Dreams and creativity--collaborative psychoanalytic work.

Abstract

Walter Bonime's contributions to the understanding and interpretation of dreams highlight collaboration and creative effort as essential to achieve appropriate attunement and effective emotional growth. The authors incorporate the theoretical constructs and technical recommendations of Bonime into their clinical work with artists. They describe how creative psychoanalytic work with artists' dreams can promote productivity, spontaneity, emotional growth, and facilitate conflict resolution, functional regression, and affective regulation. Psychoanalytic theories on creativity and the creative personality are reviewed and case material is presented to illustrate some of the technical aspects of the collaborative interpretation of artists' dreams. The authors propose that the process of dream interpretation may also foster the functional regression characteristic of creative work and motivate artists to more freely create works of art. The critic's transference is defined, and with examples the authors show how the exploration of this transference may lead to decreased resistance by allowing a reparative experience to exist within the analytic setting.