Dreams

Fourth Year Adult Psychoanalytic Training (APT)
2022-23, 3rd Trimester — Fridays, 1:45-3:15pm
Julie Wood, MA

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Introduction

In this course we will explore dreaming from the perspective of different psychoanalytic models of the mind.  To keep our discussions connected to your analytic work, please bring dreams from your clinical work, which you believe illustrate the concepts in our readings and or dreams you find particularly perplexing. Each student will present a dream in class.

Learning Objectives

Each of the skills learned in this course will serve to further and deepen the associate’s analytic work leading to improved treatment outcome. At the end of this course, the candidates will be able to:

1. develop and demonstrate approaches to working with analysands about their dreams so that analysands become receptive and interested in exploring their dreams as another mode for understanding themselves and their experience in analysis,
2. utilize their feelings, thoughts and the integrative capacity of their mind in response to the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious communication of the analysand’s dream,
3. recognize the bodily communication between the analyst and analysand that may be depicted in the emotional, visual imagery of the dream, and
4. formulate and deliver interpretations of the dream in the clinical setting.

March 24, 2023 — Foundations for Dreams in Psychoanalysis: Freud and Jung

[121 pages]

Freud, S. (1900). The Interpretation of Dreams. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume V (1900): The Interpretation of Dreams (Second Part), pp509-629

This is a very long read! Every year we ask candidates if it is still worthy of assigning and every year it is a resounding yes. This paper is the foundation of many of Freud’s ideas.

Dreams are initiated in the unconscious.  For subjective awareness to occur, the dream must break through the repression barrier and be modified by:  condensation, reversal, displacement, symbolic transformation, (Dream work) to make it acceptable for the preconscious.  Secondary revision occurs upon awakening, remembering, and telling the dream as coherent images.  Dreams are not logical and are timeless. Freud repeatedly emphasizes that the dream work only processes.  It does not think.  The manifest dream is a collage of sensory impressions, both recent and indifferent, made from the day residues and serving to express an unconscious, infantile wish that had been stirred up by a current conflict or a preconscious worry. The dream work leads to self-deception.  The mind alters ideation to keep itself from being too disturbed.

Later in the course we will explore how psychoanalysis also adopted some of Jung’s perspective on dreams. This occurred decades after the schism between Freud and his protégé, Carl Jung. By this time, there were separate Jungian institutes and the ongoing feuds among schools of psychoanalysis prevented any credit being given to the ideas Jung shared with Freud. Briefly, Jung approaches dreams as communications, messengers from the unconscious, and the manifest content is not as quickly dismissed.