ABSTRACT
Fritz Perls called dreams existential messages and treated them as visionary founts of the “wisdom of the organism”. Ernest Hartmann demonstrated that dreams immediately following exposure to trauma contained many residuals of the traumas, and that the frequency of these dreams decreased with the individual’s ability to recover from the events. The dream schools, and especially C. G. Jung, emphasized the long-term process of individuation, while Sigmund Freud was focused more on blockages in the maturation process, which he interpreted through dreams. The successors of psychoanalysis, and also existential psychology, primarily examined the connections in dreams between personal development and interpersonal relationships. In the dream schools there have been many considerations of how dreamwork could adapt to individual dreamers to avoid provoking anxiety or resistance. A common feature for all the approaches is an attempt to reduce complexity in meetings about dreams in order to protect the dreamer’s inner and outer balance.
