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 19, 2021 — Dreams in a Contemporary, Intersubjective, and Interpersonal Context

[44 pages]

Atlas, G. (2013). Eat, Pray, Dream: Contemporary Use of Dreams in Psychoanalysis. Contemp. Psychoanal., 49(2):239-246.

Atlas, a contemporary relational analyst, presents four dreams that demonstrate the movement from concrete to symbolic process. The paper is an illustration of dream work as a transitional play space that leads to growth in the patient.

Gaines, R. (1994). Interpersonal and Jungian Dream Interpretation. Contemp. Psychoanal., 30:855-867

Jung was presumed the heir apparent to Freud’s psychoanalytic legacy. While his ideas originally built upon classical psychoanalysis, his analytic psychology gave more weight to relational ideas and the interpersonal school of psychoanalysis approaches dreams much more like Jung.

Stolorow, R. & Atwood, G. (1992). Dreams and the subjective world. In Lansky, M. (Ed.), Essential Papers on Dreams, New York University Press, pp272-294.

The concrete perceptual images in the dream can lead to the dreamer’s feeling of conviction about the validity of past traumatic experience and the need for dissociation and disguise—perceiving is believing.  The dream affirms and solidifies the nuclear organizing structures of the dreamer’s subjective life.  Type 1-dream symbols are the customary creation of a neurotic mind with clear configuration of self and other.  Type 2 dream symbols are more about maintaining psychological organization, restoring the vulnerable structures to prevent disintegration.  At these times the analyst must be experienced as real, not as if.  An empathic attunement that serves to maintain the cohesion of the self leads to the experience of the self and analyst as real.  Dreams can consolidate and stabilize new structures and subjectivities of the analysand.