The Royal Road To The Unconscious: Approaches To Working With Dreams

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Only for subjects in the waking state, the world is the same. Each sleeping person revolves in his own world.

Heraclitus of Ephesus

Dreaming, as Freud once put it, is the royal road to understanding the unconscious. Working with dreams is one of the most important components of psychotherapy. A dream is simultaneously a diagnosis, a recipe for therapy, and therapy itself. Dreaming is also the "royal road" to understanding the therapist-client relationship. In the course of psychotherapy, the number of dreams in which some aspects of these relationships are displayed increases.

During sleep, our consciousness plunges into the abyss of the unconscious, where it faces the danger of being absorbed. Many significant dreams carry messages from the deepest part of our personality and can also serve as an experience.

People at all times have tried to interpret dreams. All traditions of interpretation agreed that it is difficult to express the meaning of a dream. The Talmud says about this: "A dream that has not received its interpretation is like a letter in an unopened envelope."

Dream theory has evolved in two ways. Representatives of the first path, starting from physiological laws, viewed dreams as a violation of normal sleep, the remnants of the impressions of the day. According to this approach, healthy sleep is dreamless sleep. In the physiologists' approach, the dream is more of a "nervous" rather than a "mental" process; its appearance is reflexive. The first to pay attention to the mental process of dreaming was S. Freud. In his work "The Interpretation of Dreams" an analysis of the phenomenon of dreams was presented.

Today there are two approaches to working with dreams. The first is based on the Freudian method of interpretation. For this approach, the main question in dream analysis "Why?"The task of the analyzer is to rethink the experience of previous events. The second approach to dreamwork articulates the question: "For what?" … From the point of view of this approach, dreams signal from the unconscious, these signals warn about something, report, set tasks for the dreamer.

The rules for working with dreams are the following:

1) knowledge of the client's current situation;

2) a dream is an internal process that takes place in the unconscious, and only the dreamer himself and the director, and the screenwriter, and the actor, and the visual audience of the dream. Therefore, only the dreamer himself knows what his dream is about;

3) dream images do not need to be taken literally, they are parts of the client's personality and the dynamics of his mental life;

4) an absolutely accurate interpretation of a dream is a utopia;

5) each element of a dream carries information about the dream as a whole;

6) dreams carry the potential for growth and development.

Theory and analysis of dreams in the approach of Z. Freud

The technique of dream analysis is analogous to the usual technique of psychoanalysis, these are free associations. The analysis clarifies how the elements of the dream relate to the client's previous experience. Formation of dreams - active processing of information; this reworking Freud called work of sleep. Psychoanalysis reproduces these processes in the "reverse" order. Processing information in a dream comes down to several processes:

- thickening of images up to their overlap; the content of dreams is the abbreviation of hidden thoughts; in the process of condensation, some thoughts can be grouped into a whole, creating bizarre combinations;

- bias - a hidden element is manifested by a distant association, a "hint", or an insignificant element is brought to the fore instead of an important element;

- overturning - the desire or action of the dreamer is carried out by other persons;

- symbolization - helps to mask dream thoughts;

- converting hidden thoughts and feelings into visual images;

- secondary processing - the activity that gives the dream an orderly look.

Theory and analysis of dreams in the approach of C. G. Jung

Representations of K. G. Jung's ideas about the functions of dreams are related to his ideas about the structure of the human psyche. In the model of K. G. Jung's unconscious is a great resource, the nature of which is indifferent to the ideas of good and evil.

K. G. Jung wrote:

“I never agreed with Freud that a dream is a kind of 'facade' obscuring the meaning - when the meaning exists, but it seems to be deliberately hidden from consciousness. It seems to me that the nature of sleep is not fraught with deliberate deception, something is expressed in it in a possible and most convenient way for it - just like a plant grows or an animal seeks food. In this there is no desire to deceive us, but we ourselves can be deceived … Long before I knew Freud, the unconscious and dreams directly expressing it seemed to me natural processes, in which there is nothing arbitrary and even more deliberately misleading. There is no reason to suppose that there is some kind of unconscious natural cunning, by analogy with conscious cunning."

K. G. Jung attached great importance to the dialogue between the ego and the unconscious. Dreams, according to this approach, is an attempt to integrate consciousness and the unconscious through a dialogue between them.

K. G. Jung believed that it is impossible to make the unconscious conscious, since the possibilities of the ego are much less in comparison with the unconscious. Dialogue allows you to build a diagram of the interaction between consciousness and the unconscious. Dreaming is an accessible and natural, effortless dialogue between consciousness and the unconscious. The unconscious manages this dialogue, and the consciousness comes into contact with what the unconscious provides to it. K. G. Jung believed that the dream clarifies the situation, is a message, warning or requirement of the unconscious consciousness.

Dreams contain messages from the unconscious on three levels: personal, generic and collective. Plots of dreams from personal unconsciousassociated with the dreamer's daily life. At the level generic unconscious the dreamer receives generic messages, what the generic memory calls him to. Generic memory is organized into life scenarios, plans. Generic messages strive to make a person's unique self typical, generic. Collective unconscious contains all the experience of mankind, preserved in the form of archetypes (primary images, prototypes). Archetypes at an unconscious level predispose to one or another way of organizing their personal experience. Archetypes, according to Jung, form the content of dreams, which arise in various types of archetypal dream images. Archetypal dream plots are associated with mythological, heroic, fairy-tale figures.

From the point of view of this approach, dreams perform such functions:

- Archetype manifestation - presentation of archetypal symbols to consciousness. Archetypes are certain drives and their structures, and not some kind of abstraction. Archetypes can be accessed by consciousness only in symbols.

- Interpretation of the dialogue. A dream is a temporary transition to the other world, the immersion of consciousness in another reality, where it receives the knowledge that is necessary for the development and transformation of the personality.

- Compensation. The dream is of a compensatory nature, in a dream the Ego is open to the messages of the unconscious. If a person remembers a dream, this suggests that the unconscious demands something, and the consciousness resists. Jung pointed out that the conscious position, on the one hand, and the unconscious in the form in which it appears in a dream, on the other, are in a complementary relationship.

- Amplification. The method of interpreting a dream as a dialogue between consciousness and the collective unconscious was called the method of amplification.

Amplification steps:

1) After presenting the dream, the dreamer is invited to play freely with the symbols and images of the dream.

2) This is followed by the stage of collecting associations and trial interpretations of the dream.

3) Referring to myths, fairy tales, legends, religious subjects to understand the deep levels of dream symbolism.

4) Interpretation of a dream as a carrier of important information from the unconscious.

5) Ritual performance of actions symbolizing what the dream calls for.

Theory and analysis of dreams in the gestalt approach

In gestalt therapy, working with dreams involves considering the elements of the dream as parts of the personality that are in conflict, as a projection of feelings, roles and states. The system of relations between the elements of a dream reflects the system of relations between the parts of the personality. A dream is a window into resentment, desires, conflicts, suffering; the task of working with a dream is to integrate the alienated, rejected parts of the "I". The Gestalt approach focuses in its work with visions not on understanding its content, but on experiencing it. The experience is enhanced by focusing on physical sensations, through body movements, gestures, facial expressions, sculpture or drawing. A dream is a kind of unfinished gestalt, work with a dream is aimed at completing the gestalt, acquiring integrity.

F. Perls proposed the technique “Identities with Dream Images”. The essence of the technique is that the dreamer is asked to "play" the role of a dream character, to speak and move, proceeding from this role. Identification with dream images allows the rejected parts of the “I” to be recaptured.

Epics of working with dreams in a gestalt approach:

- dream unfolding - the dreamer tells the dream in the first person in the present tense;

- focus on details - the dreamer independently identifies the most emotional elements of sleep;

- identification with dream images - the dreamer is consistently identified with each image, speaks and acts on its behalf;

- organizing a dialogue between dream images;

- establishing connections between the elements of a dream;

- clarification of what feelings, experiences, needs were reflected in the dream.

Replica to the side. In real work, an orientation toward any interpretation schemes in their "pure" form is a myth. No dream can be fully reproduced, fully recorded, or fully explained. By stating the opposite, we will simplify the mystery. I can never know ALL about the power, scale and ways of how to get to the solution to this mysterious process.

Even the famous dream about the injection of Irma, which Freud tried to explain to the end, for more than a hundred years continues to be analyzed and give rise to new interpretations. The dream is inexhaustible, each new turn of optics reveals new aspects of it.

The therapist's rigidity, the desire to squeeze in a person's subjectivity, which extends far beyond the schemes of dream analysis, hide little experience, anxiety and disbelief in oneself and another. By this I do not mean to say that knowledge is not needed, on the contrary, knowledge, no matter how trite it may sound, enriches; "schemas" are useful when something needs to be revised. While the dream is viewed by the psychotherapist as a puzzle, detective, it is not very effective for therapy. When the various "schemas" of analysis are fully assimilated, they lose their distinct boundaries and names. But knowledge must be joined by a number of sometimes elusive and difficult to express sources of strength of the psychotherapist.