ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how the ability to dream belongs to the core of our personality. In the transient and poetic ‘dream mode’ of our psyche, we experience the intuitive-emotional symbolic thinking of our Self. Looking back on the past, the present and future developments (finality), dreams can provide orientation functions. Dreams can stimulate possible solutions for conflicts in life and in transference constellations.
Dealing with dreams is highly specific to each therapeutic relationship. The context of relationship and transference influences how dreams are dreamt, what is dreamt, what is remembered, what is communicated about the dream and how it may be interpreted mutually. The transference is the unconscious organizing principle, which gives the dream its ‘place’. It mediates between the relationship situation within and outside the psychotherapeutic treatment. When working with dreams, their intersubjective aspect and the countertransference of the analyst must be taken into account. The dreams during psychotherapy are dreamed, so to speak, between the analysand and the analyst. The dream narrative is an event that happens in a relationship. In the course of psychotherapy, dreams can be used by the analysand as transition objects.
The dream series, i.e. all dreams dreamt during psychotherapy, gives us deeper insights into unconscious conflict constellations, pathogenic complex parts and ego-structural peculiarities of the analysand. The development of the analytical pair of analysand-analysts is the essential context of the shared dreams. Initial dreams often show the main problems of the analysands at the beginning of a psychotherapy in a very short symbolic form.
A major obstacle to individuation processes is the unconscious attachment to and interaction with the imagines of damaged early relationship persons. The attachment to these imagines is the emotional background onto which the ‘microworld’ of dreams is projected. The dream figures acting against the dream ego can also be seen as transference imagines of the analyst.
A detailed section is dedicated to the reported dreams of the analysand, which are presented and psychodynamically discussed in the course of the analysis. The analysand’s dreams mainly illustrate interpersonal issues of guilt and fear. At the beginning of analytic psychotherapy, conflicts appeared in the dream ‘in transference’. Later dream themes also emerged from the experienced relationship and transference situation with the analyst. The presented excerpt from the analysand’s dream series shows mainly interpersonal conflict constellations. Particularly significant is the development of the possibilities of action of the dream ego. While in the beginning the dream ego was weak, helpless and sentenced to punishment, towards the end of psychotherapy, it is able to defend itself and banishes the analyst ‘to the end of the world’.
Some drawings of the analysand are presented, which were spontaneously created and brought along in the course of the psychotherapy. The analysand often felt the need to visualize his fantasies and dream images in drawings. His inner images had a great effect on him. He could speak vividly about them and make them ‘glow’ verbally. He was also proud of his artistic talent, which had been suppressed and forgotten for many years. In addition to the amplification of the dream symbols, the discussion of the content of the symbolism of these drawings was particularly significant.
