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Herbert Hahn has introduced a concept, which in my opinion, has great value for social and community psychoanalysis. He introduces the concept that dreams shared by people in a common environment may link a meaning a group is trying to find for its existence. Freud's ideas of dreams very much depended on the individual. First, he took the interpretation of a dream as part of an analysis and would look either at a piece of the dream that sounded important as a representation of a symbolic and hidden aspect of the patient's unconscious or, secondly, he may have asked the patient to discuss an aspect of the dream that stays in his or her mind even though it may not be a major piece of the dream, since dreams often displace meaning into irrelevant superficial manifest content, and thirdly, Freud may have encouraged the patient to associate to the dream as a whole. The manifest content of the dream and the associations to the dream always had to do with the dreamer's personal psychopathology. Carl Jung took up the dream in a somewhat different way. He also saw dreams as connected with individual psychopathology but he would take a series of dreams often focusing around what he called “archetypal content” to see if the patient saw a connection among symbolic archetypes. Most of Jung's patients were older and dealing with issues around aging, purpose, legacy, and meaning, so that for Jung, the archetypal symbolic issues connected the patient with historical/sociological/social themes — hence, Jung's focus on archetypal themes as opposed to the manifest content of the patient's dream. Hahn has raised the issue and suggested that social dreaming can not only illuminate social conditions, but also help to resolve interpersonal conflicts that exist among members of the dreaming group.
The idea that individuals suffer only from their family psychopathology and immediate experience is a dated one. With the advent of the Internet, it is very clear that people are constantly affect