‘In dreams begins responsibility’: a self‐study about how insights from dreams may be brought into the sphere of action research

Abstract

This paper argues that material from dreams offers a resource within the social sphere that has potential for the practice of action research. The modern approach to dream interpretation, following Freud, has almost exclusively been situated at the level of the therapeutic dyad where the significance of dream material is circumscribed within individual and private space. The author presents a reflexive self‐study drawing on some of her own experiences of interpreting her dreams and following a social constructivist approach drawing on feminist and Jungian perspectives. The study attempts to show how bringing dream material into the social realm of the group can enable the exploration of deep emotions and co‐construction of meanings while neutralising much of their (sometimes) frightening and (within the dominant discourse) disturbingly personal nature, and celebrating the complex intelligence that arises from the processing of layers of unconscious material. An account of successive stages and depth in the analysis of one fragment of a dream demonstrates dream interpretation as having strongly socially situated features. Multiple possibilities for analysis of this dream become apparent, when interpreted within different paradigms and contexts. Therefore, it is argued, different kinds of social space may call forth different patterns of dream interpretation, opening up potential for ‘social dreaming’ as practised by W.G. Lawrence, and in the Institute of Group Analysis where the focus shifts from the dreamer to the dream, with the potential to illuminate issues and concerns that we experience in specific social contexts and for specific social purposes.

Keywords:

• social dreaming
• reflexivity
• imaginative approaches
• self‐study
• dream interpretation

Acknowledgements

The author thanks immediate family members for allowing inclusion of personal material, especially the author’s daughter Nina Balogh for finding Lawrence’s work. Also to Diana Buirski for the long‐standing conversation about dreaming, to those who discussed this paper at the 2009 CARN Conference, and to those who took part in the CARN CAMP in 2010.

Notes

1. The ‘work’ involved in interpreting dreams is a modern construction. Freud’s use of the term ‘dreamwork’ related to the process of dreaming itself as an act of work to resolve contradictory impulses.

2. Breton and Artaud did in fact solicit public collaboration via a ‘Bureau of Surrealist Enquiries’ where the public at large was invited to bring along accounts of dreams or of coincidences, ideas on fashion or politics, or inventions, so as to contribute to the ‘formation of genuine surrealist archives’.

3. Short for ‘punishment of the word’.