Image: Reflections on the treatment of images and dreams in art psychotherapy groups

Abstract

Social Dreaming sees dreams as differentiated particles of the undifferentiated unconscious, here understood as infinite and containers for unconscious wisdom. Through sharing dreams and their free associations in a particularly structured meeting called the Matrix, Social-Dreaming promotes access to unattended knowledge and transformation of thinking. Analytic Art-Psychotherapy groups promote therapeutic change through image making and interpersonal contacts. Neurological phenomena associated with both dreaming and creativity suggest that art and dreams can act as conduits to unattended knowledge, bridging conscious and unconscious thinking. The author suggests that in Art Psychotherapy this dimension could be enhanced by viewing image ownership as collective rather than individual and by routinely using free association in preference to more common, explanatory practices and describes some structural modifications to the context of Art Psychotherapy group work with clinical evidence. The conclusion is that creative thinking promotes homeostasis, a state of internal equilibrium, necessary to well being and a function of internal coherence. The ideas in this work derive from the author's personal experiences in Social-Dreaming and as an Art Psychotherapist. Relevant here are Gordon Lawrence's works on Social Dreaming; David Maclagan's on Imagination and Lois Oppenheim's on Neuro-psychoanalysis.

Keywords:

• Social Dreaming
• Matrix
• meta-verbal
• meta-visual
• free association
• homeostasis

Notes

1. A different apparatus from the Group Analytic matrix of Foulkes (1986), which is a network of exchanges focussed on transference and personal interactions.

2. Voluntary activity, at a local hospital.

3. Digital approximation of her description.

4. A tale of two siblings abandoned in the woods by their destitute parents. Hungry and desperate they find a hut made of marzipan which they start eating, only to become entrapped by a witch who plans to eat them.

5. In the literature i.e. McNeilly (2006), Frank & Whitaker (2007), also personal communications.