From Disintegration to Unintegration: The Creation of Potential Space Through Work with Dreams

The present paper is intended to show how work on dreams during psychoanalytic psychotherapy contributes to the building of transitional or potential space, and to the capacity of the Self to do necessary integrative work within that space. It focuses on a situation in which the formative environment of the patient provided few opportunities for the development of transitional space and interfered with its implementation throughout life, followed later by traumatic experiences that contributed to further limitation of potential space. The kind of work I will discuss here is possible when the patient has an inclination and ability to present dreams, and to allow their use as a vehicle in psychotherapeutic work.

Our attitude toward the clinical use of dreams has changed significantly since the origin of scientific dream work in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), where Freud conceived of work on dreams as a means to reveal the representational and integrative capacities of the ego and the unconscious. Freud tended to view the manifest content of dreams as a kind of camouflage hiding the latent contents that were more intimately connected to the patient's conflicted mental life and displaced affective desires. Freud's practice was to take apart the dream along the lines of its specific content and apparent motives and to request the patient to report associations related to each part of the dream. In this way, Freud believed, one could uncover the distortions, condensations, and transference elements in the dream, eventually arriving at the dream thought and its repressed sources. This methodology, of course, adheres to the classical tenet that it is possible to free the patient of pathological symptoms if it is possible to locate the unconscious sources of mental life. The language structure and meaning of the symptom, Freud taught, was, with certain differences, essentially the same as the language structure and meaning of dreams. Psychoanalytic dream interpretation,