Group and women’s dreams
Abstract
The paper I present to you refers in a certain way to a traditional work: the process of finding and giving sense to some recurrent dreams in long-term psychoanalytically oriented therapeutic women’s groups. But I propose to you, though not being in the specific setting, to “treat“ now these dreams in the mental attitude suggested by Gordon Lawrence in his “Social Dreaming”, almost “dreaming them again”, giving space to the echo, to our associations. As they come from the shared experience of our cultural context where our fears and desires as males and females take shape. Moreover, though relating to a “traditional” work of giving sense to dreams, the process through which the sense came to light was due to a long staying in the “negative capacity”, to the “attentive passivity” David Armstrong underlines in his contribution to “Social Dreaming”. The “attentive passivity” is always necessary in our therapeuts’ life but it has particularly been stimulated, almost imposed by women in order to live and give sense to the new emotional experience offered by gender homogeneous groups.