The divine dreams of a sample of South African children: the gateway to their spirituality

As part of a research project on religion, spirituality and education, the authors attended to the role that children's divine dreams could play in religious education (RE). They contend that such dreams can indeed be used by RE teachers as the gateway to understanding the spirituality of their learners. They defend their claim by firstly developing a conceptual‐theoretical framework with respect to religion, spirituality and children's divine dreams, and then presenting the results of an explorative quantitative‐qualitative investigation in three schools. They find their claim to have been vindicated, and suggest that although RE teachers should not necessarily teach divine dreams per se, they should, nevertheless, explore the possibility that (at least some of) the contents of children's divine dreams may be useful for the purpose of teaching them RE from religion itself, rather than teaching them only about religion.     

The dreaming mind-brain: a Jungian perspective

In this paper I discuss the nature and role of dream and the dreaming process in Jungian clinical practice in the light of neuroscience. Insights from contemporary neuroscience support rather than contest Jung's view that emotional truth, not censorship or disguise, underpins the dreaming process. I use clinical material to illustrate how work with dreams within the total interactive experience of the analytic dyad enables the development of the emotional scaffolding necessary for the development of 'mind'. Large scale evidence-based research reveals that dreaming is caused by brain activity during sleep that is both biochemically and regionally different from that of waking states. Recent imaging studies confirm that dreams are the mind's vehicle for the processing of emotional states of being, particularly the fear, anxiety, anger or elation that often figure prominently. Dream sleep is understood as also being the guardian of memory, playing a part in forgetting, encoding and affective organization of memory. In the clinical section of the paper I let a series of dreams speak for themselves, revealing the emotionally salient concerns of the dreamer, weaving past and present, transference and reality together in a way that demonstrates the healthy attempt of the brain-mind to come to terms with difficult emotional experience from the past. The dreams become dreamable as part of the meaning-making process of analysis.     

When does a dream begin to ‘have meaning’? Linguistic constraints and significant moments in the construction of the meaning of a dream

The paper investigates the origin of the meaning of dreams starting with a discussion of psychotic dreams. The author distinguishes the dream as dream from the remembered and the narrated. A two-step dream phenomenology is proposed that both acknowledges the objectivity of the dream and traces the origin of its meaning to its translation into language. Following a review of recent neurobiological theories of dreaming, the paper focuses on certain aspects of the psychoanalytical understanding of the dream phenomenon and in particular on the interpretation of dreams from the perspective of intersubjectivity and phantasy.     

Spirituality and Dream Work in Counseling: Clients’ Experiences

The authors suggest that focusing on dreams in counseling may be a useful framework to explore clients’ spiritual values and beliefs. Because little is known about how spirituality and dream work are integrated in practice, the purpose of this article is to document how some counselors and clients work on spirituality and dreams. Responses of clients who focused on dreams from a spiritual perspective are described and discussed. Relevant clinical issues that counselors may encounter are identified. Recommendations are made for counselors who wish to integrate spirituality and dream work in counseling.An earlier version of this article was presented at the Semi-Annual Meeting of the Association of Mormon Counselors and Psychotherapists, Salt Lake City, Utah, April 2004.     

Sleep: off-line memory reprocessing

Behavioral studies of memory and learning in both humans and animals support a role for sleep in the consolidation and integration of memories. Physiological studies of hippocampal and cortical activity as well as of brainstem neuromodulatory systems demonstrate the state-dependence of communication both between and within the neocortex and hippocampus. These findings are consonant with observed cognition during sleep and immediately following awakening.     

In the last analysis: archetypal themes in the analysis of an elderly patient with early disintegrative trauma

Aspects of the analysis of an elderly patient with early disintegrative experiences are described: separation anxiety, an internalized attack upon vitality, and the fear of dependency were prominent features of the transference/countertransference relationship, while the search for meaning as death drew nearer continued to be the central theme. The patient's many dreams reveal a wealth of images whose complex interlinkings provided evidence of a heightened and energized individuation process aiming at the integrity of personality.     

What happens before and after acute enactments? An exercise in clinical validation and the broadening of hypotheses

This paper seeks to validate clinical facts and theoretical hypotheses that have been discussed before and that address configurations involving chronic and acute enactments. Its validation process compares clinical material from psychoanalytic work in different psychoanalytic cultures - work from South America-Uruguay (Yardino), Europe-Spain (Sapisochin), South Africa (Ivey), Europe-UK (Bateman). It documents clinical facts described in four articles and confirms that during chronic enactments the analytic dyad gets caught up in a dual relationship that veils and congeals the triangular situation because acknowledging it would be traumatic. The lack of triangular space impedes the formation of symbols as well as dreaming and creates non-dreams-for-two. During chronic enactments analysts use their implicit alpha-function to assemble traumatic areas. These areas emerge as a mix of discharges and non-dreams that are dreamed through acute enactments. Acute enactments occur when chronic enactments dissolve and patients experience an abrupt contact with reality. The attenuated trauma is then dreamed alive. The linking of new symbols develops a network of symbolic thought and creates dreams-for-two and broadens the patient's mental universe. The validation process has deepened our vision concerning clinical facts, especially in relation to: (1) the wavering between acute and chronic enactments, (2) analysts' inhibitions and feelings of guilt, and (3) the influence of analysts' personalities on the configurations they describe. These theoretical hypotheses have been confirmed and broadened not only in relation to the vicissitudes of dream work in traumatic areas, but also in relation to defenses such as thin or thick skin, and in relation to listening in countertransferential detours.     

Affectivity: Regulation,Identity Formation,and Metaphorical Thought

ABSTRACT

Understanding affects, and their multiple roles in all aspects of the human condition and development, has more and more become a focus of study for contemporary psychoanalysis. Psychodynamic personality theories have always regarded affective life as pivotal to developmental experiences, the evolving structures of the personality, identity formation, and clinical processes. The centrality of emotion in development and affect regulation, as a maturational theme in the adolescent stage, are explored through the views afforded by object relations theory and ego psychology, intersubjectivity, the second separation individuation process, and unconscious metaphorical thought in the dream states of two clients and their therapist.     

Early psychic disturbances in anorexic and bulimic patients as reflected in the psychoanalytic process

This presentation aims at demonstrating the emergence of a basic disturbance in the analytic material of anorexic and bulimic patients, namely, the unconscious attempt to restore the lost union with the feeding mother which is both relentlessly sought and equally feared. Food is used unconsciously to represent and control intra-psychically both the object and the affects belonging to that relationship in such a way as to avoid terror of fusion or dissolution of the self.