Mescla conceitual em sonhos na pandemia: Novas perspectivas para um diálogo entre linguística e psicanálise

Abstract

Dreams are a complex type of mental activity, with undeniable evolutionary importance from their neurological bases, and with possible impacts on dreamers’ psychological experiences to their collective value, in certain cultures (Ribeiro, 2019). This study develops the conjecture that a dialogue between the position regarding basal corporeality in linguistic symbolization defended in Cognitive Linguistics and the conception of the psyche in psychoanalytic theory may be reciprocally fruitful. Notably, psychoanalysis is a disciplinary field that deals with subjectivity, addressing mental processes influenced by affects and in which the agency of a desiring being operates and builds, through unconscious knowledge, their relationship with the world. In the study, we begin to elaborate such a conjecture by way of an analysis of dream narratives that have a unique character, motivated by the Theory of Conceptual Blending (Fauconnier, 1994; Fauconnier, 1997; Fauconnier; Turner, 2004). These are narratives of Brazilian dreams collected during 2020, that is, during the pre-vaccination peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, in the context of an interinstitutional project that involved three important Brazilian public universities (Dunker et al., 2021). The analysis presented supports the idea that the Theory of Conceptual Blending is capable of dialoguing with the Freudian concepts of condensation and displacement, which predominantly correspond, respectively, to metaphor and metonymy.