As part of the Inspire yourself, breath series, Jean-Marie Durand welcomes sociologist Bernard Lahire and historian André Loez
What are we dreaming about? Why these dreams? From where in the depths of our unconscious and our troubled existences do they arise? For more than a century, dreams have been the captives of psychoanalysis, which carries authority over them and over the possibility of shedding light on their mysterious images, even if artists and poets continue to make detailed use of them. Faced with this supreme domination by psychoanalysis over dreams, one ambitious sociologist, Bernard Lahire, found something to say; not so much in order to challenge the psychoanalytical ethos itself, but rather to broaden its spectrum and compare it with another form of knowledge that is more wide-ranging, less mechanical, and more complex. To anyone who wishes to examine them, dreams provide elements of deep and subtle understanding about who we are. Studying them makes it possible to know what is obscurely shaping us and understand what is being thought inside us unbeknownst to our will. Dreams are spaces where social structures of domination express themselves. They often illustrate problems that are at once singular and widely shared: the ordeal of male domination, the after-effects of sexual abuse, the trials and tribulations of the class defector, the ups and downs of school competition, difficult relations with family heritage, the consequences of physical or symbolic parental violence, the effects of a surrounding religious morality, or the repercussions of a father’s abandonment. In his vast, two-volume investigation entitled The Sociological Interpretation of Dreams (2020 [2018]), Bernard Lahire explores the dream imagination with the tools of sociology, providing us with a means of accessing the dreamed part of our existence. From sociology to history—as historian André Loez will explain to us—to documentary cinema, on the model of Sophie Bruneau’s film Dreaming Under Capitalism, today the social sciences are taking dreams seriously, as keys to a better understanding of ourselves and of the social world that surrounds us.
