“One Thousand and One Nights”: Social Dreaming and Narrative Medicine—Group Experience with Doctors in a Hospice

The truth lies not in one dream alone but in many dreams.

We know that in institutions in which emotions are particularly intense, the promotion of dialogue and support for the expression of feelings, both individually and in groups, is a difficult task. In such situations the doctor's role becomes extremely important. Because doctors are central figures professionally, they become the object of massive projections from fellow workers, patients, and their families. This situation can trigger defense mechanisms (Correale 2007) amid rigid organization and overwork, which are offsetting reactions resulting in an unconscious attempt to avoid the emotional realm. In this play of projections, even the institution in which the doctor works is likely to acquire persecutory connotations, losing its accommodating and protective value. We have therefore decided to use a tuned-up version of Gordon Lawrence's Social Dreaming (a technique for working with groups in which dreams are a means of understanding the social and institutional reality) with a group of doctors working in a hospice. In this group work technique, as suggested by Neri (2001), the contribution that dreams can provide is to the understanding of the social and institutional reality in which the dreamers live.