ABSTRACT

The discovery of the healing powers of dreamwork on the mind has played a decisive role in our modern comprehension of dreams. Sigmund Freud’s publication of The Interpretation of Dreams in the year 1900 was a breakthrough for psychotherapeutic research. Freud described the mind in The Interpretation of Dreams as being organized in layers with consciousness on top and unconscious layers beneath. Freud developed a therapeutic method he called ‘free association’ that provided opportunities to get behind the camouflage of manifest dreams. Freud also believed that the early developmental phases in childhood were very important to the understanding of dreams. Carl Gustav Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist, has been as equally important to dream research as Freud. The function of dreams is to “complement” consciousness with unconscious knowledge and “compensate” for narrow-mindedness. American psychologist and dreamworker Eugene Gendlin has consistently developed methods of using bodily associations to disclose dreamers’ subjective experiences of dreams instead of relying on theoretical concepts.