夢見と感情制御に関する調査研究の文献展望

Abstract

This paper provides a comprehensive examination of the history of dream research in three fields: psychoanalysis, cognitive psychology and neuroscience. The evolution of theories is described in terms of historical periods. The first period spans from Freud’s “Dream Interpretation” in 1900 to the 1950s. The second period extends from the discovery of REM sleep in the 1950s to around the 1990s. The third period begins in the 2000s and continues to the present day. Even before the first period, neuroscientists had viewed dreams as meaningless phenomena. This tendency intensified following the discovery of REM sleep. The most extreme of these theories was Hobson's “activation-synthesis hypothesis,” which posited that dreams were merely the by-product of memory processing during REM sleep. During the second period, cognitive psychological research revealed that dream characteristics could be measured and exhibited regularity. During the third period, neurological evidence was obtained showing that dreaming is not unique to REM sleep. Subsequently, the primary focus of debate shifted to the psychological meaning of dreams. Proponents of “the continuity hypothesis of dreaming” emphasized the continuity between dreaming and consciousness. However, recent empirical research has demonstrated that dreaming serves to regulate emotions, suggesting that dreams cannot be explained solely by continuity with waking thought and cognition. Dreaming’s functioning as emotional regulation is consistent with psychoanalysis. Research on dreaming’s functioning as emotional regulation is based on the theoretical premise that dreams represent emotional experiences. However, studies of schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, and alexithymia have shown that patients or individuals with difficulty regulating emotions experience problems with the representation of emotional experiences in dreams. Therefore, this paper argues that focusing on symbolism in dreaming can enrich dream research. Specifically, psychoanalytic concepts such as the α function (Bion, 1962) and mentalizing are particularly useful. The paper concludes that establishing the relationship between mentalizing and dreaming’s functioning as emotional regulation is a key issue for future dream research.