Dreams also touch upon relationship issues projected from past, problematic in present or newly emerging situations. Every dream reveals information about the dreamer’s psychological and physical dynamics and spiritual process. Through dreams, a patient’s inner aetiology of mental disorder and his or her reaction to psychotherapy may be expressed as symbols, metaphors, analogies and stories that are rooted in personal and collective levels of unconsciousness.įrom the therapeutic point of view, the metaphors and analogies are somewhat obvious, but this is not the case with all dreams. They convey specific and appropriately timed messages that can assist the dreamer with problem-solving, artistic inspiration, psychological development and spiritual deepening, and they are important for healing ( 7). Consistent with natural and necessary expressions of life force, dreams provide access into unconscious areas of life. When the internal model is corrupted by old fears and misconceptions, dreams illuminate those barriers and “compensate” by projecting adjustments in order to achieve a “fit” ( 2, 6, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13). The dream not only illuminates the current issue or threat, but tries to accommodate it by finding a “fit” between the current experience and our internal model. External events that do not fit that internal model become new threats to the model ( 9). Those emotions arouse early threat reactions as well as underlying fears and misconceptions that have become part of our internal model of reality in our belief systems. When we sleep and dream, episodic memory is disconnected therefore, we cannot recall the specific event, but the emotional context of that event, if unresolved, comes to the surface to be processed. Jung observed that dreams are driven by a natural tendency to bring resolution and closure to unfinished emotional and mental problems of the day ( 10, 11, 6). Dreams process current situations that trigger these mental disturbances and then attempt to reverse the underlying fears and misconceptions through a process called “compensation” ( 9). On the other hand, dream work without therapy is not necessarily effective in reducing the emotional and mental disorders that may surface. From an aetiological point of view, dreams focus on the important unprocessed mental and emotional issues of the day or during the life span thus, dream work can quickly bring the most important issues that a person is dealing with on a subconscious level to consciousness. Based on analytical psychology, the goal of a treatment program is to incorporate and clarify the role of dreams as an instrument for the assessment of aetiology, psychotherapy process and treatment outcome in social phobia.ĭreams have two major implications in clinical practice, exploration of the aetiology of mental illness and the resulting therapy trend and outcome. Analytical psychotherapy attempts to create a communicative link between the conscious and unconscious and make the unconscious understandable through dialogue, association and interpretation of what may appear to the individual to be quite illogical and completely undecipherable ( 8). The therapeutic modality that is most commonly used to bring these and other archetypes to conscious awareness is dream work. The archetypes of the shadow and the anima-animus are two domains of the principal oppositional and tumultuous unconscious forces that must be reconciled. Guided by a therapist, clients must come to grips with powerful, unconscious archetypical complexes that are in constant and submerged flux. The present article is primarily based on Jung’s seminal work, which has been clarified and extended through years of clinical investigation by Hall ( 5), Whitmont ( 6) and Whitmont and Perera ( 7) on the exploration of dreams in the aetiology of mental disorders and psychotherapy prognosis.