The secret dream laboratory

Abstract

What does an eminent neuroanatomist dream of at night? The panic of being an auxiliary professor and receiving last minute instructions from the Dean to lecture on osteology? ‘Anxiety, distress … upon reviewing the bones in my memory. I list those of the hand: scaphoids, capitate, and I did not know any more’; or perhaps of secretly cutting slices of medulla for staining in a boarding house at night, or (a recurrent nightmare) that ‘they remove my skull and only skin covers the brain’—the dreamer is ‘alarmed and I awaken when I see that my brain is falling out’? THE DREAMS OF SANTIAGO RAMÓN Y CAJAL By Benjamin Ehrlich, 2017 Oxford University Press ISBN: 978-0-190-61961-9 Price: £29.99 The dreams in question are those of the Spanish father of neuroscience Santiago Ramón y Cajal (Fig. 1), and the long route they travelled before emerging in published form is as obscure and erratic as the dreams themselves. Jotted down originally on loose scraps of paper in various sporadic bursts between 1918 and Cajal’s death in 1934, they constitute an ongoing irritable argument with contemporary depth psychology (particularly the theories of Sigmund Freud) and at the same time open a window onto Cajal’s preoccupations at the time of his retirement, the methodology of his introspective scientific method (commentary on many of the dreams is categorized into: inconsistencies, precedents, causes), his reading habits and other day-to-day trivia rarely captured in a biography. Cajal at the University of Valencia, circa 1885. Courtesy of the Cajal Institute, “Cajal Legacy”, Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Spain. The original loose sheets and notes in newspaper margins that comprised the diary were lost and what we have is a record of their contents as transcribed and translated with frequent blanks or illegible sections and little contextual information, although the gist of the dream content and Cajal’s immediate response are clear. It seems unlikely, though, that Cajal would have wanted to publish such highly personal details in this form and why, under circumstances that remain unclear, he gave the diaries to José Germain Cebrián, a student of Gonzalo Rodriguez Lafora (of Lafora body disease), can only be guessed. Germain was later to became an advocate of psychoanalysis (he edited the collected works of Freud in Spanish) and sometime in the late 1940s he passed the transcripts on to José Rollo, a Spanish psychoanalyst (the originals having been destroyed in a flood). At that point they again were lost until being ‘recovered mysteriously’ in 2013 and published in Spanish only shortly before Rollo’s death in 2015. It seems that subsequently the manuscript copy has once more disappeared. All neuroscientists will be familiar with Cajal’s contribution to neuron theory but many will be surprised at the breadth of his writing and interests and the trajectory of his career. Part One of Ehrlich’s volume provides a succinct biographical introduction to Cajal and the cultural, scientific and political milieu from which neuron theory emerged. Ehrlich’s contextualizing is variable, presenting itself to some extent as an academic text with detailed referencing and annotations, but in tone is closer to a lay popular science book. What sticks out in Ehrlich’s approach, however, is a desire to make Cajal’s dreams relevant to a broader contemporary audience by reframing them in a narrative about the encounter with psychoanalysis. An interesting contrast is noted between the trajectory of Freud’s career from the study of neuronal circuitry to psychoanalysis and Cajal’s trajectory from hypnosis to neuron theory. The two figures are constantly placed in relation to each other, moreover, much energy is expended on trying to present a ‘psychobiography’ of Cajal along psychoanalytic lines. This framework—though full of interesting dramas—is problematic in a number of ways. First, because it substitutes what might have been a more substantial enquiry into the nature of Cajal’s own dream research and theory of dreams with Freudian speculation on Cajal’s inner struggles (there is a much longer chapter on Cajal’s relation to his father than on his understanding of mental functions in dream life). But second, it seems that Cajal’s intellectual encounter with Freud was superficial to say the least, and is far more a product of the successive (and increasingly psychoanalytically-inclined) hands that the transcripts have passed through (the Spanish edition of the diaries is accompanied by interpretive essays by clinicians). True, many comments in the dreams—at least early on—are specifically directed at Freud, or aim to disprove him. ‘This cannot be explained by Freud’ he writes in the mid-20s, or, appended to other dreams: ‘No repressed desire’; ‘Freud? Nothing’. But to what extent had Cajal understood what he was trying to refute? There is no extended discussion of Freud’s work here—either on dreams, or his model of mental life—but it is clear from the comments Cajal makes that he had not taken on board the most basic features of Freud’s theories relating to dreaming. First, that beneath conscious thoughts and desires there are unconscious ones, which have undergone repression; second, his key distinction between the ‘manifest’ content of a dream (how the dream appears to the dreamer) and its ‘latent’ content—the unconscious thoughts and associations or memories which are not explicitly present in the dream (at least at first glance) but can be discovered as underlying it. And third, the ‘free association’ method for revealing the links between conscious thoughts and such unconscious material. Freud’s patients were famously asked to say the first thing that came into their head in relation to elements of the content of the dream, thus initiating a trail of mental connections to crucial displaced or buried memories and desires. Dreams, for Freud, could not be taken at face value; they had to be interpreted to reveal their missing logic. But Cajal’s refutations of Freud repeatedly take a very naïve form in which the manifest content of the dream is compared with Cajal’s conscious desires, or real-life experiences, and if it departs from these is de facto discounted as an accurate portrait of his own mental life. He dreams he goes to America, but in reality ‘I have no desire to go’. Because he does not consciously desire it, he seems to claim, this cannot be a repressed desire. Or Cajal dreams of taking over the house of some acquaintances in order to develop some photographic plates—but this ‘is not desire, since for many years now I have a laboratory in my house and in the Institute’. He finds himself in Belgium with the author Maeterlinck—but this is ‘not subject to the law of repressed desire, since I desire neither to travel nor to meet Meterlinck [sic]’, and so on. One pretty soon gets the hang of Cajal’s refutation, which starts to seem something of a pointless exercise—neither an engagement with Freudian theories, nor particularly interesting as an observation on his many carefully-recorded dreams. As Ehrlich notes, a dream in which he drowns while holding his young daughter (a daughter who in reality had been lost to bacterial disease 40 years earlier) elicits no comment on the pathos of this form of mental revenance, no reflection on the personal undercurrents of mental life. The Freudo-centric focus of the book, amplified in Ehrlich’s critical apparatus, obscures a better understanding of Cajal’s own theories of dream, which has to be pieced together through dribs and drabs in the dream records themselves. For instance, it is clear that Cajal for a time was exploring his own hypothesis that dreams are a ‘game of imagination’ that creates combinations of scenes, taking elements from different times. According to speculations on one dream, ‘the influence of habit loads cells’ with a kind of fluid. ‘They are not established pathways’ but ‘mnemonic phenomena and conditions that did not want to die’ and now ‘reveal themselves’. He focuses frequently on the idea of an automatic persistence of the past. Elsewhere he observes that ‘acquired habits, that have lain fallow for several years reassert themselves at night’ in a kind of involuntary workout. This is connected on another night with ‘a hypothesis of fallow cells’—the resulting, reactivated scenes in dreams were real and vivid ‘but from many years ago’. We learn, almost by the way, that Cajal was late in life engaged in work about dreaming—The Hallucinations of Sleep and Theories of Dreaming—but almost nothing of the content of these books (even whether or not they were realized in publications, or remained speculative projects), and only passing mention of his 1908 publication on dreams and the empirical project on which it was based. Arguably it would have been better to read Cajal’s diaries against the research questions and themes of these other studies, or at least, to supplement the dreams with longer commentaries comparing the different veins of research with one another. And besides Freud, what of Pierre Janet’s or F.W.H. Myers’ theories—aspects of whose language of subconscious personalities chime more closely with some of Cajal’s thoughts? Or of the more populist writings of H.G. Wells and the eccentric researcher J.W. Dunne, whose notion of precognitive dreaming, mapped out in 1927 in An Experiment in Time, evidently reached Cajal, as some dream notes in the early 30s are devoted to them? An interesting comparison could be made here with John Forrester and Laura Cameron’s magisterial tome Freud in Cambridge (2017), which covers very similar terrain, namely the many dream diaries and ongoing virtual conversations with Freud being pursued by a host of Cambridge scientists in the 1920s and 30s in Britain, including the botanist and ecologist Arthur Tansley, physicist J.D. Bernal, and the psychologist and anthropologist W.H.R. Rivers. Like Cajal, each of these was drawn to test the new psychology out on themselves, and tried in different ways to wrest new psychological knowledge (and sometimes release themselves from inner demons) through this form of nightly self-observation. Such engagements with dreaming, following the example of Freud, Jung and others, led to many different kinds of attitudes—for some towards a closer connection with psychoanalysis, for others towards their own independent theories, or it was just a passing enthusiasm. The key point is that they testify to a broader culture of response to The Interpretation of Dreams, happening outside the medical frame, within which Cajal’s own diary could usefully be situated as another example of these myriad secret responses, which left a trail of jottings, musings and never-concluded projects in the archive. The edition also contains relatively little coverage of the function of REM sleep from a biological perspective and current theories of dream content. However, in many ways it ends up exemplifying an enduring uncertainty over the differing kinds of attention one might pay to dreams. There is evidence to suggest REM sleep plays a role in memory, in particular procedural memory (for example, learning new motor skills) and in emotional processing. Other theories take an evolutionary and developmental perspective and conceive REM sleep and dreaming as a training space for waking consciousness and developing a sense of self and agency—dreaming as proto-consciousness. As recognized by Cajal, most of our dream content is not a replay of real events, either in our recent or distant past, and we still lack an understanding of why a given dream has its specific content and whether this content, manifest or otherwise, has wider neurobiological implications. The issue remains unresolved of whether dream content is best conceived as ‘an imaginative creation with fragments of memories pertaining to different time periods’, ‘all pure nonsense with no purpose’ ‘game of imagination …’ or artefacts of deeper psychological processing. The two views, grounded in different traditions and terminology, seem contradictory but the underlying psychological/neurological process may turn out to be the same.