spots in the sky?
And if a parallel is already drawn between dreaming and gravity, how
outrageous would it be to argue that dreaming is related to the configuration
of stars in space? After all, it is the function responsible for the formation of all
stories and for shaping the human perception of these weird spots.

One should, nevertheless, list several limitations, before such arguments take
wing and fly too close to the sun. Indeed, dreaming cannot create something
from nothing; despite the enormous potential embedded in raw psychic
material, the structures one can construct from it are certainly limited. For
example, the raw figures ‘2,’ ‘8’ and ‘10’ can be verbally represented in a more
aggregated and abstract way, by saying that they represent ‘even numbers,’
‘figures that contain the letter T,’ ‘digits that are part of my passport number’ or
‘numbers created by god.’ Still, while there are many ways of weaving them
together, there are more possibilities that exclude them, such as ‘odd numbers,’
‘bright colors’ and so forth. This means that the ability of dreams to attain
awareness is limited in the sense that it must stem from the dreams
themselves. Nevertheless, the level of rawness matches the potential for
creation; just as one can paint more paintings with primary colors than mixed
ones, so more psychic structures can be formed with thought-particles that
have yet to be processed and determined as particular structures. For this
reason, one can view psychic fragmentation as a therapeutic act, which
broadens the potential for thought-creation and makes more space for it
(Author's Name, 2018; Freud, 1919).

14

While these invented thoughts and insights may be effective, exhaustive and
exclusive to various degrees, in my view, the better they are able to “capture”
unconscious dream-thoughts and stem from them, the more they will be

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experienced as beautiful and “appetizing.” In this sense, aesthetics may serve
as a means for weaving together dissonance - an effective manner of
combining building blocks that have not yet been properly metabolized - and
thus draw the mind to be absorbed and synchronized with it. I therefore believe
that the perceived beauty of the therapist's interpretations, insights and
thoughts in the session is of the utmost importance.

The dual nature - both deterministic and creative - of the emergence of thinking
brings to mind a conceptual entity that Kant (1781) called a “synthetic a priori
judgement.” This is a very intricate and elusive notion, but its main significance
in relation to insight is that the latter is both a synthesis of raw thoughts, which
seems to stem from them and grant them a new global meaning, and, in
contrast, an expression of a truth that precedes the experience that originally
gave rise to those raw thoughts. In other words, although insight is a
manifestation of a new psychic structure that did not exist beforehand, it is
actually experienced as a discovery of something that was already there and
can therefore be loosely called “invented reality.” In the above example,
because she stopped eating, the therapist concluded that the patient is trying
to disappear from the world but, at the same time, in order to attempt such
disappearance, the patient stopped eating - the cause and the effect run in
circles. In accordance with this, the entirety of consciousness is a kind of entity
that seems to stem from psychic activity and add meaning to it, while at the
same time also expressing the preconditions for psychic activity in general -
space and time. Thus, the psychic goo of the unconscious teems, whirls and
collides, seemingly emerging from sheer chaos, but eventually assuming forms
that seem to precede it and draw it into their likeness.

15

The notion that awareness eventually manifests the essence that created it has
donned many guises in human culture: its outlines can be traced in the biblical
story of the creation of man in god's likeness (Genesis, 1, 27); in the belief in
reincarnation; in Hegelian dialectics and Eastern philosophies, which argue that
the entire universe is derived from the same oneness (Lao Tzu, 1986; Hegel,
1807; Watts, 1957; Biderman, 1980); in the collective psyche which shapes
individuals in its image (Jung, 1951/2014, 1959; Kant, 1781; Lacan, 1988); in
Bollas' (1987) “unthought known” (which, at some point, makes itself manifest);
and in many other stories. In any way, whether they revolve around god,
emptiness, reason, nature, humanity, culture or the mother, all these stories
depict a kind of hypnotizing melody that resonates around the psyche, causing
it to become attuned to its sounds and, through it, rousing the perplexed and
desperate subject to the awareness with which to understand it.

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But this is not the end of the story, because energy must be conserved and if
one subject rather than another emerges from the fusion of chaotic goo, we
must still find out what happened to whatever was not allowed to become
aware.

Opposing Forces and Symmetry: The Remainder

Coming into being and gaining a meaningful awareness are not without their
price and when the process of dreaming bites off pieces of raw unconscious,
not all of these end up metabolized. In mathematical terms, whenever we
remove a common factor, some kind of remainder is left and any attempt to
aggregate information always leaves out some of it. In psychic terms, the
gaining of awareness cannot exhaust and represent the full potential of the raw
unconscious, by the sheer fact that it processes and aggregates it. Going back
to the example of the infant and the chair, even though ‘chair’ adds meaning to
‘this,’ it does not completely exhaust the total potential embedded

16

in ‘this;’ anything not manifest in it is the remainder. In other words, the

remainder is all the possibilities that the psyche relinquishes when it ‘decides
the facts’ and is determined into a particular subject comprised of some - rather
than other - perceptions. This remainder, which I will now explore more deeply,
links what Lacan (1977, 1988) called the “objet petit a,” what Carl Gustav Jung
(1959) called the “shadow” and what Hegel (1807) called the “opposite” or
“inverse.”

In neurological terms, perceptions are a network of neural connections and

disconnections, ostensible filters which, when applied to sensory data - a field
of receptors that change from ‘presence’ to ‘absence’ according to different
frequencies - filter out everything irrelevant and extract some mental image. As
an example, picture a tree that only allows a tiny amount of sunlight to pierce
through its leaves and form an image on the ground below. The image created
by the light on the ground is analogous to phenomena as these are perceived
in space-time; sunlight, in fact, stands for itself - the white noise that washes
over the senses; the tree is the psychic structure - a network of neural
connections shaped by experience; and the shadow (the remainder) is all the
information that was abandoned in order to extract the image that eventually
appears in consciousness from the white noise.

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The surprising possibility suggested by this analogy is that, in and of
themselves, psychic associations are not the phenomenon but are rather
structured as its exact opposite, just as the shape of the tree is manifest by the
shadow cast on the ground, not the light. This means that the neuronal
structure must manifest an inverse image whose energy is the exact opposite
of that of the object it presents in consciousness. This implies that associations
proper, minus the sensory stimuli, are an aggregate of energy that is the
inverse and opposite of the subject and phenomena. Moreover, it is also implied
that the perceived world comes into being neither through the associative
network nor through sensory stimuli, but only through the tension between
them or, as Winnicott (1957, 1971)

17

and Ogden (1986) put it, in the potential space between fantasy and reality. A
parallel formulation, more akin to the spirit of this paper, would be that the
world, space-time, is itself the potential space between fantasy and reality.

Therefore, space-time - the universe which we believe we wander - ultimately

entails the results of the encounter between associations and sensory stimuli,
but not the associations or the sensory stimuli themselves. The place in which
associations are, perhaps, revealed is sleep or daydreaming, when the mind
plays only with itself and does not come in enlivening and awareness-bringing
contact with the white noise of sensory stimuli. This may explain why it is
precisely the exploration of dreams that is able to teach us about the
unconscious activity of the mind or why repressed material, such as
impressions of traumatic events, may appear in dreams rather than
wakefulness: they exist in the mind, but in a hidden manner, which does not
trigger the awareness-bringing dialectic with sensory stimuli.

The importance and meaning of inverse energy can be deduced through a

parallel mathematical-physical phenomenon which has been give the name
“chimera state.” This phenomenon shows that unities in nature tend to collapse
symmetrically into two groups that balance each other out: a synchronized and
ordered one and a chaotic one. For example, when two groups of metronomes
are placed on two adjoined dynamic surfaces, after some time the metronomes
in one group will become synchronized and move in the same rhythm, while
those of the second group will exhibit vibrational chaos (Martens et al., 2013).
This chaos is not incidental but a precise expression of the excess energy
escaping the first surface and a precondition of the latter's balance - order is
maintained through disorder. In this vein, the remainder (the fantasy, the
shadow, perception, associations, etc.) is the chaotic negative which balances

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the subject (the world of phenomena, awareness, consciousness, etc.) and both
are derived from the symmetric

18

collapse of the white noise of the senses - that uniform reservoir of endless
potential that is void of pre-existing meaning.

The subject and its remainder are each imbued with the other's negating
energy and thus cannot become interwoven without annihilating one another.
Nevertheless, as mentioned, the two exist in the same psyche and are vital to
each other. This means that the remainder must paradoxically be maintained in
the mind: on the one hand, it must be a part of it but, on the other, it must also
be manifest in it as something that is defined as ‘not-me’ and ‘external.’
Therefore, whether the remainder assumes any clear form or presents itself in
an abstract manner, it will always evoke paradoxical feelings in the subject: on
the one hand, in order to preserve the split and the avoidance of annihilating
interaction, it will evoke repulsion, disgust, terror and loathing and be
experienced as traumatic; on the other hand, it will serve as an addictive desire,
by virtue of how crucial it is for existence. In this sense, the traumatic object or
the object of desire are essentially vital for existence.

Additional light can be shed on this equilibrium of opposites by Einstein's

general theory of relativity, which argues that gravity is a distortion of space-
time that is proportionate to an object's mass (1916/2013). Seeing as the
present paper has drawn parallels between gravity and dreaming, space-time
and consciousness and mass and the level of processing, if we were to project
Einstein's claim onto the conceptual universe of psychoanalysis, the general
psychoanalytic theory of relativity would be: “dreaming is precisely the
distortion of consciousness according to the object's level of processing.”
Meaning, just as a planet needs its gravity in order to keep from being
scattered across space, a phenomenon needs to be dreamed and perceived
associatively in order to remain firm in one's consciousness. If perception
loosened its grip on phenomena and if the associative network became
fragmented, phenomena would burst free of their form and scatter

19

into a psychotic, raw, uniform, latent, unwitnessed ooze and actually cease to
exist. As Einstein said of the universe: the greater a phenomenon's presence in
consciousness, the stronger the distortion required to maintain it.3

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These descriptions can explain, among other things, the psychoanalytic claim
that “lower”-order defenses, such as splitting, require a greater investment of
energy: the split object has greater ‘mass,’ because it acts as a giant sun, which
incorporates a great amount of matter and requires a powerful space-time
distortion in order to remain split-off from its remainder - vacuum and
gravitational chaos - which might tear apart its form and annihilate it.

But no matter how great the splitting forces, the separating balance always
tends to become disrupted: just as the star is eventually crushed by its own
gravity, so the subject is crushed under their own remainder (Ogden, 1985;
Author's Name, 2018). The symmetry of opposition implodes with an enormous
blast, triggering a psychotic supernova: the enlivening and awareness-bringing
dialectic tension collapses and, following its collapse, things vanish; supernovas
leave black holes in their wake and the traumatic encounters between fantasy
and reality leave behind psychic objects of annihilating absence (Freud, 1917;
Green, 1986; Eshel, 1998). However, this collapse is also incomparably
exhilarating and moving, seeing as it is the state of fragmentation, as
mentioned, that holds the infinite potential for creation and emergence: when
opposing energies

3Gravity is conventionally viewed as a force that emanates from matter and causes

it to coalesce. However, the analogies put forth so far suggest that it is a force
that somehow resists the tendency of matter to disperse and become
annihilated. This view is reminiscent of another physical theory, which argues
that matter and anti-matter (particles which resemble those of matter, but have
the opposite electric charge and spin direction) are split into existence from the
vacuum and seek to meet again and become annihilated. To the extent that
gravity was indeed a force that, like dreaming, maintains the matter-anti-matter
split, one could have assumed that anti-matter particles would fall upwards
rather than downwards. Indeed, such a hypothesis is being studied in recent
years (Kwon, 2015; Hamilton et al., 2014).
20

collapse into themselves, they explode into fragments of raw, unconscious

stardust; by becoming interwoven in each other's ashes, they naturally emerge
as a new configuration of subject-and-remainder, time and again (Author's
Name, 2018). The annihilation of tension constitutes the apocalypse and
genesis of the dialectic and spiraling play of the creation of the universe and
the mind.

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Conclusion

The interplay of thoughts in this paper gave rise to various psychological and
therapeutic insights, for example, that interpretations are as much an
expression of invention and creation as they are a discovery; that the
composition of the mind requires no effort but occurs naturally and by itself;
that it is not the subject who dreams, but dreaming which creates the subject;
that the mind - when detached from sensory data - is comprised precisely from
the opposite energy of that of the subject, an energy which is manifest, for
example, in dreams; that every perception in our awareness and consciousness
inevitably expresses its own unconscious and inverse counterpart; and that
such splitting and dissociation safeguard the subject against its inevitable
death and birth as another subject.

These, however, are merely the byproducts of a more general idea I wish to
present, namely, that the space in which human beings believe their
consciousness exists is consciousness itself and thus, when we open our eyes,
we are actually looking into ourselves. In this sense, every and any theory about
the world is actually a story that (personal, collective or cosmic) reason tells
about itself. This means that psychoanalysis, physics, philosophy and any other
discipline all study reason itself from as many perspectives. The sum total of
explored objects - behavior, thoughts, the brain, matter, the universe, nature
and so on - all function as Rorschach stains that reason

21

painted for itself and is now projecting onto them the stories of its own
emergence, again and again.

What are, then, the results of this test? What can one write in the diagnostic
report for psychoanalysis and reason? Precisely this - that psychoanalysts are
preoccupied with their mother and that reason draws out opposites from a
neutral totality and plays hide and seek with itself. This is the alpha-function,
the fractal and spiral dialectics at the root of reason and behind its evolution
from the big bang to dreaming through the unconscious. This is the mother of
all of reason's abstractions, which says all but says nothing.

Here power failed the high phantasy;

But now my desire and will,

Like a wheel that spins with even motions

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 Were revolved by the love

that moves the sun and the other stars.

(Dante, 1961, p. 485)

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