Interpersonal and Uniquely Personal Factors in Dream Analysis: Commentary on Paper by Susan H. Sands

Abstract

There is a gradient in our description of psychoanalytic process, as to how much the analyst's reactions are caused by the patient's communications and needs, and how much they are caused by the analyst's own personality, including the analyst's storehouse of experiences, wishes, needs, and motivations. I consider Dr. Sands generous presentation of three of her patients' dreams and one of her own dreams to analyze the contribution of analyst and patient to the clinical interaction, in terms of overlap and difference. Such transference/countertransference interactions may lead to tertiary revision by the analyst of the patient's dream and may raise the question of how much the analyst's reaction is due to the patient's dissociation or the analyst's psychology. I also consider the implications of conceiving of “the unconscious” as a mental place versus “unconscious” being a potential property of any mental activity.

Notes

¹Sands's words could possibly suggest a sexual connotation to her response, as could her reference in the dream to a brown, fuzzy mound. This might have implications for the dimension of bloodlessness/bloodiness in the various dreams in her paper.

²Alberta Szalita (1958) highlighted the importance of dissociation in psychopathology more than 50 years ago, a time when it was a decidedly unpopular view among psychoanalysts. She saw the function of the analyst as making connections between “ego islands” in a process that she called “psychointegration” (Blechner, 2001a).

³Analysts can, in my view, “hijack” a patient's dream by shaping it with their own subjective responses, going back to Freud's analysis of “The Lovely Dream” (Blechner, 2001b; Freud, 1900).

⁴This is an excellent example of a “partial condensation” (Blechner, 2001b, pp. 63–65). The latent content of interspecies similarity or difference resonates with the fern in Sands's dream, which may be a “simple, overdetermined condensation” of a plant-human.