Presented by Marilyn Charles, PhD, ABPP

Nowhere do we see our psychic struggles so clearly as in the world of dreams, where images call to our attention the emotionally-charged, aesthetically-driven aspects of experience, and patterned relationships help reveal aspects of our stories that have remained hidden. Dream images afford metaphors embedded in the person’s own experiences and history, providing a grounding through which the person might more fully discover themselves. Following Bion’s suggestion that the purpose of psychoanalysis is to enhance the capacities for feeling, thinking and dreaming, Bionian field theorists conceptualize psychoanalytic work as a dreaming process through which dream elements become elaborated into meaningful symbols. Working with dreams allows analyst and analysand to avoid becoming ensconced in conceptions that might obscure the issues at hand, but rather to learn to play together with possibilities. This process affords sufficient displacement to allow condensed, highly personalized meanings to formulate themselves into symbols and characters that can be recognized, worked with, and integrated into narratives through which personal transformations might occur.