Dreams

Integrated Child & Adult Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (ICAPP)
2021-22, 2nd Block — Mondays, 8:00-9:15pm
Julie Wood, MA

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Introduction

Welcome to a mini course on the use of dreams in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. We will take a general overview; move into how dreams integrate affect; focus on the sensory, somatic, visual process in which a dream is like a painting that patient and therapist can look at together; and consider the dream as transitional play space for the patient’s growth and development.

It’s ideal to have you present some dreams from your patients, but we have limited time. Please let me know if you want to present a dream from a current psychotherapy patient. It would be good to have one person each week willing to present dream material for the purpose of working together as a group and gaining skills on how to work with dreams.

November 15, 2021

[31 pages]

Greenson, R. (1970). The exceptional position of the dream in psychoanalytic practice, Psychoanalytic Quarterly: 39:519-549.

Working with dreams facilitates free association through a comfort with the unconscious.  The immediate visual/affective experience of dreams allows the patient to see the unconscious, thus interpretations are more readily accepted as are the disguised, hidden unconscious affects, wishes, and prohibitions.