The Guardian of Dream: The Neglected Relationship Between Sleep and Psychoanalysis

Knowledge about sleep was very limited at the time Freud elaborated his seminal work on the interpretation of dreams. He was also not interested in sleep, that considered a problem of physiology, however sleep appears to have a central role in his model, since dreaming is considered the guardian of sleep. The function of dreaming according to Freud is to protect sleep from disruption, the dream work finalized to avoid repressed stimuli interrupting the “biological” function of sleep. Before neurophysiological studies provided evidence that sleep is not a passive state, Freud also recognized sleep as an active process, human beings voluntarily withdraw their attention from the external world to actively move to sleep. Discovery of REM sleep in the fifties led psychoanalysts to see sleep as the necessary background to the occurrence of dreaming. Although Freud dismissed the clinical importance of sleep disturbances, viewing those as the somatic expression of an instinctual disturbance, which will disappear during psycho-analytic treatment, successive authors highlighted the fact that sleep disturbances might have a more specific psychic significance. The similarities between the loss of self which occurs by falling asleep and the fragmentation of the identity experienced in schizophrenia, is an interesting and yet not fully explored area of research. Thanks to Freud’s work, the desire to sleep assumes the important role of a psychological, active factor which contributes to the occurrence and function of sleep.