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An “explosive” young college woman dreamed about eggs, some of which were bombs. We never precisely understood the eggs and bombs, but through a long, painful, increasingly intimate psychoanalytic struggle she was able to overcome her unhappy, self-destructive way of life.
Collaboration is of the essence in the psychoanalytic process. It is clinically basic for optimal work with dreams. Quite apart from resulting insights, working with dreams in itself contributes intrinsically to the psychoanalytic process. A contribution of immense value is in the psychotherapeutic engagement of patients (Bonime, 1969). Work with dreams often serves as an induction of the patient into analysis, into the most intense, sometimes almost new experience, of participating in an intimate cooperative activity.
Dealing with dreams helps as an induction into the clinical experience partly in an educational way. It is an excellent learning situation for free association. The abnormal imagery in dreams, the unnatural or unusual physical properties of live or inanimate objects, the altered appearance and character of people familiar to the patient, the distortion of time and space all create a more consonant context for revealing the “meaningless” tangential associative fragments that are excluded from ordinary discourse. Reporting the dream sets a tone that tends to ease communicating what is awkwardly personal and seemingly irrational. Associative activity, risked with dream material, can serve as initiation and practical experience for free association in connection with accounts of waking life, including the therapeutic interpersonal relationship.
Psychoanalysis as a necessarily cooperative undertaking is a novel concept for the patient. The analyst can seriously convey that: “I don't