Dans l’ombilic du cauchemar
In the Navel of Nightmare

Summary/Abstract: In our field, we tend to hear and read about, and even to devote entire books, articles, and testimonies to the oneiric experience – generally associated with what Freud meant by the dream work – but how much analysis and reflection do we devote to the nightmare? Isn’t it, perhaps, another form of what we call the oneiric experience? What place for the nightmare – beyond Freud and Lacan, but not without them – in the clinical experience? This paper is accompanied by the fragmentary saying – is there another one? – of authors such as Walter Benjamin, Pascal Quignard, Artemidorus, Jorge Luis Borges, as well as the saying of some analysands who have passed through my office. By these means, I will articulate what in some cases has been interpreted as a failure and which constitutes, from my point of view, the triumph of all those parlêtres who let themselves be inhabited by what we would qualify as the demonic – thus recognizing themselves. In other words, I will approach what incubates, in the navel of the nightmare, through sex and death as figures of the real.

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