The Relational Interpretation Of Dreams

This book explains the use of dreams as a tool in psychotherapy to provide meaning, establish and maintain a therapeutic relationship, and thus enhance and progress treatment. Maintaining a focus on the synergy between dreams and relationship, it includes interviews with four eminent dream researchers and scholars: John S. Antrobus, G. William Domhoff, Mark J. Blechner, and J. Allan Hobson. This book explores the synergistic qualities between dreams and relationships, and how that synergy generates biographically, professionally, and psychotherapeutically formative experiences. The book delineates the ways in which dreams provide a foundation for relating, provides a container (Bion, 1967/1993) for the unthought known (Bollas, 1987), creates meaning through relationships, and ultimately fosters dispersion of relational dynamics originating from the culture of the times and more. From a relational psychoanalytic perspective, this book describes the role of dreams in shaping our relational living. This book provides a unique perspective that illustrates using yourself as a tool in relational establishment, preservation, and knowing. It is ideal for students working toward an understanding of the influence of intersubjective space in clinical interactions and clinicians looking for additional and alternate ways to connect with patients.

For both students and practicing counselors, this book fills the gaps that exist between many current academic programs and practitioner’s needs for focused training on how to better assist clients with dream interpretations. Its main focus is on dreams concerning family members and other major figures in the dreamer's life with whom he or she interacts. Readers will first learn how to understand and use their own dreams, and then how to apply this in order to facilitate their clients’ interpretations of dreams. They will be amazed and fascinated by the issues, emotions, and problem-solving suggestions that are often revealed as they guide their clients' use of a personalized dream interpretation method developed by the author. Through the use of a detailed case example of a client and her dreams, the author shows how each step of this method can be applied and carried out in practice and is easily integrated with contemporary psychotherapies, especially cognitive behavior therapies.

Existential Psychotherapy and the Interpretation of Dreams, by Clark Moustakas, presents a fresh model for the effective integration of dreamwork in humanistically oriented psychotherapy. The existential-phenomenological emphasis opens channels of conscious awareness that enable people in therapy and in everyday living to awaken to their own visions, hopes, and dreams. The internal shadows and fires of individual consciousness come to light in therapy and in dreams and invite self-resources and self-directions for change in self-growth and in significant relationships. An Existential Model is presented in detail as a guide to effective psychotherapy. With slight modification, the Model is also applicable to an understanding and interpretation of one's own dreams as well as the dreams of people who are in therapy. Through existential awareness and reflective thinking, the reader is encouraged to discover constructive challenges and paradoxes that connect dreams with waking life and lead to the discovery of creative possibilities for work and living. The existential approach to psychotherapy and dream interpretation is explicated through examples of phenomenological interviewing, use of description in lifting out horizons and core meanings, and analysis of core themes that intimately embrace the self. Existential philosophy recognizes mystery encompasses the unknown and unpredictable and asserts that regardless of past suffering and impoverishment, the potentials for health and well-being are within reach. The Existential Model offers a practical methodology and a set of guides for achieving these goals and finding a future that moves beyond the restraints and rejections that have resulted from choosing the wrong path for identity expression and selfhood. The person is the central catalyst for decision and action and retains control over her or his own destiny.

Originally published in 1979, this is a dream book with an outstanding difference: it takes the interpretation of dreams out of the realm of the professionals and gives it to the ultimate expert – the dreamer. Working with Dreams stresses the uniqueness of every dream and dreamer. With anecdotes and examples from their own dream groups, the authors show how to deal with the intimacy and honesty of a dream; how to explore its meanings without distorting them; how to let a dream tell us about ourselves and add to our understanding. Dr Ullman and Mrs Zimmerman start with the question of what is in a dream – what is real and what is symbolic? – and then go on to explain what happens during sleep and the way a dream develops. They cover remembering and recording dreams and dealing with the imagery of dreams. They illustrate the many predicaments that dreams depict, the self-deceptions we practice in relation to our dreams, and then show how dream groups – whether a family or a group of strangers – can work together to uncover the meaning of dreams. And they enrich their book by discussing everything from the history of dreams to the possibilities of dreams across space and time. The result is a storehouse of information about the world of dreams.

Dreams and Dreaming: Analysis, Interpretation and Meaning begins with a review of an integrative phenomenological approach to psychotherapy. More specifically, the authors outline the dream-interpretation method of Daseinsanalytical psychotherapy compared to Freudian and Jungian dream analysis. The main working method of Daseinsanalysis is dream interpretation, since the subject mostly reveals herself/himself through dreams. The authors go on to maintain that memory processing and lucidity are better viewed on the sleep-wake continuum, independent of the REM sleep versus non-REM question, as processes contiguous with waking. The strongest evidence supporting a special relationship between REM sleep and dreaming comes from studies addressing the types of thought present in different forms of dreaming. Next, dream motifs and experiences are described from personal and universal perspectives in the context of a simulation of madness. The authors sense of madness is derived from the cinematic semiosis presented by Patrick Fuery (2004) and Christian Metz (1991). Important aspects of dreams and of their probable interpretations are comparable to a cinematic experience, including time bending and various degrees of spectatorship involvement. Following this, this book makes considerations about, the value that the Freudian interpretation accords to latent contents and to the actual shape of dreams, the defaulting status of the object of desire, the relationship that the accomplishment of desire implies between encounter and confrontation and between deception and truth, and the problem of fetishism. Lastly, the pair of Doras dreams written down by Sigmund Freud in light of two modern functional theories concerning the phenomenon of dreaming are revisited. The authors shed light on new hypotheses regarding the dreams, confirming the accuracy of several theories.

This book looks at dreams from a twenty-first century perspective. It takes its inspiration from Freud's insights, but pursues psychoanalytic interest into both neuroscience and the modern psychoanalytic consulting room. The book looks at laboratory research on dreaming alongside the modern clinical use of dreams and links together clinical and empirical research, integrating classical ideas with the plurality of psychoanalytic theoretical constructs available to modern researchers. Psychoanalysts writing about dreams have traditionally represented the cutting edge of clinical and theoretical development, and this book is no exception. Many of the contributions, as well as the epistemological position taken by the writers, represent a kind of radical openness to new ways of thinking about the clinical situation and about theory. In line with the ambition of the editors, this volume represents an integration of theories and disciplines, and a scientific context for modern psychoanalysis. The link between clinical research and extraclinical research via the royal road of dreaming is a theme that runs through all the contributions.

The long personal and professional experience of Dr. Javier Castillo allows him to finally come to the conclusion, in line with the Jungian idea, that dreams are a phenomenon of nature and must be understood as what they are. The contents that come from the unconscious neither want to hide, distort or fool us, but speak in its own language, the language of images.(Dr. Theodor Abt) Another of the fundamental characteristics of this work is the description of the different interpretive frameworks that occur in the psychotherapeutic practice of dream analysis. The experience of Dr. Castillo in Freudian, Reichian and Jungian analysis allows the reader to have a deep insight into the various analytical maps, and he makes a clear, organized and systematic description of the different forms of interpretation, which will be helpful for anyone who wants to further deepen their knowledge of this subject. (Dr. Antonio Sanfeliu)