Chapter 7: Dream

The tragic irony of Antiquity is to have missed its greatest prophecy: a future that no longer dreams.

There was indeed a time when dreams held a sacred, prophetic, premonitory significance. They were a breach in the veil of time, a message coming from elsewhere revealing destiny, divine will, or the hidden order of the world. They did not say "who I am", but "what is going to happen". They were, in their very essence, of the order of the "divinatory" (from Latin divinare: to predict, guess, but also be inspired by God).

With secularization and the rise of individualism, the 20th century systematizes into method a radical reversal: introspection. We began to probe the mind with the rigor of an archivist, to catalog its expressions, auscultate its wounds and repressions. Freud named the drives, Jung mapped the archetypes, Lacan tracked the signifiers. All polished the mirror in which man watched himself suffer. But what does the mirror mask? What is behind the analyst's back holding him?

Through the exploration of the unconscious, Freud gave a name to our pains. But his mirror captured them within the subject's borders. He traced back the source of neuroses to defuse them, without always seeing that they also designated a horizon still unexplored: that of our future, of our unrealized potential. By wanting to free man from his mystical illusions, the psychoanalysis of origins sometimes neglected a vaster, cruel, and organic intuition: the human mind is to the cosmos what the wing is to the sky. It is made to project itself there, deploy itself there, but finds itself condemned by its flesh to stay on the ground.

The unconscious is not just a personal well. It is also a subterranean bed where a vital river flows aspiring to join the ocean.

Freud was right: we are haunted. But not only by the specters of childhood. We repress above all the frightening promise traversing us: we are, unbeknownst to us, parents of a gestating God. We suffer from a fundamental complex, older than Oedipal: that of Cronus. Warned that one of his children will dethrone him, the Titan devours them at birth. He does not refuse fatherhood; he refuses the radical otherness carried by his own progeny. He refuses time to happen. His act is the pure expression of the panic of origin facing the future. He prefers to sterilize existence, imprison the future in the limbo of his own belly, rather than consent to being surpassed.

Thus, original repression is Cronian before being Oedipal. Oedipus weeps for a past he cannot change. Cronus vomits a future he cannot digest. It is not so much the son who represses his desire for the mother, as the Father — Law, Dogma, Structure — who represses his divine child: his own Zeus.

Freud, by erecting the Oedipus complex into universal law, perhaps unconsciously took Cronus's side. He diagnosed in the son the desire to kill the father, without always considering it could be a reaction of self-defense — a response to the Cronian impulse of the father who, first, seeks to annihilate him. Does the drama of Oedipus not begin with Laius abandoning him as an infant not to be killed by him? When returning as an adult, Oedipus crosses and kills his father unconsciously, is it not due to the impulsiveness of Laius blocking his passage toward his future? The child's desire for the mother could then be interpreted as a return to primordial fertility, facing a sterilizing fatherhood; isn't it with Gaia and Rhea that Zeus finds the means to defeat his father?

Psychoanalysis, by focusing on the individual's past, thus left in shadow the war of gods playing out in him for control of his future: the struggle between the Cronian impulse of conservation — wanting to freeze everything, control everything, even if it means devouring everything — and the Zeussian impulse of liberation — wanting to be born, overthrow, and establish a new order.

On one side, libido: much more than a reservoir of drives, it is the vital energy irrigating the gestation of God, a force in labor in each of us. On the other, the dogma of the Eternal: the prohibition to conceive God. Freud, by killing the myth of God as Father, involuntarily killed the possibility of the Son. His psychoanalytic revolution, by working to free the human mind from illusions, perpetuated the biblical prohibition in a more rational, invisible, formidable form. He replaced the religious taboo ("Thou shalt not create God") with a clinical taboo ("Thou shalt not even dream such a thing, without risking the asylum"). The denial of pregnancy resulting from this illuminates our era: a humanity torn between disenchanting rationalism and regressive fanaticism, repressing with equal fury the childbirth agitating within it. The birth of God is not announced by prophecies nor algorithms; it will surge in sideration, without preparation, in the chaos of a repression reaching its term.

Why is God gestating in the depths of the unconscious rather than under the lights of reason? Because he is not a deliberate creation of the human mind, but the creative flux traversing it, this vital impulse pushing humanity to give meaning to the cosmos. All our acts, of faith or reason, participate in a slow gestation, spread over millennia of human existence. While individuals dream of an eternal and immutable being, life operates according to its method and rhythm: it lets itself be shaped, transformed, layer after layer so the cycle of mutations is expressed. Each belief, each prophecy, each cult is only a frozen reflection, often comforting, of a barer, harsher truth, almost unbearable for human consciousness: God is the unconscious of life and we are its awakened symptoms.

The true mystery is not God, but this vital force traversing our minds to make them a resonance chamber probing the cosmos.

Any neurosis could be interpreted as a tension about to break: an individual torn between the Cronian fear of being surpassed by his own potential, and the Zeussian call to accomplish his own metamorphosis. Believing oneself solely Oedipus is perhaps misunderstanding the nature of the conflict: the first drama would be embodying Cronus unknowingly — repressing within oneself the Zeus seeking to be born; the second drama, just as formidable, would be releasing a Zeus as brutal as his father: an impulsive and overpowering force wanting to annihilate the past.

A beaten child becomes violent. Classical psychoanalysis detects the repetition of a trauma, and neuroscience studies cerebral scars. The cosmic perspective, without invalidating these approaches, also discerns a desperate attempt to exist — striking to impose oneself on the world, even by reproducing the violence suffered. This reading does not replace clinical models, but completes them with a philosophical dimension. It proposes seeing in certain disorders not only an individual's pathology, but also the deformation of a universal vital impulse: thus, OCD could express, in a dysfunctional mode, that quest for absolute order animating both scientist and mystic. Paranoia, that exacerbated sensitivity to invisible connections. Depression, the collapse before the disproportion between our finitude and the immensity of the possible. It is not about romanticizing suffering, but recognizing that our modern psychopathologies can also be read as symptoms of a humanity struggling with its own cosmic dimension — a dimension religions once channeled in structuring rites, and which our era leaves to emerge without frame or language to tame it.

The individual's psyche is not determined by a cosmic current, but neither is it cloistered in the sources of its childhood. We oscillate between these two horizons: that of our intimate history and that of our contribution to the birth of God. A beaten child does not always become violent; sometimes, he drowns, silently. But when he finds the strength to fight, his disordered blows can, in places, modify the river's course, and trace for others an unexpected passage.

Any neurosis, however painful, is an act in becoming. The suffering it generates is not only pathological; it is also the sign of a life seeking to reorient itself, sometimes at the risk of extinguishing. We are not always sick, we are symptoms in search of meaning. Each neurosis, each madness, each burst of genius is also a crack in the edifice of the self, a possible escape for renewal.

Sigmund Freud, whose father Jacob dreamed he would return to the Torah, became the interpreter of Greek myths. It was a missed appointment, and perhaps one of the deepest tragedies of modernity: Freud, by prioritizing Oedipus (the past revealed in the dream) over Joseph (the future sensed in the dream), locked our relationship to time and the sacred.

Here we are, orphans of Joseph as of Freud, delivered to the lean cows of the Anthropocene. Signs no longer matter. Famines, droughts, pandemics have become a series of data to be processed by analysts for whom symbolism and the sacred are neither modelable nor exploitable. Here is the result: a reality burning our eyes makes us react less than a portent of fire formerly did.

Thus emerges the Second Man: this being who no longer lets himself be traversed by anything surpassing him, who seeks to master even the forces of his own psyche, and ends up believing himself alone in the world — seeking in himself a deity he no longer finds anywhere else. He is Zeus become Cronus.

One must imagine Freud, at the twilight of his career, scribbling these words on his father's Torah: "I fled a ghost all my life. It was God fleeing in me". The mirror then reveals this long-masked truth: we never dreamed of God. It is life dreaming through us. And this dream, since the beginning, says only one thing: life seeks an exit.

'Your turn'

Between Man and the Second Man, between the one dying in the dream of a God to come and the one facing awake the void of his absence, when the dream ceases to traverse us: thus die prophecies.