Personality,dream content and dream coping style

One hundred and thirty Ss completed the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire and a Dream Analysis Questionnaire (DAQ), based on retrospective recall. Differential dream content was self-rated on three parameters: frequency, duration and intensity. Factor analyses identified three specific dimensions of dreaming: ‘Personal Avoidance’, ‘Eroticism’ and ‘Adventuresomeness’. It was clear that, on the frequency and image-intensity categories, dream content related overwhelmingly to Neuroticism. Personality , as measured, was clearly related to the salience (e.g. clarity of imagery, emotionality) of dreams. Given the specificity of dream content, the results suggest the presence of a person-specific coping style, primarily affective in nature. The findings are discussed in light of the continuum or parallel model of the dream-waking cycle. Implications for the cognitive modification of aberrant dream images or fantasy processes are briefly reviewed.     

The child dream and the child transference

This paper explores the symbolic meaning of dreams in which children appear with special attention to the way children in dreams symbolize the self, particularly the dependent and developing self. It is suggested that patients' growth in analysis can be monitored by observing what happens to the children in their dreams. This paper also explores the vicissitudes of the child transference, in which the patient treats the analyst as a child. An analysis is described in which the child dream and the child transference played an important role in elucidating the patient's neurotic behaviors. The author contends that the child dream and the child transference are common and clinically useful phenomena, especially important in the analysis of dependency conflicts. An additional thesis of this paper is that the child transference is most likely to be found in instances where a patient played a parental role with one of their parents during childhood.     

The tendency to suppress, inhibiting thoughts, and dream rebound

Ironic control theory proposes that suppressing thoughts leads to increased occurrence of the suppressed thought because monitoring for the unwanted thought leads to intrusions. This study investigated the influence of suppressing unwanted thoughts on dream content. One hundred participants who had high or low levels of tendency to suppress unwanted thoughts nominated an intrusive thought, and half of the participants were instructed to suppress that thought for 5 min prior to sleeping. Participants completed a dream diary upon waking, which was subsequently rated by independent raters for dream content. In terms of the 79 participants who reported dreaming, more high suppressors who were instructed to suppress dreamt about the intrusive thought than high suppressors in the control condition. There was no difference between low suppressors in the suppression and control conditions. These results suggest that dream content can be influenced by attempted suppression prior to sleep, and this is particularly apparent in people with a tendency to suppress unwanted thoughts.     

The countertransference dream1

Can the analyst's night‐dream about his patient be considered as a manifestation of countertransference‐and, if so, under what conditions? In what way can such a dream represent more than just the disguised fulfillment of a repressed wish of the analyst? Is there not a risk of the analyst unconsciously taking up and ‘using’ the content of a session or other elements coming from the analytic situation for his own psychic reasons? The author, closely following Freud's dream theory, shows the mechanisms which can allow us to use the dream content in the analytical situation: preserved from the secondary processes of conscious thinking, other fantasies and affects than in the waking state can emerge in dream thought, following an ‘unconscious perception’. After examining the countertransference elements of Freud's dream, ‘Irma's injection’, which leads off The interpretation of dreams, the author presents a dream of her own about a patient and its value for understanding affects and representations which had hitherto remained unrepresented.     

The dream of dreams

Abstract

This paper investigates the relationship between the therapist's use of the dream and the patient's use of the dream, both inside and outside the formal therapeutic setting.     

'Reverberation time', dreaming and the capacity to dream

In this paper the author suggests that understanding the roots of the subjective sense of time can throw light on the disturbances in psychic time which are found in particular in the more severe pathologies. She introduces the argument that the roots of the development of the sense of time rest on a primitive sense of time she calls 'reverberation time'. By this notion she refers to the particular quality of the earliest 'back and forth' internalized exchange with the mother in which the auditory dimension plays a significant part. Referring to a wide range of literature and clinical examples, the author thus suggests that the subjective sense of time is created by the reverberation between mother and infant. Disturbances in this area will be reflected in the pathological 'arresting' of time which is observed in the different pathologies and, in particular, around the negotiation of the depressive position and the oedipal situation. Extending this argument, the author goes on to suggest that it is the internalization of this experience of 'reverberation' which lies at the heart of the experience of dreaming; she considers that dreaming understood as an internal dialogue points both to its roots in the relationship to the maternal object and to its fundamental role in psychic life. The author concludes that 'reverberation time' is also the building block of a psychoanalysis, leading to 'unfreezing' psychic time and enabling the reconnection of 'here and now' with 'there and then' in a flexible way which promotes open possibilities, and that this takes place via the analyst's reverie, or time of reverberation.