Dreams, memories, and the psychoanalytic process

Abstract

Freud believed the dreamer’s wish amounted to the most powerful motive underlying all dreaming processes. Ángel Garma suggested traumatic memories might play a similar or even greater role. In the present paper, I extend Garma’s suggestion and propose that unconscious memories of interpersonal interactions are the basic components of dream narratives. Within this perspective, latent dream content includes a wealth of information about the unconscious experience of the transference situation. Through a clinical vignette, I show the reader how appropriate transference interpretations allow the identification of such transferential emotions and their reintegration within the psychoanalytic field.

Key words:

• dream interpretation
• unconscious wishes
• unconscious memories
• transference interpretation, psychoanalytic situation, psychoanalytic process

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paolo Azzone

Paolo Azzone is a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst. He is the Head of the Forensic Psychiatric Outpatient Service at the ASST-Rhodense Hospital in Garbagnate (Milan), Italy. Azzone substantially contributed to the establishment of a psychotherapy research tradition in Italy, with empirical studies on the psychotherapy process and on dreams. His current interests include psychoanalytic treatment of depression and the intersections between psychoanalysis and philosophy, history, and religious experience. He is editor of The Wounds of Our Mother Psychoanalysis - New Models for Psychoanalysis in Crisis (2023), co-editor of La Mente dell'Anima [The Mind of Soul] (2008), and author of Depression as a Psychoanalytic Problem (2012) and Freud and the Da Vinci Code: Homosexuality, Mourning and the Family in a Blockbuster Novel (2021).