In Dream Work in Therapy: Facilitating Exploration, Insight, and Action, distinguished researchers and clinicians explore Clara E. Hill's cognitive-experiential model for working with dreams. This book discusses the theoretical basis of the model and provides clear instructions for implementing it in practice. Through the use of valuable clinical examples, chapter authors present extensions of the model in specific settings and populations, such as groups, men, the bereaved, and nightmare sufferers. Of particular interest to readers will be the last part of the book, which describes how to train therapists to use the model and provides a detailed review of the model's empirical research. This approach offers therapists and their clients a structured but flexible method for maximizing the therapeutic benefits of working with dreams.
A Clinician’s Guide to Dream Therapy demystifies the process of working with dreams by providing both a grounding in the current science of dreaming as well as a simple, practical approach to clinical dream work. In addition to a survey of the current science and neuroscience of dreaming, this book includes clinical examples of specific techniques with detailed transcripts and follow-up commentary. Chapters cover how to work with PTSD nightmares and how to use experiential dreamwork techniques drawn from current neuroscience to engender lasting change. Readers will be able to discuss their clients’ dream material with confidence, armed with an approach that helps them collaboratively tap into the inherent power for change found in every dream. Backed by research, common factors analysis and neuroscience, the approaches described in this book provide a clear map for clinicians and others interested in unlocking the healing power inherent in dreams.
Working with dreams in therapy can help clients establish a focus and reach core issues quickly, and can play an important clinical role in both brief and long-term therapeutic relationships. This accessible volume integrates the latest research on sleep and dreaming with a cognitive-experiential psychotherapeutic perspective, providing a comprehensive guide to dream interpretation. In clear, jargon-free prose, elucidated by extensive case material, the author presents a three-stage model of dream interpretation based on the premises that dreams reflect waking life, that their meaning is best understood in a collaborative effort between client and therapist, and that both cognitions and emotions are important in this process. An Appendix contains a reproducible, self-guided manual on dream interpretation featuring step-by-step instructions and worksheets. This Appendix is an ideal resource for therapists to use with clients.
Dreams told in the group are conjoint individual and group creations. They are both influenced by the group atmosphere and may in turn influence it and the individual, promoting change and development. Dreams have a deepening effect on therapeutic work and, due to their unconscious content, they may represent the most authentic exchange between individual and group. This state-of-the-art book provides help for therapists encountering a dream told in their group. It covers the major theoretical perspectives for their understanding, as well as representing different psychological schools and their approaches to the technical issues of group dream therapy. Despite the variety of sources, the clinical approaches described complement each other, and the book details many case studies, including a first dream in the group, an unconscious meeting between women and men, and other polarities within the individual and the group.
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.
This monograph focuses on a systemic approach to dream interpretation and the unique importance of the initial dream. The first dream reported in a psychoanalytic therapy session poignantly encapsulates the major issues that the patient brings to the treatment. These dreams 'herald' the trajectory of the treatment and can be interpreted in the service of psychodynamic diagnosis and prognosis.The book melds aspects of Jungian dream analysis, with neo-Freudian analytic thought, current neurobiological concepts, and Buddhist psychology, to yield a rich and powerful understanding of how dreams symbolize the multifaceted aspects of the psyche. Multiple examples of initial dreams are discussed in detail, with suggestions for how they can inform the analytic stance and serve as objects for analysis over the course of a treatment.
All people dream regularly, regardless of their circumstances, whether they remember their dreams upon awakening or not. From the beginning of human history, dreams have been a source of creative inspiration and spiritual renewal, emotional and psychological insight, and scientific and cultural innovation.
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.
This book is about the practice of working with dreams. Rather than presenting a general theory about dreams, it focuses on the dream as phenomenon and raises the question how we must look at dreams if our approach is supposed to be a truly psychological one. So far most essays on, and the practice of, Jungian dream interpretation have paradoxically centered around the person of the dreamer and not around the dream itself. Dreams were used as a means to understand the analysand and what is going on in him or her. Jung’s fundamental shift from his earlier person-based psychology and pre-alchemy stance to his mature soul-based psychology, informed by the hermetic logic of alchemy, has not been followed, which was already noted by Jung himself: "My later and more important work (as it seems to me) is still left untouched in its primordial obscurity." The present study is based decidedly on the stance of mature Jung and his very different views about dreams. His most crucial insights in this regard include that in dreams the soul speaks about itself (not about the dreamer), that the dream is its own interpretation and therefore needs to be circumambulated (rather than translated into the language of psychology and everyday life), and that dream images have everything they need within themselves (rather than needing associations from the dreamerʼs daily life). This book discusses in detail what all this means in practice and what it demands of the psychologist. A decisive transposition away from ordinary consciousness, a "crossing to the other side of the river," is required of the consciousness that wants to approach dreams psychologically. Numerous aspects of dreams and special questions that come up in working with dreams are discussed. At the end of this book our working with dreams is situated in the wider question of the psychological task in general by exploring Jungʼs insistence that psychology has to transcend the "consulting room," Hillman’s move "From mirror to window" and, in Plato’s parable, the revolutionary move out of, and return to, "the cave." While limited to the topic of dreams this book may also serve as an indirect introduction to an understanding of psychology as a "psychology with soul" (Jung) or as the discipline of interiority.
