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ENGAGEMENT IS ACTIVITY of the analyst that fosters the patient's mobilization and use of personal resources in a joint attempt to define and solve problems of personality distortion. Engagement is repeatedly required, may occur at any point in the course of analysis, and sometimes happens more than once in a single session. Dreams lend themselves particularly well to the activity of engagement. They serve as a focus for the initiation or resumption of collaborative psychotherapeutic efforts.
An example of therapeutic engagement as early as an initial interview is provided by the case of a twenty-five-year-old social worker, married several years, who sought consultation because of general dissatisfaction with her life, increasing social and professional diffidence, and sexual frigidity. A request for dream material led to immediate collaborative involvement in pathology previously unrecognized by the patient.
Toward the end of the interview, the question, "Do you recall any dreams?" brought instantaneous memory of two dream fragments from several years earlier. She hesitated over these old, embarrassing, and seemingly irrelevant memories, but was urged to tell them. In the first fragment; "I was riding on a man's shoulders having an orgasm." In the second; "I was swimming in a pool, having an orgasm."
Within the narrow time limit remaining for this consultation, I quickly formulated my interpretive reaction and suggested the possibility that her optimum or requisite conditions for satisfaction were symbolized in these two fragments. Either, as in the first, she must ride on top, instead of participating in a mutual embrace; or else, as