1st Edition
The Relational Interpretation of Dreams When it’s About More Than Your Mother
This book explains the use of dreams as a tool in psychotherapy to provide meaning, establish and maintain a therapeutic relationship, and thus enhance and progress treatment. Maintaining a focus on the synergy between dreams and relationship, it includes interviews with four eminent dream researchers and scholars: John S. Antrobus, G. William Domhoff, Mark J. Blechner, and J. Allan Hobson.
This book explores the synergistic qualities between dreams and relationships, and how that synergy generates biographically, professionally, and psychotherapeutically formative experiences. The book delineates the ways in which dreams provide a foundation for relating, provides a container (Bion, 1967/1993) for the unthought known (Bollas, 1987), creates meaning through relationships, and ultimately fosters dispersion of relational dynamics originating from the culture of the times and more. From a relational psychoanalytic perspective, this book describes the role of dreams in shaping our relational living.
This book provides a unique perspective that illustrates using yourself as a tool in relational establishment, preservation, and knowing. It is ideal for students working toward an understanding of the influence of intersubjective space in clinical interactions and clinicians looking for additional and alternate ways to connect with patients.
Biography
Alicia Ann MacDougall, M.S., is an advanced doctoral candidate in Clinical Psychology (Psy.D.) at Antioch University New England. She serves in various roles in national organizations concerned with access to care, leadership, and psychoanalytic theory, practice, and training.
"MacDougall offers us a unique view on dreams positioning interpretation of dreams within intersubjective space where both therapist and patient create meaning of the dream through the intimate connection of the therapeutic relationship. Through her fascinating interviews with prominent dream researchers, MacDougall argues that our dreams are not only past events buried in our unconscious looking for interpretation, but they are invitations to mutual encounters with another. Our dreams, she writes, facilitate relational bonding." - Roy E. Barsness, Ph.D. is Author of Core Competencies in Relational Psychoanalysis: A Guide to Practice, Study and Research, is Founder and Director of the Post-graduate Certificate Program in Relationally-Focused Psychodynamic Therapy and a Professor at the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology
"MacDougall’s book brings to life the relational foundation of dreaming, and the importance of a collaborative process and relationship in grappling with the ever elusive meaning of dreams. Through four moving interviews with neuroscientists and psychoanalytic clinicians who are major figures in the area of dream exploration, she portrays a deepening understanding and relationship with her interviewee subjects as they grapple with dreaming, mirroring clinical moments of patients and clinicians together making meaning from dreams." - Arlene (Lu) Steinberg, PsyD, is co-editor of the book Sexual Boundary Violations in Psychotherapy: Facing Therapist Indiscretions, Transgressions & Misconduct, is a Supervisor & Adjunct Faculty member at Ferkauf Graduate School, and an Educational Consultant at Mount Sinai Medical School.
"Alicia Ann MacDougall is passionate about dreams and her new book, The Relational Interpretation of Dreams: When It’s About More Than Your Mother, takes us on an interesting journey about how contemporary master clinicians work with dream material from a relational perspective. Not only will this book be of interest to those therapists seeking a means of deepening their connection to the inner lives of their patients, but also to those with in an interest in the evolution of the theory and technique of dream interpretation as practiced by some its most artful contemporary practitioners". - Ronald C. Naso, Ph.D., ABPP, Adjunct Professor, Derner School of Psychology, Adelphi University, Past President, American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis
