ABSTRACT

On Working With Dreams in Psychotherapy (an Interpersonal Psychoanalytic Approach)

Affiliation: William Alanson White Psychoanalytic Institute, NYC – Faculty, Training and Supervising Analyst. Director of Stockbridge Dream Society and Author of Nocturnes: On Listening to Dreams. Teaching and writing about dreams for several decades.

Summary of Presentation

Talking together about dreams brought from psychotherapy, an atmosphere will evolve, I hope, that will encourage the participants to engage more fully in the play of healing with dreams. This approach is basically a subversive response to contemporary destructive trends that reduce the significance of inner life—even in psychotherapy.

Learning Objectives:

(1) Participants will learn, by example and by lecture, about contemporary psychoanalytic thinking on dreams, 

(2) in particular about a contemporary interpersonal-naturalist approach that focuses on the importance of staying with the image and on dream conversation rather than dream interpretation and 

(3) about ways of integrating Freud, Jung, Shamanism and modern psychotherapy in relation to dreams.

Evaluation questions:

(2) How can shamanic practice influence work with dreams in contemporary psychotherapy? 

(3) What is the point, anyhow, of working with dreams in psychotherapy?

Abstract 

Psychoanalysis has turned away from its original partner, dreams. But during its heyday, it influenced and continues to influence therapists, in working with dreams, to direct their attention (a) to "correct" interpretations and (b) more recently, almost exclusively to relationship dynamics (particularly to transference and countertransference). Work with dreams, for many, becomes a test that tightens rather than loosens the imaginative and playful mind necessary for the deepest creative work in the unconscious. This seminar provides a way to hold on to the valuable insights provided in psychoanalytic-dream literature at the same time as breaking free from the mind-numbing and constricted work with dreams that characterizes much of contemporary psychotherapy. Playing with images is now more possible because of the modern experience of film, video, computer, along with New Age and Eastern meditative traditions. 

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