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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November 5, 2021 — Dreams as “Transitional Phenomenon”

[44 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.

Molinari, E. (2008). Dreams: A ≪Transitional≫ Area from the Body of Experience to the Body of Thought. Ital. Psychoanal. Annu., 2:157-169.

Dreams occur in a transitional space from the experience of the body to the area of thought.  Dreams are shared between the analyst and analysand and are visual, affective experiences of past scenes either imagined or remembered.   They can be unconscious memories of primitive sensorial experiences during analytic regression similar to a small child and its mother.  The field of the preverbal, relational experience and early proto-affective traces may be in the transference and referenced in dreams.