THE MOTHER IN THE DREAMS OF THE CHILD by Francesco Mina. Turin (Italy), 1994. Editor: Massimo Schinco. Published posthumous and unfinished in 2007 by Giuliana Mina. Purchased on www.lulu.com/contents/706763
A first important distinction between Mina as a psychotherapist and Mina as a researcher into dreams must be established. Mina himself alerts the reader that coherence among
is an important clue of his theory's thruth and an efficacy's indicator of his therapeutic approach. But, Mina claims, to reach a scientific corroboration of his dream's theory (in order to go beyond the level of the debatable hypothesis) a systematic study of the phenomenon following scientific conditions is requested. He worked on a sample of about 46,000 dreams.
This is epistemologically consistent with the assumption whose any skilful therapist is aware, that a theory or a part of it, at least partly efficacious on the therapeutic level, not for this is necessarily true on the scientific level. As a matter of fact the scientific research into efficacy of therapeutic communication is a separate chapter as to the theories of mental phenomena (i.e. the dream) implied in different psychoterapeutic theories.
Mina's starting point is the following one: when dream is interpretated as a reactivation of fetal fantasies or even of the embryo, and interpretation's rules (molstly derivated from psycoanalysis) are enforced, it makes sense and its absurdity vanishes out. Moreover, many absurdities which make everyday's life troubled or are peculiar to psychopathological disorders become intelligible when is admitted that fantasies fetal-origined can overflow, in psychotic way, pervading it more or less, into diurnal mental activity.
So the most baffling implication is that fetus is endowed with desire, memory and fantasy since his/hers very first moments of his/her existence, being even able to activate, in pre-verbal and pre-imaginal way, memories of hi/hers fecundation. As to this the Mina's stand is that observed phenomena must precede theories, if observation' method is correct. As long as the scientific work goes on theories will become able to explain and not only to describe. In any case it is not correct to reject an observation (which is shared with other school of psychotherapy that obey to anthropological premises different or even incompatibles with Mina's premises), if it is coherently constructed, just because at the present time theories are not able to explain it.
Mina's anthropological premise is evidently christian personalism through which he rivisits many typical assumptions of freudian psychoanalysis.
Mina states that the type of dream he's devoted to is not the only possible. He studies the ordinary dream, or better, the ordinaries aspects of dreaming. Creative, or mystical and premonitory dream is not part of his research. This doesn't mean at all that ordinary dream is devoid of fascination: meanwhile we dream we can recall fetal fantasies and transform them into the oneiric theatre. What is put on the stage of this performance?
Mina's answer is severe. It's always a criminal story, a thriller. According to this, the dream Mina intends to interpret is the speech of a guilty. Dream, by the means of oneiric work, conceals the simple truth of desire and fantasy as well as the accused in front of the examining magistrate, because this thruth is guilty and absurd.. If accepted with full consciousness by the subject, they would lead to death and madness, individual and collective. The concealed desire of dream obeys to death's instinct much more than to sexual desire. But the death istinct, in the Mina's meaning, has not the original biological connotation, i.e. natural in itself, which Freud attributes to it. It is rather featured as an envious and stubborn desire radically obstile to life. An envious negation of the filial and creatural reality of the individual, of the dipendence from his/her parents and from nature, fo being a part of human race. Death's istinct is finalized to psychotic fostering of individuality, considered all-powerful, omniscient, omniessential. It is the envious perversion of a natural desire, i.e. rejoining in a participating way to the absoluteness of life (or, in other words, God) we all come from. Nevertheless, denying relativity of his/her condition, the subject denies and refuses the development itself, and the necessary renouncements it needs to be accomplished.
Extending backward hypothesis developed especially by english psychoanalysis, Mina claims that during intrauterine life, it all happens by the prevarication of oral istincts (of greedy incorporation) against sexuals one and trust which is necessary to realize attachment to mother. This aspect, very relevant in Mina's therapeutical practice, is little represented in the Mina's book , which remained unfinished because of the Author's death. He saw the recovery of disposability to rely trustly upon someone else as the first therapeutic resource, and often self-healing because peculiar of living systems. Fantasy is, following Mina, the human faculty where freedom is performed above all. The strenght of dream's criminal fantasies is, however efficacious, nothing but a week caricature of Being's fantasy to whom any individual can participate; so Mina's message is radically positive and fostering trust. It's up to the subject to steer, in cybernetic sense, his/her own collocation into the stormy ocean of fantasy and desire, deciding which course to hold and where to go.
After birth, if the child is able to trustly rely upon to his/her mother, performing oral istincts allows life and growth by nourishing, which features the basic disposability to receive. In fetal fantasies, the same istinct is perverted to incorporation and elimination of parent's sex and consequently of both real and virtual phratry, so that guiltiness feelings arise making the living of birth thraumatical, and the idea of birth repellellent. Because of it fantasy denies more or less the idea of birth, and the sense of reality weakens.
The more disposability to rely upon consolidates, the less subject will desire to shut himself up into solipsistic fantasies of self-sufficiency and individual might. This process is never perfect in any individual, so dream features itself also as a compromise, in the same way symptoms are in psychoanalysis. As a matter of fact dream both conceals and declares, in order to keep someway alive, although only in part realized, the desire of omnipotence and overturning of natural order that impulsively blows inside the human soul. Into it can be found the origin of difficulties and emotional or relational uneasiness which can feature real pathological disorders, up to the most severe ones, like individual or collective psychosis.
It all is illustrated in the Mina's writings in a simple, clear and involving style. The reader is nearly taken by the hand across the algorythms of oneiric's work, as much as into the rules of metaphorization (and, vice versa, of anti-metaphorization) that dream uses in order to go through its equivocal speech.
Massimo Schinco