Daydreaming, intimacy, and the intersubjective third in fieldwork encounters in Syria

In this article, I analyze three episodes of daydreaming and reverie by young Syrian men that were occasioned, in part, by the presence of the anthropologist in ethnographic encounters. Such daydreaming calls forth an “intersubjective third,” which privileges the experience of the interlocutor but is powerfully defined by the relationship of the roles of anthropologist and interlocutor. This construction opens a space in which both unconscious and conscious aspects of experience can be recontextualized, leading to a better understanding of interlocutors’ wishes and anxieties—in this article, for transgression of genealogical and gender orders, the excitement of Internet pornography, and seductions of the modern. I conclude by theorizing the specificity of the ethnographic encounter’s relation to knowledge and the different commitments for the anthropologist in the encounter and for the psychoanalyst in a therapeutic session. [Syria, reverie, psychoanalysis, masculinity, ethnographic encounter, countertransference, pornography, Internet] W hereas anthropology has fruitfully made dreams a subject of analysis (e.g., Devereux 1951; Eggan 1949; Gregor 1985; Róheim 1952; Stewart 1997; Tedlock 1987b), it has given no systematic attention to the activity of daydreaming and the state of reverie.1 These two activities—night dreaming and daydreaming—are, of course, related and share, as Freud had it, the goal of “making the obtaining of pleasure free once more from the assent of reality” (1966:463). But major differences between the two persist across cultures: Dreams occur during sleep and have a hallucinatory quality, whereas daydreams are fantasies in which one consciously imagines something while fully awake.2 Because dreams involve an internal censor and repression, their motives must be decoded from distorted messages; in daydreams, however, “the content of these phantasies,” as Freud observed, “is dominated by a very transparent motive. They are scenes and events in which the subject’s egoistic needs of ambition and power or his erotic wishes find satisfaction” (1966:120). In amovement that has bypassed anthropology, psychoanalysts have increasingly paid attention to daydreamlike activity in the state of reverie, to moments of unconscious association and inattention, both in human development and in clinical settings. In particular, a focus on reverie has led to insights about the “unconscious state of receptivity” in communication between mother and child (Bion 1962); the psychic translation of the other’s enigmaticmessages in seduction, theorized as the genesis of the unconscious in general and of repression as a partial failure to translate these messages (Laplanche 1989); and the receptivity to states of reverie of both analyst and analysand in the joint construction of an “unconscious third subject” in the psychoanalytic session (Ogden 1997b:117).3 For social theorists as well as ethnographers, anthropology’s inattention to daydreaming and states of reverie is particularly unfortunate, as such moments are ubiquitous in fieldwork encounters and key windows into unconscious communication.4 In this article, I focus on three episodes of daydreams and reverie that were occasioned, in part, by my presence, as an anthropologist, AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 38, No. 2, pp. 234–248, ISSN 0094-0496, online ISSN 1548-1425. C © 2011 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2011.01303.x Daydreaming, intimacy, and the intersubjective third American Ethnologist in ethnographic encounters in Aleppo, Syria.5 Such daydreaming calls forth what Thomas Ogden (1997b:9–11,116– 119) terms the “intersubjective analytic third”—a joint though decidedly unequal construction generated in the context of the encounter, which privileges the experience of the interlocutor but is powerfully defined by the relationship of the roles of anthropologist and interlocutor. This third opens a space in which both unconscious and conscious aspects of experience can be recontextualized, leading to a better understanding of the interlocutor’s wishes and anxieties, which, in this article, include transgression of genealogical and gender orders, excitement of Internet pornography, and seductions of the modern. I proceed by bringing to bear on the ethnographic encounter some fundamental theoretical concepts of contemporary clinical psychoanalysis—reverie, transference and countertransference, the intersubjective third, and containment. In the final section, I use the explications of the three episodes to theorize the specificity of the ethnographic encounter’s relation to knowledge and to highlight the different commitments to knowledge for the anthropologist in the encounter and for the psychoanalyst in the therapeutic session. The different and mutually informing articulations of anthropology and psychoanalysis point to new theoretical frontiers in both disciplines. Much as anthropological theorizing has moved away from an understanding of fieldwork as motivated by a desire to map out an objective set of cultural traits, differences, or relationships independent of the encounter, so too, psychoanalytic theorizing has moved away from the goal of knowing the underlying structure of a patient’s mind. Rather than focus on systems of thought, their symbolic content and relation to power, more attention is paid to how people think and the way such thinking can transformoccasions and institutions that reproduce the social. Therefore,many of themore recent epistemological advances in both fields have come out of an appreciation of the dynamics of transference and countertransference and the significance of storytelling in communication, that is, of a reflexive interpretation of the experience of a relationship. Anthropologists who engage in what I call “interlocution-based fieldwork,” a mode of research no longer limited to ethnographers, experience highly charged countertransference in encounters with the people they study, in which they are often asked to serve as “containers” for the projections, anxieties, and phantasies disclosed by their interlocutors (Bion 1959).6 The encounter takes place, to use the words of Donald Winnicott, “in the overlap of two areas of playing” (1971:381). The overlap is stimulated by conscious and unconscious communication in particularly open-ended, playful interactions, which include the activity of daydreaming. Encounters that focus on daydreaming are to be distinguished from other anthropological glosses on the fieldwork experience as dialogic, collaborative, a joint narrative, or instrumental, in that they are not to be equated with the exchange between two egos or distinct subjectivities but involve a third subjectivity (the analytic third) created through unconscious exchange (cf. Groark 2009).7 Put another way, an analysis of daydreaming and reverie in the ethnographic encounter does not reveal the point of difference between two already constituted cultures or two public selves but, instead, discloses knowledge of unconscious intersubjective exchange that points to future communicative possibilities. The creation of the intersubjective third subject in the interlocution-based encounter can form the basis for an autonomous (with respect to the ego) “inner other” that reveals an alternative sense of reality in which the anthropologist, at least momentarily, also takes part. Moreover, if the experience and the storytelling of this understanding are of sufficient depth and texture—crafted to include the conditions of articulation but allowed tomeander across domains, they can (and, one hopes, will) also stimulate readers to reverie, to associations that will increase their unconscious receptivity to what is being communicated.8 Episode one: Dream collector This first episode occurred in the fall of 2004 during my encounter with a merchant in the Souk al-Atarin (Borneman 2007:115–116). Majid calls me a dream collector because I make a point of asking people about their dreams. Freud famously defined dreams as the “fulfillment of a wish,” and I see them as windows into complex motivations, how people envision their world, and what they generally want from it. Dreams are especially important for recording wishes that people are most reluctant to express openly to themselves or to others. Most people I ask say they cannot remember their dreams. Majid’s nephew, Mohammed, who assists him in the shop, says he remembers only the dreams that repeat. In one, he says, he is licking a woman, sometimes even her feet. His uncle overhears him and says, “He asked for dreams, not nightmares!” The next day, when I ask Mohammed again, he says, “I dreamt of having a knife and using it on my uncle Majid.” Mohammed also thinks that, by “dream,” I mean simply what he wants and whom he desires—whom among the customers that walk by he consciously desires. From his shop he yells after them: “Miss!” “Señora!” “Fräulein!” “Mademoiselle!” “Señorita!” “Madame!” Invariably the women he singles out are the older ones in the group, the grandmothers, who cannot believe this hunky, broad-shouldered 20-year-old has his bright eyes on them. And then, as they walk away, he closes his eyes tightly and says wistfully, “My cup of tea.”