Posts

Senso

Dreamtelling as a request for containment – Three Uses of Dreams in Group Therapy

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Abstract

Dreams told in a therapeutic setting are challenging events from an experiential and technical perspective. Their contents seem fantastically rich for the one side, but often overwhelmingly chaotic in their implications for relations. Many clinicians lack know-how about how to use the informational and relational possibilities inherent in the complicated act of telling the dream’s report. Dreams told in groups provide additional challenges for all participants. This article is an effort to conceptualize a coherent, unified and consistent dream theory since learning to work with dreams not only enhances understanding of personal and group unconscious processes but may also have a strong impact on the therapeutic culture and working relationship. After differentiating dreaming and dreamtelling I will briefly describe the three uses of dreams – the classical “informative” and more familiar “formative” uses, Read more

MiroMente

Folkloristic Methods in Dreams Interpretation

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Abstract

The current paper deals with the affinity between dreams and fairy tales by using methods taken from the folk literature discipline. In the search to define common meeting points between literature and psychoanalysis, the most popular tendency has been towards psychological interpretation of literary genres. The current paper describes the opposite process, in which a mental product – the dream – is given a literary treatment. This process reflects the assumption that literary and folkloristic interpretations, which focus on aesthetic, collective and universal aspects of dreams, might have an important contribution to make, both on a Read more

ChagalFiaba

Presentation, The Ordering Function of Thought in Folktales

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Each of the articles in the volume relates to unique aspects regarding the affinity existing between fairy tales, or tales which share common characteristics with folktales, and the therapeutic process – either individual therapy, or a group workshop. Several articles in this issue deal with the ways in which fairy tales function in the therapeutic process.
The connecting thread of the articles is the use of the fairy tale as a “mediating object” in psychotherapy, as well as in educational situations: fairy tales convey profound topics, both in therapeutic and educational contexts and provide indirect access to these topics.  Lafforgue, citing Kaës, defines them as a “prêt-porter” for thinking, emphasizing their “ordering function”. Read more

ChagalFiaba

Wandering through the dark forest: dreams and fairy tales in a group workshop

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Abstract

The paper touches upon the role that fairy tales play in a group therapy, as it works through processes relating to dream contents.  It exemplifies the way in which the interdisciplinary dialogue existing between group analysis and folklore research provides some interpretative options that would be unavailable unless one is familiar with the collective material existing in fairy tales. The example presented in the paper deals with the tale ‘Hansel and Gretel’, and demonstrates the way in which fairy tales are, in some cases, so integral to the shared cultural repertoire that it is almost impossible to deal with the dream narrative without relating its contents. The paper demonstrates the ways in which fairy tales and dreams might present a complementary or even compensatory dialogue, similarly to the way in which different voices in the group portray the outlines of conflicts and dynamics that the group will be occupied with in the phases to come. It is possible that this example Read more

ChagalFiaba

The Relationships between Incest and Hubris in Dreams, Myths and Folk Tales

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Abstract

In ancient myths, Hubris and Incest appear as the two archetypes, and are largely mentioned as the primary human sins in various cultures. It is in fact reasonable to assume that these two taboos constitute an ideological foundation, ground rules or moral axioms for the entire human civilizations. The many notations provided in the stories of creation, myths, works of art and legends, only serve to strengthen this hypothesis. Despite their numerous joint appearances and reciprocity, while attempting to understand their essence and basic importance, it seems that the affinity existing between them has not been stressed strongly enough. A dream told by a 33 year old man, married and a father to one child, demonstrates the special relationship existing between incest and hubris. The man came to treatment because he couldn’t hold on to a job and had a tendency to frequently change occupations. Having high ambitions of getting rich, he had the tendency to put enthusiastic efforts into dubious business schemes. They all eventually turned out to be totally unrealistic and caused him a great deal of disappointment, not to mention financial loss. He was in fact dependant on the support of his wife’s affluent Read more

sogno e gruppo

A treatening dream in a homogeneous group of patients expecting kidney transplants

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Abstract

This is an account of a Brief Analytic Group Psychotherapy experience with patients with chronic renal damage who were being dialyzed while waiting to receive kidney transplants. This practice was carried out in 1997, in the Psychiatric Liaison Unit of the Psychiatry Division of Hospital El Salvador, in Santiago, Chile. The authors had the chance to observe, on the one hand, the transplanting team’s and hospital patients’ demands for psychological help and, on the other hand, the difficulties said Center’s psychotherapeutic team encountered in serving such demands. In this context, and being aware of the effectiveness of the group psychoanalytic approach, the writers Read more

PicassoSaltimbanchi

The use of dreams in group analysis” touching intangibles”

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Abstract

The dreams have a natural symbolic language that can be difficult to understand and every dream is something new. Jung compares dreams to an unknown foreign language. The symbol in a dream is a fact, it means what it is. It must be understood, not as if it were a facade to hide. The language of the dreamer is in the signs and symbols, figures of people are also archetypal motifs as the treasures in a cave, the hero’s journey, the cross a river. One of the symbolic forms of the archetype of the Self appears in a Mandala, the magic circle, the main symbol of unity, the transcendent Self, Jung often describes images like this. Freud asserts that symbols are signs with a fixed meaning and uniformity of meaning. The dream has changed its value in moving from the point of view of a person to two people. Foulkes was a psychoanalyst who wrote the classic short on dreams. He believed that Freud: “The dream is an individual creation is not intended to be made public, nor to be communicated to others. He points out that dreams are influenced by the situation of the dreamer and that must be understood in the context of the transference. He defines his attitude towards the dream as “capacitor phenomena,” the members lose their strength and are lost each other in deep unconscious levels. emotional loads are generated and stored and then dumped in a shared event of the group, often dreams support this event. Foulkes emphasizes that the group is the background of the dream: “Every dream recounted in a group is owned by the group and should be left to the group analysis”, for example, sometimes they are ignored, sometimes are Read more

PicassoSaltimbanchi

Group dreams as fractal images

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Abstract

In fractal geometry, a fractal is an object with a complex branched structure subtly, gradually enlarging a portion of the structure are out details that remain the same at all scales of growth. fractals are not expressed by primary forms, but by algorithms. In this sense, the analytic group can be considered, using the theory of chaos, as the analogue of a fractal. The analytic group is the meeting point, the scene where you are replicating primordial collective dynamics and dynamics very personal, the group is the focal Read more

PicassoSaltimbanchi

Dream in group experience

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Abstract

The group is a dream that cannot be explained, an experience influenced by institutional biases, that can however find reassurance in the conductor’s figure. Is dream a system of self representation for groups and persons capable of producing deep emotional meanings, unconscious language and expression for communicating Read more

PicassoSaltimbanchi

A therapeutical community on its way towards dreaming

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Abstract

For about a year, that is since we have assumed the community project ‘therapeutic responsibility for the structure has been given to a psychiatrist (psychoanalytic psychotherapist) to which were joined a psychologist (group analyst and expert in institutional dynamics), a clinical psychologist doctor (psychoanalytic psychotherapist, expert group phenomena), a psychiatrist (psychotherapist with special training in psychodrama). The authors are two psychologists, one leads to an experiential group with members of the structure, the other part weekly group organization and planning. A brief description of some of the tracks the experiences of these two moments groupal. The authors from experience groupal, observe that in some places appear fantasies similar to those that occur during pregnancy: what seems to us to support the use of metaphor (the teacher who proposes the work on the garden perhaps testifies to a fantasy of care something that is growing, the mental group, the possibility of therapeutic work with patients, Read more

GiocoLegame

The Co-construction of the imaginary space in a group of children through the narration of stories and dreams

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Abstract

This work originates from the idea that the use of a mediating object (Privat P., Quélin-Soulignoux D., 2000) such as the narration of stories and dreams that emerge in the group, may create a new potential space where children may discover the dialectical relation between reality and imagination through the direct experience of what Winnicott D.W. (1958) defines as “me” and “not-me”.
The author will describe through clinical material, how children once engaged in group psychotherapy,, start to build together a common language of meanings, from chaos to a shared play in which they may talk about their feelings, fears and “bad dreams”.
Eventually, group psychotherapy is considered as a new creative space of symbolization, where Read more

PicassoSaltimbanchi

Dreams in a group session: telling a dream as an instrument to develope one’ s own individuality

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Abstract

In this paper some reflections will be formulated about a possible use of the dream as a useful tool to understand and have a view on the state of individual mind, related to group work, in a brief number of sessions of a psychotherapic group, managed in a Psichiatric Public Clinic. Then the process of telling dreams within a group, seems to bring meaningful traces of such an immersion in the inter-subjective plot, which I consider our original condition of being in the world as humans. Within a group, such a plot is alive and present, can be seen, listened, and this experience facilitates a possibility to gather access to personal, remote memories, and touching such ancient roos seems to allow a significant Read more

Donne

The oneiric world of women in the Grete Stern’ s photomontages

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Abstract

Grete Stern was a german fotoghaph ad designer. Due to her jewish origins, during Nazism she had to migrate to Argentina. In the 1948 she started a collaboration with the magazine for women  Idillio, on Buenos Aires. Her task was to represent on a photomontage the dreams of the female readers reported on the letters addressed to the Italian-argentine psychanalist Gino Germani. She looked for and created new  immages  that allow to part with real world and point out an idea of interior world. In her work she represents dreams through a special critical analysis that, at the same time, record argentine women’s  concerns of that time: she represented with humour, irony Read more

PicassoSaltimbanchi

The impact of the female analytic group leader’s gender as revealed in dreams of male members: a clinical exploration

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Abstract

The psychoanalytic literature has always believed that the sex of the therapist is not a significant variable in treatment. Eroticized transference has positive potential, facilitating, restorative and invigorating. “Eroticized” capture the plasticity of sexuality, and creative ways of human beings who can be loved, and eroticize Read more