Process II and Ethics

Second Year Adult Psychoanalytic Training (APT)
2022-23, 2nd Trimester — Fridays, 1:45-3:15pm
Diane Wolman, MSW

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February 24, 2023 — Dreams

[48 pages]

Freud famously said that dreams were the royal road to the unconscious.  He considered The Interpretation of Dreams  to be his major work.  As productions of the dreamer’s mind, they offer analyst and analysand unique opportunities to better understand what might lay hidden in the  mind.  Learning to work with dreams in psychoanalytic treatments can help to open up treatments and assist the analytic dyad in getting past “stuck” places together.

The Greenson article, written 52 years ago, offers a nice history of the use of dreams in psychoanalytic treatments. It also offers beautiful examples of how different ways of working with dreams can open up or foreclose on the analytic process.  Sands, in a more recent article (2010), discusses the analytic function of dreams in activating dissociative unconscious communication, which ties in nicely with the Bromberg article we read.

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

Sands, S.H. (2010). On the Royal Road Together: The Analytic Function of Dreams in Activating Dissociative Unconscious Communication. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 20(4)357-373.

Optional Reading

Furedy, R. (2013) Summary of Dream Concepts

Furedy, R. (2013) A Guide to Working with Dreams Analytically