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Biomedical subjects

S R Palombo

Publications and source records attributed to S R Palombo.

5 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1992

Connectivity and condensation in dreaming.

Converging developments in the cognitive- and neurosciences have brought Freud's hope of a bridge between psychoanalysis and psychophysiology nearer to hand. This paper concerns the relation between dream construction and memory in terms of these new developments. The neural network architecture of memory structures in the brain is described and illustrated with simple examples. We see how a network is connected and how connection weights vary with experience. The distributed representation stored by the network and its crucial properties for mental functioning are discussed. These concepts are used to explain how particular memories of past events are selected for inclusion in the dream. The properties of the neural network suggest that images of distinct past events are conflated at times during the selection process. The appearance of these conflated images may complicate the matching of day residues with representations of past events in the dream itself. Some likely implications for psychoanalytic theory are explored.

Dreams↗
PubMed1992

The Eros of dreaming.

This paper examines the aspects of dreaming derived from the principle of Eros, the life instinct as described by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The life instinct is interpreted in information-processing terms, as the inverse of entropy. The paper emphasizes the role of condensation as a mechanism that binds together the representations of present and past events in the imagery of the dream. This distinguishes it from displacement, which appears to be a mechanism whose function is solely defensive. The role of the dream in finding a common ground between current and past experience (Galton's method of comparison by superimposition) is discussed in detail. It is suggested that condensation is a primitive cognitive mechanism at work in many kinds of mental activity. The implications of this idea for psychoanalysis and for the creative process in general are explored in brief.

Dreams↗
PubMed1988

Day residue and screen memory in Freud's dream of the botanical monograph.

Freud's theory of dream construction allowed the censorship to intervene only when a repressed infantile wish emerged from the unconscious. In his (1899) paper on screen memories, however, he proposed a mechanism for the defensive displacement of current events as they are sorted for introduction into permanent memory. I suggest that Freud was actually describing the conflictual process through which the day residue of the dream is formed. Day residue and screen memory are closely related as elements of the dreamer's present and past experience displaced from his more central instinctual concerns. Freud's dream of the botanical monograph clearly illustrates this relation. Substituted day residues were matched in the dream with relatively innocuous memories of past events of similar cognitive and affective significance. By retracing the substitutions, one can see how a current conflict over Fliess's role in the writing of the dream book recapitulated a series of Freud's earlier conflicts concerning his father and the power of books.

Conflict, Psychological↗