The intersubjective function of the dream in psychoanalytic couple psychotherapy

Abstract

Telling a dream in a joint session of a psychoanalytic couple psychotherapy can be considered as part of a session rather than a "thing" brought into a session from outside. Telling a dream not only provides an idea of the dreamer's various selfstates, but also of how one partner and his/her external world entered the internal world of the other and what role has been assigned to him/her. This is what we call "dreams about links" or even dreams as an expression of a fine tuning of the "We Go" (Klein, 1976). If a dream is also a narrative in the session, this should be considered as a pictorial figuration of an emotion, as it exerts pressure not only on the partner and the analyst listening to the dream, but also on the field's atmosphere. So, we could say that the dream is "an emerging property of the field" as suggested by Bion (1967). The narrative implies that the dreamer has chosen that particular dream and session to recall it, and this exerts an emotional involvement on the dynamic of the session itself.