Dreams and Emotions. The Emotional
Free Radical Hypothesis
Pierre Clément obtained
his MA in Medicine and Philosophy. He was trained in psychiatry at
McGill University, Canada. For many years he was a staff member of
the Ottawa Hospital. He now has a private practice in Ottawa. He
published a book, En finir avec l’inconscient. His fields
of interest are psychoanalysis, consciousness and dreams.
Abstract
This paper proposes that dream
activity is a process of consciousness which is closely related to
waking consciousness. The model presented borrows from Freud’s
notion of perceptual identity, S.M. Kosslyn’s notion of image
matching, and from E. Hartmann’s hypothesis of dreaming as the
result of emotions made into pictorial metaphors. According to the
present hypothesis, waking consciousness is defined as the result
of a match between perceptions, including emotional concerns, and
memorized concepts. The emotional free radical (EFR) hypothesis
proposes that under certain conditions, emotional concerns
produced during the waking state are unsuccessful in finding a
corresponding concept to match with and therefore prevented from
reaching consciousness. Reasons for failure to find a match
include situations having escaped attention, unexplained events,
and past traumatic experiences. Unmatched EFR’s become available
for dream activity so they can be reprocessed in a different way,
this time with previously stored images. Dream consciousness can
then be conceptualized as the result of a match between EFR’s
having failed to reach consciousness during the waking state and
successfully matching with memorized images in dreams. Two
possible types of matching will be described. Matching by
combination produces usually pleasant dreams expressing
fulfillment, as exemplified with Freud. Matching by similarity,
more commonly seen in cases of past traumatic experiences,
generates unpleasant dreams characterized with dream activity
repeating the past traumatic event. A summary of studies
highlighting the primacy of emotions in dream and supporting the
present hypothesis will be presented. The possible role of
dreaming will be briefly discussed.
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