Response to Margaret Wilkinson

It is a great pleasure to respond to Margaret Wilkinson's very moving, engaging, and timely paper.

Margaret Wilkinson shows us how a working knowledge of the neuro-biology of dreaming can enrich clinical work. Her clear thinking does not interfere with emotional empathy, and so she offers us a more differentiated and integrated approach to the timing and nature of the analyst's comments, questions, and interpretations. Her relationship to the research, in short, opens up analytic imagination rather than limiting it.

With deftly chosen examples, she calls our attention to the affective content of dreams and the affective interchange between analyst and patient as a dream is discussed. In the six million pound house dream vignette, we see engagement, curiosity, excitement, and a stepping back from heightened enthusiasm when the patient adds, ‘I don't know about the horses’. Then the analyst brings up her own association, relating it to their work together, and the patient responds with feeling and reclaims and interprets the horses as her passions. Here we see the way an empathic resonance between the analytic pair fosters symbol formation and, with it, the anticipation of a more passionate engagement in life. There are initiatory and cultural aspects to this dream, but these are not commented upon nor interpreted. It's the patient's affective life that wants to come more fully into the treatment. She is already objective and abstract, and at this time objective comments from her analyst would risk wounding her emerging hope—and fear—that her emotional life can come alive.

Wilkinson gives us another case example showing the emergence of memory when warded off affects evoked by dreams are metabolized by the analytic pair. The patient's dreams (and perhaps those of the analyst’) develop into a series. She reminds us that the focus is not on reconstructing the past, and yet that can be a bi-product of the work on affect. This brings up an interesting issue in the treatment