Lecture:
Daru Huppert: Dreaming about the Dead – On some Relations between Mourning, the Dream and Melancholia

Unless we are hallucinating while awake, we can see and meet the dead only in our dreams. For the bereaved dreaming about their dead is therefore uniquely poignant, pleasurable, painfully seductive and uncanny. And yet the relationship between dreams and the work of mourning has hardly been explored within psychoanalysis. This is all the more puzzling given that Freud considered the Interpretation of Dreams a response to the death of his father. In other words, it is a book about mourning and therefore of its impediments.

Daru Huppert will delineate central aspects of the relationship between dreams and mourning by reading Mourning and Melancholia in the light of The interpretation of Dreams. Thereafter he will speak about a patient, who after the death of her mother would dream about her incessantly, but who had lost her ability to associate to these dreams and to mourn her mother. It is in regard to such cases that Freud’s analysis of melancholia and of the traumatic dreams in Beyond the Pleasure Principle become a necessary reference. Looking at both mourning and melancholia through Freud’s theory of dreams promises many a stirring insight. 

Daru Huppert is a training and supervising analyst at the Viennese Psychoanalytical Society. He studied clinical and social psychology in New York, Zurich and Cambridge, where he gave lectures on psychoanalysis at the University of Cambridge. In addition to writing many articles on a wide array of psychoanalytical subjects, such as dreams, the moral emotions and destructivity, he is the co-editor of two books, including Contemporary Perspectives on the Freudian Death Drive. Since several years he has held seminars at the Viennese Psychoanalytical Academy on the theory of dreams and on close readings of Freud’s texts. 

Organisers: Austrian Cultural Forum Warsaw, Polish Psychoanalytical Society 

04.10.2024 (Fr.), 8:00 p.m. 
Austrian Cultural Forum Warsaw
ul. Próżna 7/9
In English
Free admission