The Use of Dreams in Psychoanalytic Group Psychotherapy*

I would like to share some of my thoughts in connection with the use of dreams in psychotherapy, whether in individual, group or other configural settings, such as more than one patient with the therapist or more than one therapist with the patient or patients.

Because there is a certain continuity of experience, both awake and dreaming, it is not necessary to make arbitrary distinctions between reality and dream material. It is helpful to get all the data that is available at the moment, whether conscious or unconscious, real or fantasied, from day or night processes. Actually the intermingling of the real and the fantasied is an everyday experience. The reality the patient presents often has a dream-like quality. In order to allow for a full appreciation of the character and style of the person and his communications, feelings and intuition on the part of the analyst and the patient are utilized. An illustration of this intertwining, in an exaggerated form, is Pinter's play, The Caretaker.† In this play, the three characters display an unreal mode of relating to one another in the sense that it is tangential to the current time and circumstance and more readily related to their respective pasts and hoped-for-futures. They flow, in word and act, in and out of fantasy and reality, but they go on as if everything is real. Two brothers, separately, employ