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Article Excerpt
In counseling sessions, clients often present dreams as material to use in making meaning of their experiences. Mental health counselors may benefit from using Ivey's Developmental Counseling and Therapy (DCT) approach to help clients process dreams, thereby promoting insight and change. A case example demonstrates the use of DCT in dream analysis.
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Dreams have fascinated people since ancient times. The Mesopotamians, Hebrews, Babylonians, Chinese, Greeks, and Romans all valued dream interpretation (Van De Castle, 1994), and early psychologists (Freud, 1900/1970; Jung, 1945/1993) wrote of the value of dream interpretation in spurring client insight. In fact, Freud stated that "the interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind" (p. 647), and Jung viewed dreams as being a source of personal knowledge and guidance. Despite the attention given to dream interpretation by these and other theorists, and the fascination with dreams by people in a variety of cultures and times, only 10 to 15% of mental health professionals work with dreams (Davis, 2002).
In our work with diverse clients, we have found that integrating dream interpretation into counseling can promote client development, understanding, and self-efficacy. Other mental health professionals have reported similar findings. For example, Diemer, Lobell, Vivino, and Hill (1996) noted that use of dream interpretation in even the beginning sessions of brief counseling can lead clients to explore deeper issues than would be normal for early sessions. Provost (1999) and Berube (1999) both described the value of dream exploration in counseling groups, and Provost noted that such exploration helped to encourage client disclosure and exploration and that clients may have felt less threatened than they normally might when self disclosing.
We believe that mental health counselors (MHC) fail to use dreams in part due to lack of preparation and, thus, lack knowledge of how to process dreams in a meaningful manner. In this article, a brief review of historical perspectives on dreams and dream interpretation provides a foundation for examining dreams as an integral part of counseling practice. Ivey's (2000) Developmental Counseling and Therapy (DCT) is described as a useful model for dream interpretation, and a case example from practice illustrates the application of this model
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES ON DREAM INTERPRETATION
Although early psychologists shared an interest in dreams, they disagreed on the meaning of dreams and how to interpret them. Freud (1900/1970) was not the first theorist to write about the unconscious and dreams, but he brought attention to the importance of the unconscious and dreams in psychotherapy through his book, The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud wrote that dreams contained both manifest and latent content. The manifest content is the material that the dreamer is aware in relating the details of the dream. The manifest content is a disguise for the true meaning of the dream, or the latent content, which is comprised of unconscious sexual and aggressive wishes and fantasies unacceptable to the conscious ego. These unconscious wishes and fantasies find expression in dreams. Consequently, Freud believed that the meaning of dreams is almost always wish fulfillment. To discover the meaning of dreams, Freud used a process of free association, asking his patients to free associate to various dream symbols. Invariably, he found symbols to be related to sexual or aggressive themes. Thus, a gun was a penis, and a cave was a vagina. He did not allow for cultural variations in meaning (Van De Castle, 1994).
Jung (1964) an early colleague who later broke from Freud, differed from Freud in that he believed that dreams can reveal other themes besides aggression and sexuality. According to Jung, dreams can also reveal archetypal material, creativity, and a drive toward individuation. Jung viewed the manifest content of dreams as not being disguises but being metaphors (Van De Castle, 1994). The psyche's libido is a more general form of energy which pulls us toward individuation, a process of developing greater insight in one's inner self. Dreams reveal material from either the personal unconscious or the collective unconscious, the source of archetypes. Jung's (1945/1993) approach to dream interpretation involved amplification, the process of asking the dreamer to focus on various symbols in the dream and provide as many associations as possible about the particular symbol; whereas Freud used free association to have the dreamer create a chain of associations beginning with the dream symbol. Dream symbols could represent an actual person in the dreamer's life or a part of his or her psyche. Amplification includes exploration of feelings connected to dream images, cultural meanings of dream images, and possible archetypal meanings of the dream images such as the mandala representing the archetype of the self (Van De Castle, 1994). Jung (1964) also encouraged the dreamer to use active imagination, reliving the dream and allowing it to continue in conscious imagination.
Adler (1927/1956), who like Jung broke from Freud's psychoanalytic group, is known for his own theory, Individual Psychology. Adler viewed the personality as being holistic; thus, the conscious and unconscious are not separate. Consequently, he did not place as much focus on dream interpretation as did Freud and Jung, although he believed that dreams provided insight into one's lifestyle and social interest. In particular, Adler noted the significance of repeated dreams as keys to understanding life challenges and their unique meaning for the individual (Sweeney, 1998).
Like Jung and Adler, Perls (1969) studied psychoanalysis but moved away from it to found Gestalt therapy. Perls viewed dreams as parts of the personality that had been unexpressed. Because Gestalt therapy focuses on "the here-and-now," dream interpretation involves asking the dreamer to relate the dream in the present tense. The Gestalt therapist asks the client to experience parts of the dream by actively playing them out or by dialoguing with dream parts in an "empty chair" technique. The goal of dream work is not insight but experiencing so that disowned aspects of the personality can be reintegrated. Perls differed from Jung in that he viewed dream characters as parts of the dreamer's personality. Similar to Freud, Jung, and Adler, however, Perls considered the interpretation of dreams to be an important area of consideration for mental health professionals.
DREAMS AS A TOOL IN MENTAL HEALTH COUNSELING
Although empirical research on dream analysis as a therapeutic tool is somewhat sparse (Diemer, 1999) and has mainly explored Hill's (1996) dream interpretation model, most research findings support the importance of dreams and the use of dream interpretation as leading to positive counseling outcomes (Diemer et al., 1996; Heaton, Hill, Petersen, Rochlen, & Zack, 1998; Rochlen, Ligiero, Hill, & Heaton, 1999). For example, Heaton et al. reported that clients found psychotherapist-led dream interpretation sessions to be deeper and more insightful as compared to psychotherapist-led sessions without dream interpretation, and they found self-guided sessions to be similar in terms of depth and insightfulness to psychotherapist-led sessions without dream interpretation.
One possible explanation why many MHCs do not use dream interpretation is that they feel they lack training in dream interpretation techniques. Other possibilities are that dream interpretation seems incompatible with the emphasis in counseling on developmental issues (Ivey, Ivey, Myers, & Sweeney, 2005), that empirical research on dream analysis as a therapeutic tool is limited, or that managed care emphasizes short-term counseling approaches. Whatever is the case, even if MHCs do not plan on making dream interpretation a part of the counseling process, some clients will inevitably talk about their dreams. Dreams are personal to the dreamer, reflecting one's own underlying preconscious, semi-conscious, or unconscious thoughts and feelings (Adler, 1927/1956; Freud, 1900/1970). The lack of clear conscious states and images in dreams contributes to an ethereal and mystical quality of experience; this quality, in turn, stimulates the universal...
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