ABSTRACT
In learning and teaching tasks, the unconscious processes at work are often ignored. This contrasts to the analytic perspective where the evidence for underlying dynamics is sought and their elucidation is given a central place. As workers in the group-analytic field, psychoanalysts are often reminded that each individual and group has to discover and rediscover unconscious processes and that dreams are richly relevant. This chapter describes the way in which specific discoveries of underlying dynamics in groups and systems-as-a-whole occurred. It considers the worker's vulnerability to becoming a collusive cog in an anti-development wheel and focuses on the happy surprises that emerged when a learning group shared their dreaming. With regard to working with dreams, psychoanalysts' experience was that they had a central place in psychoanalytic therapeutic work, and could also be useful at times as grist to the mill in an educational context.
