On Dreams

Dreams and Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis was carried into the 20th Century on the wings of dreams. And to return the favor, dreams were brought into the 20th Century on the wings of psychoanalysis. What is meant by these two related ideas will be the subject of this article because both dreams and psychoanalysis, and their extraordinary relationship, have proven of great value in the modern effort to understand and alleviate human psychological suffering. 

Dreams have been with us from the beginning of time. Long before modern industrialization lit up the night and brought us the mixed blessing of 24/7 living and 500 TV channels, dreams were once the only show in night town. They lit up the dark sleeping night like an aurora borealis of the mind. And long before modern science helped us to understand the seasons, the movements of the planets and the stars, the ways to hunt and plant, the ways of birth and death, it was often to dreams that ancient cultures turned for an understanding and prediction of the ways of the natural and spiritual worlds. Dreams in the hands of ancient healers were among the major tools used to help heal psychological suffering. But modern times brought an end to the dream's significant place in human affairs as science and materialism began to dominate.

At the beginning of the 20th Century, psychoanalysis was introduced to modern culture, in part to help understand and cure the ills of modern life. Without God, with shrinking Nature, without meaningful communal life, and with a growing dependence on the machine, the illnesses of the spirit began to show themselves-alienation, disconnection from feelings, dissociation from our animal and instinctual feelings, of loss of control-and required a treatment method that could reconnect people to their deepest innermost selves. First Freud and then Jung looked to the sleeping mind, and to its amazing outpourings of images, stories, memories, experiences-to the ancient language of dreams-for a way to reconnect people to their basic natures. 

As dreams began to lose influence in modern industrial culture, as dreams and their interpretation were thought to be the province of remnants of musty, old, magical thinking, the scientific interest of psychoanalysis brought dreams, once again, to the forefront of contemporary thinking. On the couches of psychoanalysts, dreams regained influence. Their interpretation paved the way to knowing oneself in new and challenging ways. Thus were dreams reborn on the edge of modern machine life.

Psychoanalysis, for its part, searched the domains of the unconscious and dreams were deemed the "royal road to an understanding of unconscious life. Freud stated that without dreams, psychoanalysis would be just another psychotherapy. Its depth required an understanding of dreams.

In today's psychoanalytic psychotherapy, dreams continue to be extremely useful. We find that dreams can solve problems, can provide rehearsal of difficult experiences, can express emotions that may be too painful for waking consciousness, can gratify wishes, can consolidate different sides of the self, can puzzle and engage, excite and soothe, torment and offer consolation, can frighten and reassure, can work through trauma, can visit with the dead and can rehearse death itself. In short, they are the most free imaginative musings of the sleeping mind about all manner of subjects.

Each image in a dream can contain multiple meanings and we learn that there is no such thing as a single explanation. The play of a patient's dream meets up with a freely imagining listener, the therapist, whose knowledge of this particular patient's ways joins with the dream's images to provide for enriched dream conversation. Meanings emerge from this conversation that can move the therapy ahead in often surprising, stimulating and challenging directions. Freud's method of free-association and Jung's method of dream image amplification, join many additional ways to think together about the puzzling, often ambiguous images and stories which can lead to many ideas and hypotheses about the potential meanings in a patient's dream.

Just as there is no single meaning for a dream, there is no single method that suffices. Each dream can open to a unique vista and requires in the therapist-listener an open and non-dogmatic approach. 

Following are some of the dream situations with which I have recently been involved. (1) A lonely and deeply depressed 25 year old who could be described as having slowly emerged from an asperger's childhood dreams night after night of a city with the most extraordinary architecture through which he wanders in a blur of confusion. (2) A 60 year old man who had been in the grips of an earlier psychosis and is now regaining coherence and sanity dreams of being a car-his body morphed into the inner workings of a beautiful automobile. (3) A 21 year old friendless girl who is starving herself to death while attempting to learn the thrills of skydiving, dreams of an evil presence pressing against her chest, blowing air into her lungs, while weeping and singing in a strange alien child's voice. (4) A 55 year old married woman who was involved in a 20 year secret love affair with a man who had just died bringing to a crashing halt her carefully constructed world, dreams of the return to life of her secret lover who comes to console and comfort her. (5) A guilty and shame-filled young woman who was supporting herself and child through prostitution, dreams of riding a beloved pony from her childhood and for a moment finds happiness and respite from her woes. 

Rather than striving for interpretation, each of these dreams led to enriched conversation which opened both patient and therapist to an inner world that brought renewed meaning in the therapeutic process.

Love and Creativity

Why Doesn't Anybody Talk About Psychological Health Anymore?  What Is It?  

Everybody can talk about being an addict of one kind or another, or of having one hang up or another, but rarely do you hear a discussion about psychological health, either as it pertains to oneself or others.  How can we know what is a problem without having some frame of reference for what is right in ourselves, and for what we can do to become more alive in our lives as people with psychological health?

One form of overall flow that characterizes psychological health can be described as a "love-creativity dialectic."  We all need both love and intimacy, and we all need to have creative self-expression to form and develop our identity and to communicate with others outside the frame of one to one intimate communication.  In the psychologically healthy personality there is a natural organic flow, back and forth, between self-expression in one's work and interpersonal relationships in which bonds of love and intimate connection can develop.  It's like a pendulum of psychological motivation that swings back and forth.  On one side of the pendulum swing are yearnings to connect to others by expressing oneself in relationship through verbal dialogue, and in intimate relations through sexual dialogues. 

On the others side of the pendulum swing are longings to connect with one's inner essence, ones true self, one's feelings, in such a way as to create from within.  You don't have to be a professional artist to find a way of expressing your true inner nature through creative self-expression in one's work.  When there is a continuing process of psychologically digesting one's daily experience through feeling it, rather than just remaining in one's head, and when fears of feeling anger, rage, sadness, loss and grief don't interfere with a continuing processing of one's experience on a feeling level, the pendulum flow of the "love-creativity dialectic" can continue, with an ongoing organic flow.  When fears (often unconscious) block this flow all kinds of problems result.  Feeling states of deadness, emptiness and void-like or abyss-like sensations can make one feel static, stuck, filled with anxiety or deeply depressed.  If one side of the love-creativity dialectic is blocked, the overall attachment to the other side of this internal dialogue can become a compulsion, or addiction.

For example, we have the "love addict" who keeps clinging to others in an overly dependent way, rather than facing his or her internal feeling states, along with the thoughts and images and fantasies related to these feeling states.  This kind of individual has generally not psychologically developed to the level of connecting with creative capacities and talents, with intellectual resources, or with a sense of agency to initiate one's own creative projects.  The "love addict" cannot actually love either because love involves seeing the other in a relationship for who they are, separate from who they are for oneself or for one's own needs.  Love also involves caring for someone who may have different views and opinions, being able to appreciate the different, personal and subjective view of the other.  Love addicts can't do this.  Due to their lack of connection with their own internal resources and talents, they starve for others to fill up the emptiness within themselves.  They crave constant attention and contact that doesn't allow the other to be him or herself in a relationship, and doesn't allow the other to respond freely to them, in a mutual interpersonal dialogue of intellect, emotions and sexual desires. They need to grow to tolerate their separateness enough to connect with a whole internal world of feelings, fantasies and dreams within themselves that can lead to creative self expression in independent work.

On the other side of the stuck pendulum is the person possessed by the creative process in the form of a "compulsion to create," rather than a free motivation to create or to express the self creatively.  This kind of individual often can be seen in artists who cling to the creative process for security, when they suffer the breakdown of interpersonal love relations, often through self-sabotage.  Such artists, many of who were the brilliant and famous ones I have written about in my books on creative women, often try unsuccessfully to actually live in the creative process.  Bereft of love and of the psychological nurturing experiences that we take with us initially through symbolic memory, such artists end up dismally alone with psychological breakdowns and withdrawals from the world that eventually result in an impoverishment of their formerly rich creative self expression.  Even in the greatest artists, like Emily Dickinson, who after a lifetime of anonymity was lauded as "The Greatest American Poet:' after her death, end up having the essence of their creativity dry up. Those possessed by the "compulsion to create," at the expense of sustained good-enough relationships with others, and at the expense of intimate relations, lack the nurturance from interpersonal relations that they desperately need, as they are repeatedly thrown back on their own individual minds to create themselves each day in some form of artistic self expression or creative work, until they break down or dry up.  

Through work on dreams, fantasies, and the unconscious, they can open to the pain of rage, grief and loss that they may have kept at bay throughout their whole lives, so that they can stop defending against human contact and intimacy in order to ward off these feelings.  If they can free themselves from the loss and deprivation of relationship that has haunted them throughout their lives, they can learn to love again, after early and later grievous disappointments in their lives.  In this way they can develop the true free-flowing motivation to create in their work without being enslaved to their work as a workaholic or compulsive creator.  They can learn from the inside out, not just in their heads, to open emotional space for others, to receive others in an ongoing mode of psychological nurturance that is essential for human beings.

"Developmental Mourning" is my term for one key psychological process that allows those who cling to either pole of the "love-creativity dialectic," without enough self-integration to swing with the organic pendulum from one pole to another, to begin to share their grief from psychological losses so that both capacities for love and creativity can naturally evolve.

About Our Authors

Dr. Susan Kavaler-Adler (On Love and Creativity) is a psychologist and psychoanalyst, who has been in private practice in Manhattan for thirty-four years.  She is the author of three books and 56 articles on issues of psychological interest that relate to clinical practice, healing, and particularly to issues of mourning, creativity, and intimacy, in relation to the promotion of psychological health.

The Compulsion to Create: Women Writers and Their Demon Lovers (Routledge, 1993, Other Press, 2000); The Creative Mystique: From Red Shoes Frenzy to Love and Creativity (Routledge 1996); and Mourning, Spirituality and Psychic Change (Routldge 2003), which won the National Gradiva Award in 2004. Among the subjects of many of her articles are "fear of success," envy, blocks to creativity, fathers and daughters, mothers and daughters, self sabotage, spirituality, and on finding one's internal voice through the mourning process in both love and creative work.

To read more about Dr. Kavaler-Adler, and to know how to reach her, please go to her website: www.kavaleradler.com (you will need to type it is or use the links above). She may be reached by phone at (212) 674-5425 .


Dr. Paul Lippman (On Dreams) is a distinguished psychologist and psychoanalyst in New York City and in Western Massachusetts.  He is a Fellow, Training Analyst and Supervising Analyst at the William Alanson White Institute, and is the President-Elect of the William Alanson White Psychoanalytic Society.  He is also Faculty at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis.  Dr. Lippman is the Director of the Stockbridge Dream Society in Stockbridge, Mass, where he maintains a private practice.  He is the author of many articles on dreaming and psychoanalysis, and most recently a book:  Nocturnes: On Listening to Dreams, published in 2000.

Susan Parlow, Ph.D., Editor in Chief
Roanne Barnett, Ph.D., Don Greif, Ph.D., Maureen O"Reilly-Landry, Ph.D., Nicholas Samstag, Ph.D., Janet Tintner, Ph.D., Editorial Board

NYSPA, Division of Psychoanalysis

With special thanks to the Psychoanalytic Society of the Post Doctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis at NYU, for initial funding.