CRITICA

Beth Kalish and I presented our film, “The Achuar in the Amazon,” at the 52nd IPA Congress.  Beth chaired the program. The film records interviews and experiences from our 2018 journey into the Amazon Rainforest to meet with the Achuar, an indigenous people who live along a remote section of the Pastaza River in Ecuador and Peru.  They are an independent people who have never been conquered or colonized. 

Of special interest to psychoanalysts, the Achuar live by their dreams. Each morning, they arise before dawn to discuss and interpret dreams from the previous night.  Dream interpretations are the basis upon which they make crucial decisions and plans for the day.  Since 2008, at the invitation of the Achuar, Beth and I have been involved in research to study the ways that the Achuar use dreams.  Our goals are to compare their practices with the methods of North American psychoanalysts, and to explore what psychoanalysts might learn from the Achuar.  Proud of their knowledge, the Achuar wish for us to document their use of dreams and present that information to the wider world, as we were able to do in the Congress.

In the film, we interview shamans and other Achuar adults, meet with a group of women, travel by canoe from village to village, and participate in a “Wayusa” dream-sharing ritual. In one segment, Beth and I discuss what we have come to call the Wayusa Dream Space with Daniel Koupermann, our non-Achuar Ecuadorian mentor and guide. The scene shifts from footage shot in the rainforest to scenes in Beth’s living room in Los Angeles, where we discuss what we have learned.  The film is narrated by Paul Goldsmith, the videographer who accompanied us on our 2018 journey and who created the film.  We were told that people from 37 countries attended the presentation at the Congress.

For the Achuar, dreams are more real than waking reality.  When interpreted, they are a more reliable guide to action than waking thoughts.  It is difficult for a person raised in North American culture to comprehend this worldview on a practical level. However, the Achuar perspective provides a useful orientation to psychic reality. Beth and I now look at “reality,” as presented in analysis, as being in itself a product constructed like a dream.

The Achuar see dreams as predicting the future. This concept, dismissed by Freud as primitive folklore, has meaning to Beth and me in relation to our own work. We see our patients’ dreams, and our own, as reflecting wishes and predictions involving the dreamer’s unconscious intentions, expected consequences of acting upon those intentions, and unformulated perceptions about the world – the “unthought known.” Thus dreams predict emotion and action.

For the Achuar, dreams are interpreted in a social context, consisting of both the immediate dream-sharing group and the larger social reality of the community.  The social context in which the dream will be reported enters into the dream itself, because the dreamer has the anticipated audience in mind (as preconscious day residues) forming background material for the dream.  Beth and I have come to see that psychoanalysts (as well as our patients) are participants in thought collectives that actively guide our clinical work. Like the Achuar, our interpretations are also group interpretations – dreamer and interpreter are engaged in the shared meanings of a small group (of two), within the shared meanings of larger psychoanalytic and cultural groups. 

Our first discussant, Mark Solms of South Africa, focused on the fact that the Achuar world is densely populated by spirits.  Freud wrote in Totem and Taboo that the projective creation of spirits is essential to culture, including religion and other cultural institutions.  Why, then, is religion waning in industrial societies?  Mark proposed a “bridging concept,” relating the spirit world in human hunter/gatherer societies to hierarchy, patriarchy, and sharply defined gender roles.  These same characteristics are also found among groups of non-human primates.  Is there greater continuity between species than Freud believed? 

Our second discussant, Susana Vinocur Fischbein of Argentina, approached the topic of Achuar dreaming through semiotic theory, developed by Charles Sanders Peirce and others. The narration of a dream is an act of intersemiotic translation, creating a triadic relationship between an object of representation, a sign, and a thought through which the sign and its object acquire meaning. The narrated dream is a communicative sign and a symbolic matrix for the Achuar and in psychoanalysis. 

Beth and I appreciate these responses, which open new avenues for our research.