What themes appear in the manifest content of therapists’ dreams about their patients? 2.

The research focused on three theoretical research questions: 1. Dreams were collected using anonymous self-report inventory. In the present study 31 dreams were collected from 22 therapists. Few clinical and empirical references to this subject are to be found in the literature. I think you really have to expand yourself and your life and do what you can for other people.Abstract This study examines therapists’ dreams about their patients from the Jungian and the relational perspectives. It’s hard to have meaning in a closet, encapsulated by nothing. I feel that’s what makes our life full of meaning. We’re passing on something of ourselves to others. They’re linked to other generations of people around us, to our children and our family. I think all kinds of meanings in life transcend your self. And what was so important about it, I thought, is that it imbues her life with meaning until the very last minute. One day she told me that she had decided that she can be a “pioneer of dying” for all of her friends and acquaintances. I’m currently writing about a patient who was dying, she was very depressed. How does one take that leap into commitment and action when even engagement seems meaningless and arbitrary? On an existential note, you write that the problem of meaninglessness is best approached obliquely through engagement.

Just this last week I made an offer to meet with the residents over at my home once a month just so they have exposure to this other form of thinking. I gave grand rounds a couple of weeks ago and I just see how students are really craving for some more teaching. But I feel at such a crossroads, even in my own department of psychiatry. Even so, the new studies on outcome showing psychodynamic therapy of 20-24 sessions is equally effective, perhaps more because it’s more long-lasting. This becomes foolish after a while because of the intricate, complex quality of things, you just can’t do that. And then the absolute maniacal need to empirically validate everything you do.

All this, all the psychodynamics are just not getting to them. We’re not teaching our students the importance of relationships with other people: how you work with them, what the relational pathology consists of, how you examine your own conscience, how you examine the inner world, how you examine your dreams.

The gift of therapy