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.