Collaborative Dream Interpretation (Bonime, 1986)

“Collaborative Dream Interpretation” was written in the best Bonime style: sophisticated, accessible, and clear while explaining complex psychic experiences. Walter Bonime, a friendly, humble, brilliant psychoanalyst, loved teaching. With ease he was able to ascertain, clarify, integrate, and promulgate psychodynamic understanding of complex intrapsychic concepts or interpersonal experiences.

In the article, he used excerpts of a clinical case and some fragments of dreams from one of his patients to illustrate a then provocative and innovative idea. Psychoanalytic work, which today we would call psychodynamic work, is for patients “an intense, almost new experience of participating in an intimate cooperative activity.” Bonime implicitly agreed that dreams are the direct connection to the unconscious but extended the value of dream work beyond this role. He considered that the mutually participatory stance of the patient and therapist in reference to working with dreams heightens the patient's ability to understand and participate in the psychoanalytic process, enhancing the collaborative aspect of the therapeutic relationship. While analyzing a dream patients focus on themselves and therapists focus on the archived knowledge of the patient, enhancing in both patient and therapist their concentration in the psychodynamic process. Associating to aspects of the dream helps the patient understand and utilize free association, as it seems often easier for the patient to associate to the fantastic aspects of their own dreams than to their own intrapsychic or interpersonal experiences. Therapists often find themselves having associations to the dream based on information gathered by the discovery process about the patient that the dream has stimulated via free association in the mind of the therapist. Bonime spoke of mutual influence in this intense, focused work on dreams, which includes working