Dreams

Adult Psychoanalytic Training (APT)
2021-22, 1st Trimester — Fridays, 1:45-3:15pm
Charlotte Malkmus, MA LMHC
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 of the learning objectives for this course will serve to further and deepen the associate’s analytic work leading to improved treatment outcome.

Additional Optional Readings for a longer course on dreams:

Grenell, G. (2002). The Termination Phase of Psychoanalysis as Seen Through the Lens of the Dream. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 50(3):779-805.

Dreams can reveal an analysand’s readiness for termination.  Dreams of graduation, funerals, people or objects separating, self-examination (capacity for self analysis) may all be preconscious reference to termination.

Lansky, M.R. (1990). The Screening Function of Post-Traumatic Nightmares. Brit. J. Psychother., 6(4):384-400.

The compulsion to repeat can be seen as a wish from the ego, originally overwhelmed, as preparing itself in both dreams and repetitive acts to replay and eventually to master overwhelming traumatic experiences. Soldiers, returning from battle, experienced dreams as though they were flashbacks – exact replays.  But, on careful examination the nightmares were not exact replicas and some contained material from early family experiences.  Viewing the dream as exact replicas of battlefield experience, when they clearly were not, must be seen as an aspect of the disguise function of the dream, a screen to prevent the dream from being too troubling and too connected to ongoing painful and conflicted material, past and present, embedded with guilt and shame.  The rationalization that the nightmare has nothing to do with one’s life experiences is used to prevent the dream experience from integration into the entire continuity of one’s life, childhood, and military experience.

The nightmares clearly have a screening function to conceal from awareness infantile trauma and its residuals.  Most of the patients were raised in families where marital strife, physical violence, and alcoholism were rife.  The handling of intense shame and rage by placing it on the battlefield is rationalized as coming from the battlefield only and not connected to one’s entire life.

Mancia, M. (1999). Psychoanalysis and the Neurosciences: A Topical Debate on Dreams. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 80(6):1205-1213.

Dreams allow old experiences to be reconsidered in the present allowing new meaning to be assigned to past experiences.

Watson, R.I., Jr. (1994). The Clinical Use of the Analyst’s Dreams of the Patient. Contemp. Psychoanal., 30:510-521.

The analyst’s dream involving the patient can represent (1) neurotic conflict in the analyst; (2) a transient identification with the patient; (3) the mind of the analyst attempting to symbolize and integrate (understand) the patient; (4) a containing function of the projections from the patient with the analyst identifying with the projected disavowed parts of the analysand’s mind.  Also, the dream may be a representation of the current interpersonal action in the analysis.

Learning Objectives

At the end of this course, Clinical Associates will be able to

1. Develop and demonstrate approaches to working with analysands about their dreams so that analysandsbecome 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.

October 22, 2021 — 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 CA’s 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.