Working with dreams in psychotherapy: What do psychoanalytic therapists report that they do?

Abstract

Catholic University of AmericaForty-seven psychoanalytic therapists completed a questionnaire about dreamwork. Overall, results indicated that therapists had very positive attitudes towarddreams, worked with their own dreams, sought out dream training, and feltcompetent working with dreams. Therapists estimated that they worked withdreams with about half of their clients about half of the time in psychotherapy.They were most willing to work with dreams when clients had recurrent ortroubling dreams or nightmares, were psychologically minded, were seekinggrowth, were interested in dreams, and were willing to work with dreams.Keywords: dream work, attitudes toward dreams, dream training, dreams inpsychotherapyDreams have had a central function in psychoanalytic thinking and psychoanalyticpsychotherapy from the beginning. In the Preface to the First Edition of The Interpretationof Dreams , Freud (1900) wrote, “Anyone who has failed to explain the origin ofdream-images can scarcely hope to understand phobias, obsessions or delusions or tobring a therapeutic in uence to bear on them” (p. xxiii). Since these early days, whenFreud rst recognized the utility of dream interpretation in gaining understanding of theunconscious, psychoanalytic psychotherapists have considered dream work to be a keycomponent of psychotherapy.Despite the importance of dreams for psychoanalytic psychotherapy, minimal empir-ical research has been conducted to determine how dreams are used in psychoanalytic