Dreams, Unconscious Fantasies and Epigenetics

Abstract

Fischmann presents an interdisciplinary combination of psychoanalysis and neuroscience, in which she focuses on different approaches towards dreams, the dreaming mind, and the brain from a psychoanalytical, neuropsychoanalytical and neurobiological stance. The current FRED study continues to investigate changes in brain functions in chronically depressed patients after long-term therapies, looking for multi-modal neurobiological changes in the course of psychotherapy. Data from both neurobiology and psychoanalysis suggest that emotionally meaningful life experiences are encoded in memory by sensory percepts. These encoded memories will then recur in dreams. Therefore, dreaming can no longer be considered as random and meaningless. The author further links dreams and unconscious fantasies with epigenetics. The fact that epigenetic regulation, that is, chromatin remodeling in neurons, not only occurs in the developing brain but also in the mature, fully differentiated brain, raises questions about psychodynamic interactions in the developing mind that we are just now beginning to understand. What do dreams, unconscious fantasies, and epigenetics have in common? Epistemologically speaking, dreams and unconscious fantasies belong to the theoretical domain of psychoanalysis, while epigenetics belongs to the fi eld of neuroscience as part of biology. All three deal, in one way or another, with the mind (soul) and brain and probe the different functions of each. But how and by what means is this done? The article gives some insights into an ongoing research project where psychoanalysis meets neuroscience. The fi rst section focuses on the topic of dreams and elaborates the different approaches towards dreams and the dreaming mind and brain from a psychoanalytical, neuro-psychoanalytical and neurobiological stance. In order to illustrate the fruitfulness of the interdisciplinary combination Keywords

Freudarwin: Evolutionary Thinking as a Root of Psychoanalysis

“…The current interest for epigenetic inheritance (Gissis and Jablonka, 2011) has sparked renewed interest in Freud’s assumptions in transmission of traumatic memory across generations (Fischmann, 2016). However, it is important to remain very cautious on this subject at the moment; indeed, though epigenesis – i.e., changes in gene function that do not involve changes in the DNA sequence – is a well-demonstrated phenomenon with clear developmental implications at the individual level, involvement of epigenetic mechanisms in intergenerational transmission has been yet little documented in humans (Yehuda et al, 2016), and never across several generations.…”