Dreamtelling, Relations, and Large Groups

New Developments in Group Analysis

Robi Friedman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138346277
• eBook ISBN: 9780429594236
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Robi Friedman is an experienced group analyst and clinician specializing in conflict resolution, and in this important collection of his work, he presents his most innovative concepts.

Dreamtelling is an original approach to the sharing of dreams with partners or within families, exploring how the dreamer's unconscious messages can be communicated, and helping to contain emotional difficulties. The book also explains Friedman's concept relation disorders, which locates dysfunctional behavioural patterns not within intrapsychic issues, but rather as a function of dynamics in group relations. And finally, the book presents the soldier's matrix, a method for conceptualizing processes in highly stressed organizations and societies which are either under existential threat or pursuing glory. In the process of becoming a soldier's matrix, subgroups and nations progressively lose shame, guilt and empathy towards perceived enemies and the Other, and every society member embraces a selfless role. Applying this method to training in groups provides an optimal way out of organizational and national crisis.

The book will be of great interest to group analysts. It will also appeal to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and clinical psychologists with an interest in conflict resolution.

Part I
Dreams and dreamers in relation and some research on dreamtelling in families

Introduction to Part I

Introduction

Dreamtelling

It all started with my connection to my dreaming and my interest in the relations between the dream’s content and the relational context in which it is remembered and told. Two ‘events’ helped me to define my own thinking on dreamtelling (Friedman, 2008). The first was when my son was about three or four years old, and often woke up from what seemed to be a nightmare. His nocturnal cries made me jump out of my bed and rush into his room. He usually returned to sleep in a moment – while I was left worried, especially if this repeated itself in the same night. I learned from this ‘interaction’ about the non-verbal communication of anxiety and panic, and even more about the possibility that feelings can be shared between a dreamer and his audience. Later I understood that these are more familiar situations than we think. I called my son’s communication a ‘request for containment’; I understood that I was the ‘container-on-call’ and that there was a very deep relation between the two of us.

The other event which helped me to understand the deeper communicative aspects of dreamtelling was a patient’s story: he fell for a young woman in a party, but could not find enough courage to approach her directly. Back home, he dreamt about her with red lips, which seemed to be waiting for a kiss … and in his dream they did indeed have a passionate kiss. Although first his dream just felt like ‘wishful thinking’ there was a completely additional side to the dream in this story. In our area, party participants used to meet on the beach the next afternoon. Then, ‘armed’ with this dream, he found the courage to approach the young woman and conquer her heart by sharing his dream with her. It was only much later that I could conceptualize what seemed to be a banality: the dream’s power to demand to influence a relationship. Understanding the ‘told’ dream’s unconscious communication as a wish to change the relations with the audience helped me to further clarify ‘transformative’ sides in dreamtelling. Dreams are not only informative, but have the power to transform relations. Later I understood the general clinical value of understanding much of human communications as ‘requests for containment’ and ‘demands for transformation of relations’.

By dreamtelling I refer to a whole elaboration process, which starts with a dreamer’s autonomous effort to elaborate excessive emotions during sleep, and finishes by further elaborating these excessively strong emotions through sharing the dream with a co-operative audience. Dreams may be remembered and told to others, and also resonate with others. While usually dreams told in therapy seem to request an interpretation, in my clinical experience I found that not every dreamer is ready for an interpretation, nor are the relations with the dreamer ready for touching the unconscious. Finally, we have to acknowledge that simple human resonance is often more needed than deep interpretation (Friedman, 2006).

This insight helped me to define what it means to work ‘formatively’: when we feel the dreamer is in some danger of fragmentation, or in crisis, etc. We should use the dream told in order to first strengthen the dreamer’s Self. Dreamtelling can call for a first ‘forming’ or structuring of the relation between all participants. That is one reason why I often suggest that our reactions to a dream told should be ‘re-dreaming the dream’ as if it was the listener’s own dream.

Dreams are the result of a special kind of mental ‘digestion’ of excessively threatening and/or exciting emotions. It is an adaptive system, functional and natural for humans like the process of breathing oxygen. Later they may be adapted into our being or thinking – sometimes in order to enjoy them. By magically translating emotions and thoughts into stories, scripts, images, known or wished relations and voices, dreams are created. Research maintains that most probably our unconscious elaboration makes use of our whole lifetime experience, by comparing past and present situations.

My first professional encounter with dreams was influenced by the classical approach to the dream as a text. What first drew my attention were the dream’s contents, I suppose much in in the same way as Freud’s (1900) traditional, ‘diagnostic’ approach, which I later renamed as ‘informative’. Many of us who are interested in dreams, are first fascinated by unveiling the unconscious, to get more knowledge of the dreamer’s psyche, to decipher latent contents like the Rosetta Stone. Soon another interest awoke in me and I asked: In which unique way does the dream itself reveal how the dreamer copes with his difficulties? Together with Morgenthaler (1986) and others, I felt the creation of the dream and its structure would characterize the dreamer more than we thought.

But the information which interested me quickly led me into more interactional realms. Firstly, I asked if every dreamer is able to profit from deep interpretation. My clinical experience showed this is in no way so. In this book I try to give guidance as to who could be harmed from interpretation, and how to determine this ahead of time. Dreamtelling also makes it potentially possible to find partners who could co-operate. Dreams send powerful conscious and unconscious messages which influence the dreamer’s relation with the audience. As we discovered in our research, this is also true of new partnerships.

I learned that not all of the dream’s contents are told into the transference, and therefore are not exclusively directed at the listening therapist. Although this often happens, dreamtelling is more connected to requests for containment and further elaboration. Dreamtelling is also more than merely a tool for the elaboration of excessive emotions, but the creation of relations and partnerships and their transformation. This alone makes dreamtelling a fascinating and complex interpersonal event. Dreams suddenly went beyond being ‘the royal way to the dreamer’ and became ‘the royal way to the dreamer’s psyche through his relations with others’. The strangest part was when it became clear that the dreamer was not only dreaming for himself but had been called upon to elaborate emotional difficulties of others too. It is always his own problem, but this new understanding that our dreaming may ‘borrowed’ by those close to us is actually mind blowing. A child, a friend or a patient may ask the dreamer to digest his uncontained problem. In therapy groups it makes shared work reciprocally significant.

Working with dreams does not need magical endowment or witchcraft. It can be learned. As a rule, when there is a container, dreams are better remembered and shared. When dreams are shared in families or groups, they overcome modern culture’s malady of disconnection with our inner life. Participants in ‘dream-groups’ seem to get in touch with the dreams’ complexity and richness and progressively befriend dreamtelling to develop a better elaboration of difficult emotions. I learned much from dream-groups, where the therapeutic work is done through sharing dreams and responding to them, as if they were ‘your own dream’. In therapeutic groups which include dreamtelling, the relations become qualitatively different.

The theatre of the mind (Resnik, 2002) becomes the dream stage where group experiences both influence and are elaborated. S.H. Foulkes (1964) himself did not move far from the traditional early psychoanalytic thinking on dreams which emphasized contents. In fact, dreamtelling works in a way that promotes identification processes with the dreamer, and can be considered to be a model for group-analytic work. It makes optimal use of the group as a source for mirroring and resonance, creating within the group a certain music around dreams, which has to be played and heard to connect to it emotionally.

The chapter on research describes an investigation we made at Haifa University asking 100 men and 100 women about their family history, personal past, and the present patterns of dreamtelling. Particularly interesting were connections made between parental containment of their children’s dreams and subsequent ability to relate to the inner world in general and dreams in particular. There was significant evidence of transgenerational transmission of the ability to share dreams. After we understood the developmental significance of sharing dreams, it also became clear that most modern families do not have the know-how to listen and react to children’s dreams in a way which furthers communication, rather than shame, guilt or manipulation. Individuals, couples and families who own some ability to work in a dreamtelling ‘fashion’ seemed to profit from great emotional communicative advantages. For example, men in love tell unusually more dreams to their new partners, something which also shows that they feel to have found a container and are unconsciously prone to influence the growing relationship.

My own long story with conflict resolution started more than 20 years ago with a difficulty to shake the hand of a Palestinian professional. In the years after that, I went through a lot of pain and elaboration of many difficult feelings, especially hate, shame and the most difficult feeling of all: guilt. The ‘guilt war’: the ability to accuse the other side along with the difficulty to accept one’s own guilt (Friedman, 2015). This seems to me to be the most significant obstacle to talks with former ‘enemies’. It requires not only personal transformative processes to overcome the destructivity of such a war, but also a special social situation which supports the feelings of guilt. In many settings, I have tried and still do try to meet hate and accusations from the ‘other side’. Dreams where more than one side is represented helped me to be able to understand and contain the ‘other’ side and the feelings aroused. In fact, we can often see how dreams, when elaborated as a dialogue between differing and conflicting aspects in ourselves and in society, become as close to a conflict resolution dialogue as they can be.

References

Foulkes, S.H. (1964) Therapeutic Group Analysis. London: Allen and Unwin. Reprinted 1984. London: Karnac.

Freud, S. (1900) The Interpretation of Dreams (ch. 6–7. Standard Edition 4–5). London: Hogarth Press.

Friedman, R. (2006) The Dream Narrative as an Interpersonal Event – Research Results. funzione-gamma. La Sapienza, Univ. of Rome. www.funzionegamma.edu/inglese/currentnumber/friedman.asp

Friedman, R. (2008) Dreamtelling as a Request for Containment – Three Uses of Dreams in Group Therapy. International Journal of Group Psychotherapy, 58(3): 327–344.

Friedman, R. (2015) Using the Transpersonal in Dream-telling and Conflicts. Group Analysis, 48(1): 1–16.

Morgenthaler, F. (1986) Der Traum. Frankfurt: Qumran.

Resnik, S. (2002) Reflections on Dreams. The Implications for Groups. In C. Neri, M. Pines and R. Friedman (Eds.), Dreams in Group Psychotherapy (pp. 197–209). London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

1
Dreamtelling as a Request for Containment

Three uses of dreams in group therapy¹

This chapter introduces a clinical theory for working with dreams, hypothesizing three functions of dreams told in the clinical setting: the informative, the formative, and the transformative. Group-analytic and relational theories are employed to focus on two functions of dreamtelling that are both unconscious and intersubjective: the (unconscious) implied requests for containment and for influence on relations with the dream-audience.

Differentiating between dreaming and dreamtelling

Freud (1900) was the first to conceptualize dreams as ‘a way of thinking’, and many psychoanalytic theorists, including Jung (1974), Bion (1962), Meltzer (1983), Kohut (1984) and Ogden (1996), have followed in his footsteps, considering dreaming as a coping mechanism. There seems to be general theoretical consensus that a dream is dreamed in order to work through emotional difficulties in the dreamer’s mind. Dreaming is an intrapsychic process that helps the dreamer cope with mental content that in waking life might be experienced as too threatening or exciting. As such and as Freud (1900) posited, dreams can provide the ‘royal road’ to knowledge about the dreamer’s unconscious. Since Freud, generations of therapists have invested in deciphering the dream’s hieroglyphs and secrets hidden beneath its manifest contents, and many consider the revelation of those secrets the closest that we can get to the dreamer’s true self. In the context of the therapy group, a dream is also considered the ‘royal way’ of understanding the latent desires and conflicts of the group as a whole and those of other participants besides the dreamer.

In contrast to dreaming, which is regarded primarily as an intrapsychic and autonomous function, dreamtelling is always an interpersonal event that results from an unconscious choice to share disguised or vague information. Dreamtelling raises the intriguing questions as to whom we tell a dream and why – that is, what is consciously and unconsciously expected and wanted from the other in telling the dream. While only the self is available to contain the dream during dreaming, in dreamtelling the other can help contain the dream. The recipient can elaborate on the dream content to help work through undigested emotions and unprocessed dynamics.

Dreaming may be considered the intrapsychic phase of elaboration of emotional excesses, while dreamtelling may be understood as a complementary interpersonal phase, similarly aiming to further digest the unaccomplished elaboration of emotional tensions first tackled while dreaming. I call this function of dreamtelling a ‘Request for Containment’ (Friedman, 2000). If the dreaming phase proves unsatisfactory in resolving internal tensions, it may be followed by another – now interpersonal – chance to elaborate something left uncontained in the dream. One condition for this is that the dreamer finds an ‘elaborating’ partner, receptive of the request and capable of a further containment effort. Dreamtelling’s second inter-subjective function is to significantly exert (usually unconscious) influence on the relationship with the listener (Friedman, 2004). Dreams told are meant to have a strong impact on the interpersonal processes, as will be illustrated below. Limiting our attention as group therapists only to the contents of the dream and the internal world of the dreamer may be reductive and an oversimplification of the complex interpersonal processes involved in dreamtelling.

The three uses of dreams: informative, formative and transformative

In addition to the differentiation between dreaming and dreamtelling, clinically working with dreams can be understood from three perspectives: the analysis of dreams to assess or diagnose a person or group – the informative use; to strengthen the dreamer’s ego or structure of the self, or, analogously, to enhance the working capacities of the group – the formative use; and understanding dreamtelling as a powerful interpersonal communication that changes relationships with the dream’s audience – the transformative use. The first, informative perspective is the classic approach to explore and interpret the dream’s content and structures to raise consciousness or expand knowledge about the dreamer and his/her internal world. A dream reported in the therapy group can illuminate heretofore unknown depths of the individual and also of the group entity. A second, formative use of the reported dream is to therapeutically strengthen the dreamer’s p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Foreword
• General introduction
• PART I Dreams and dreamers in relation and some research on dreamtelling in families
• PART II Who is sick? About pathology in relations
• PART III The soldier’s matrix, or how to live with existential anxieties, trauma and hopes for glory. The encounter with conflict in communities through the sandwich model – a combination between small and large groups to heal society
• Index