Children S Dreams In Clinical Practice

Once upon a time I dreamed myself a butterfly, floating like petals in the air, happy to be doing as I pleased, no longer aware of myself! But soon enough I awoke and then, frantically clutching myself, Chuang Tzu I was! I wonder: Was Chuang Tzu dreaming himself the butterfly, or was the butterfly dreaming itself Chuang Tzu? -Chuang Tzu Dreams are an endless source of mystery and fascination. Those we remember bring to our conscious awareness a variety of characters, circumstances, and situations often implausible or even bizarre in our everyday world. Sometimes dreams are more mundane and common place, reflecting memories of recent events of obvious importance. It is perhaps because of our lack of ability to under stand fully the origin of dreams or interpret their exact VII viii Preface meaning that dreams are the subject of such interest and speculation. Or perhaps, as the Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu suggested, they allow us the freedom to ex pand our thoughts, associations, or spirit in a way that no other experience, waking or otherwise, can. Clinical interest in dream content has primarily been limited to the psychoanalytical perspective. This modern clinical interest in dreams is the direct result of Freud's landmark contribution concerning the importance of dreams in unconscious thought and in the practice of psychoanalysis. Theoretically, psychoanalytical interpre tation of dream content as a repressive-defensive content function dominated clinical practice and application for many years and remains an influential school of thought.

Children’s Dreams teaches readers how to understand and appreciate memorable “big dreams” of childhood. The book introduces readers to the basic psychology and neuroscience of dreaming, then discusses dreams from early childhood through adolescence, exploring why we dream and how dreams can help us enhance creativity and make sense of our lives.

The contributions to this book, containing talks given at the Conference in Vienna on 'Dream and Fantasy in Child and Adolescent Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy', focus on the close connection between children's imaginative world, their dream life, and play. Is it a dream that a child is recounting or is it rather a fantasy to be regarded as equivalent to a dream? Children's play, too, presents important material that allows us to draw inferences about the subconscious. Indeed dreams, daydreams, fantasies and play were originally treated as of equal importance in child analysis. How do child analysts work with dreams at the practical and theoretical levels? In the practice of child analysis today do we find analysis of dreams and the classic differentiations between manifest and latent content? Is attention accorded to the mechanisms of condensation, displacement etc. described by Freud? The current discussion on working with children's dreams and their equivalents in today's practice of child psychoanalysis forms the central focus of the contributions collected in this book.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Children's Dreams" by C. W. Kimmins. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

This wide-ranging exploration of the spiritual and scientific dimensions of dreaming offers new connections between the ancient wisdom of the world's religious traditions, which have always taught that dreams reveal divine truths, and the recent findings of modern psychological research. Drawing upon philosophy, anthropology, sociology, neurology, literature, and film criticism, the book offers a better understanding of the mysterious complexity and startling creative powers of human dreaming experience. For those interested in gaining new perspectives on dreaming, the powers of the imagination, and the newest frontiers in the dialogue between religion and science, Visions of the Night promises to be a welcome resource.

A pioneering work on early childhood development that is as relevant today as when it was first published 60 years ago. To a small child, the world is an exciting but sometimes frightening and unstable place. In The Magic Years, Selma Fraiberg takes the reader into the mind of the child, showing how he confronts the world and learns to cope with it. With great warmth and perception, she discusses the problems at each stage of development and reveals the qualities—above all, the quality of understanding—that can provide the right answer at critical moments.

In the 1930s C. G. Jung embarked upon a bold investigation into childhood dreams as remembered by adults to better understand their significance to the lives of the dreamers. Jung presented his findings in a four-year seminar series at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. Children's Dreams marks their first publication in English, and fills a critical gap in Jung's collected works. Here we witness Jung the clinician more vividly than ever before--and he is witty, impatient, sometimes authoritarian, always wise and intellectually daring, but also a teacher who, though brilliant, could be vulnerable, uncertain, and humbled by life's great mysteries. These seminars represent the most penetrating account of Jung's insights into children's dreams and the psychology of childhood. At the same time they offer the best example of group supervision by Jung, presenting his most detailed and thorough exposition of Jungian dream analysis and providing a picture of how he taught others to interpret dreams. Presented here in an inspired English translation commissioned by the Philemon Foundation, these seminars reveal Jung as an impassioned educator in dialogue with his students and developing the practice of analytical psychology. An invaluable document of perhaps the most important psychologist of the twentieth century at work, this splendid volume is the fullest representation of Jung's views on the interpretation of children's dreams, and signals a new wave in the publication of Jung's collected works as well as a renaissance in contemporary Jung studies.

This fascinating and highly original book presents a longitudinal systematic study of the earliest form of human dreaming in a child, from ages 4 through 10. Claudio Colace draws upon his extensive research on children’s dreams, his expertise in brain science and an intimate knowledge of a single subject, his son Marco, to demonstrate the validity of an ontogenetic approach to the understanding of dream processes. The availability of ‘first-hand’ information about the daytime experiences of the author’s son in relation to dream contents, as well as the longitudinal approach of the study, prove to be useful for a qualitative in-depth analysis of the nature and function of infantile dreams and of the changes that occur in the dreaming process as the child grows, from the early forms to more complex ones. Affirming the significance of Freud’s explorations of infantile dreaming, this book attests to the nature of dreaming as a meaningful psychic act rather than the result of random processes. Expanding beyond a purely psychotherapeutic context, the book analyzes the development of dreams systematically and in relation to Freud’s theories on the human mind, making it an important read for clinicians, scholars and researchers interested in dream functions, child development and psychodynamic theory.