Using Dreams to Assess Clinical Change during Treatment

Glucksman, Myron L.; Kramer, Milton

doi:10.1521/jaap.32.2.345.35276

Cited by 17 publications

(18 citation statements)

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“…Although interpreting the latent content of dreams was an important part of each patient's therapy, I did not report their associations to all of the dreams I selected for this article. It is evident that changes in the manifest content of their dreams during the course of therapy paralleled their progress in therapy and clinical improvement, which is consistent with findings from empirical research on the usefulness of manifest dream reports in documenting changes during treatment (Glucksman & Kramer, 2004;Kramer & Glucksman, 2012).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 71%

Varieties of Castration Experience: Relevance to Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Psychodynamic Psychotherapy

Taylor

2016

Psychodynamic Psychiatry

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Although Freud considered castration to be one of the two major anxieties of human life, the castration complex has been relatively neglected in contemporary psychoanalytic writing and is insufficiently discussed in presentations of clinical cases. This article discusses the relevance of the concept to contemporary psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy, in particular the important contributing role of castration conflicts in the pathogenesis of a wide range of clinical symptoms. The author begins by briefly reviewing some classical and contemporary psychoanalytic ideas about castration to show how the concept has broadened and is currently used not only to signify fear of damage to or loss of the genital, but also metaphorically to indicate a threat to or loss of any valued human characteristic or function. He outlines Brenner's distinction between castration anxiety and castration depression, and reviews the role of childhood trauma in intensifying castration conflicts. He then illustrates the clinical application of these ideas by describing aspects of his psychotherapeutic work with three male patients who presented with a variety of symptoms and distressing psychological experiences that were gradually resolved through the analysis of underlying castration anxiety and/or castration depression. Although castration anxiety is frequently intermingled with separation anxiety, the author concludes that with many traumatized patients castration conflicts are in the foreground and the therapist needs to focus on the patient's proneness to humiliation, powerlessness, and shame.Keywords: body image; castration anxiety; castration depression; childhood trauma; masculinity; self-esteem Psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy are evolving treatment modalities with clinical interventions being modified or expanded when new theoretical concepts are introduced, especially with

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 71%

Varieties of Castration Experience: Relevance to Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Psychodynamic Psychotherapy

Taylor

2016

Psychodynamic Psychiatry

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“…It is clinically helpful to have a sense of whether the therapy is or has progressed. Change or lack of change from the first to last MDR has been shown to co-vary with improvement or lack of improvement in psychotherapy [6]. The first MDR in psychotherapy is more likely to be affectively negative rather than positive, while when clinically improved, it is more likely to be positive than negative [8,24] as is the dream as a narrative [8].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…He noted that he obtained associations to the various portions of the dream rather than to the dream as a whole, en detail not en masse, to establish the meaning of the dream. Interestingly, in Freud's [6] dream specimen, 'the Irma dream' he does leave out words and phrases that when attended to open up a sexual aspect of the dream that Freud admitted when Abraham questioned him that he had left out [16].…”

Section: Dream Translationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the first study [6], I was given 12 pairs of dream reports from early and late in their psychotherapy by their therapist and no other information about them. I was told that six were from successful therapy and six were from unsuccessful therapy.…”

Section: Dream Translationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…I was 100% successful. In the second study [6], I was given the first and last dreams in therapy of 12 patients by their therapist and was asked to rank them in the order of improvement. My correlation with the therapists ranking was R = .45[p = 0.069], an encouraging result.…”

Section: Dream Translationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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An Approach to Understanding Dreams

Kramer

2017

Sleep Vigilance

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The dream exists as an experience extended in time which can be captured in the dream report as an excellent approximation of the experience. Dreams can be adequately collected and reliably measured. Dream reports are both stable and variable across time. Dream reports show meaningful content differences in group and individual situations, where psychological differences are known to exist. Dreams and waking life are linked and dreams are responsive to the immediate emotional concern of the dreamer. The dream is sufficiently orderly that the search for its meaning is justified. Methods exist to establish the meaning of the dream experience working with the dreamer through associations or amplification. A method ''Dream Translation'' is described in which the meaning of the dream report is explored using the associations of the translator rather than the dreamers. The translation approach could be used by the clinician to assess whether the patient has improved and to establish the immediate current emotional concern of the patient at the initial contact or at points of block in the therapy. Although the dream report has the necessary characteristics to establish a meaning from it and a method exists to establish the meaning, this does not address the possible functional significance of dreaming. We have explored the dream function question in a monograph on the subject (Moffitt et al., The functions of dreaming. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993).

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Strukturale Traumanalyse

Roesler

2024

Psychotherapie

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ZusammenfassungSeit den Anfängen der Psychoanalyse werden Träume in der Psychotherapie verwendet, und die Wirksamkeit der therapeutischen Arbeit mit Träumen ist mittlerweile gut belegt. Nach wie vor fehlt aber ein empirisch fundiertes Modell für eine zeitgemäße therapeutische Traumarbeit, die die Erkenntnisse der empirischen und klinischen Traumforschung integriert. Die zu diesem Zwecke entwickelte Strukturale Traumanalyse (STA) wird mit ihrer Forschungsmethodik und den bisherigen Ergebnissen zusammenfassend dargestellt. Zentrale Annahme ist, dass die Handlungsfähigkeit („agency“) des Traum-Ich (die Figur im Traum, die der Träumende als Ich erlebt), Probleme im Traum zu bewältigen und zu lösen – im Gegensatz zu, sich bedroht zu fühlen, ängstlich und passiv zu sein und keine Lösung zu haben – im psychodynamischen Sinne mit Ich-Stärke gleichzusetzen ist. Eine weitere Annahme ist, dass sich die Zustandsverbesserung des Patienten im Laufe der Therapie in einer Zunahme der Traum-Ich-Agency widerspiegelt. Es wurde eine Typologie von 6 Traummustern entwickelt; hiermit können über 90 % der Träume in der klinischen Praxis eingeordnet werden. Die Traummuster stehen in Verbindung mit den spezifischen Problemen des Patienten, den Themen der Psychotherapie und dem Fortschritt in der Therapie im Sinne von Besserung. Das Modell wurde in einer Reihe von empirischen Studien bestätigt. Es lassen sich daraus Handlungsmaxime für die klinische Praxis der therapeutischen Traumarbeit ableiten.

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Using Dreams to Assess Clinical Change during Treatment

Cited by 17 publications

References 12 publications

Varieties of Castration Experience: Relevance to Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Psychodynamic Psychotherapy

Varieties of Castration Experience: Relevance to Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Psychodynamic Psychotherapy

An Approach to Understanding Dreams

Strukturale Traumanalyse

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