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39-410: A belief of dreamwork is that each person has their own dream "language". Any given place, person, object, or symbol can differ in its meaning from dreamer to dreamer and also from time to time in the dreamer's ongoing life situation. Thus someone helping a dreamer get closer to their dream through dreamwork adopts an attitude of "not knowing" as far as possible. In dreamwork it is usual to wait until all

78-420: A possible influence an essay by Ludwig Börne , suggesting that to foster creativity you "write down, without any falsification or hypocrisy, everything that comes into your head". Other potential influences in the development of this technique include Husserl 's version of epoche and the work of Sir Francis Galton . It has been argued that Galton is the progenitor of free association, and that Freud adopted

117-472: A similar situation from the day. Before the unconscious thoughts can be displayed they are censored. Since many unconscious thoughts do not follow the moral code of society, the mind changes them to be more respectful. This is done so that it does not cause the dreamer anxiety and therefore wake them up. It is also due to censorship that multiple unconscious thoughts are combined, since it is hard to just have one slip through. After condensation, another step in

156-463: Is a form of unconscious thinking'. When used in this spirit, free association is a technique in which neither therapist nor patient knows in advance exactly where the conversation will lead, but it tends to lead to material that matters very much to the patient. 'In spite of the seeming confusion and lack of connection...meanings and connections begin to appear out of the disordered skein of thoughts...some central themes'. The goal of free association

195-425: Is a pledge undertaken by the client. Freud used the following analogy to describe free association to his clients: "Act as though, for instance, you were a traveler sitting next to the window of a railway carriage and describing to someone inside the carriage the changing views which you see outside." The fundamental rule is something the client agrees to at the beginning of analysis, and it is an underlying oath that

234-427: Is cured when he can free-associate'. Lacan took up the point. 'Free association is really a labour - so much so that some have gone so far as to say that it requires an apprenticeship, even to the point of seeing in such an apprenticeship its true formative value'. By the late twentieth century, 'analysts today don't expect the free-association process to take hold until well into the analysis; in fact, some regard

273-432: Is intended to continue throughout analysis: the client must promise to be honest in every respect. The pledge to the fundamental rule was articulated by Freud: "Finally, never forget that you have promised to be absolutely honest, and never leave anything out because, for some reason or other, it is unpleasant to tell it." Freud's eventual practice of psychoanalysis focused not so much on the recall of these memories as on

312-399: Is not to unearth specific answers or memories, but to instigate a journey of co-discovery which can enhance the patient's integration of thought, feeling, agency, and selfhood. Free association is contrasted with Freud's "Fundamental Rule" of psychoanalysis. Whereas free association is one of many techniques (along with dream interpretation and analysis of parapraxis ), the fundamental rule

351-406: Is said and may use their own judgment in deciding which comments appear valid or provide insight . If the dreamwork is done in a group, there may well be several things that are said by participants that seem valid to the dreamer but it can also happen that nothing does. Appreciation of the validity or insightfulness of a comment from a dreamwork session can come later, sometimes days after the end of

390-416: Is secondary revision. In this step, all the thoughts are put together and are made coherent. Another point of this step is to make the dream relate to the dreamer. These four steps put together make up dreamwork. People who study the formation of dreams and then analyze them are called dreamworkers. As mentioned before, dreamworkers must work backwards from the conscious to the unconscious. Since they are not

429-424: Is the underlying, unconscious feelings and thoughts. The manifest content is made up of a combination of the latent thoughts and it is what is actually being seen in the dream. According to Carl Jung's principle of compensation, the reason that there is latent content in dreams is that the unconscious is making up for the limitations of the conscious mind. Since the conscious mind cannot be aware of all things at once,

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468-446: Is used in psychoanalysis (and also in psychodynamic theory ) which was originally devised by Sigmund Freud out of the hypnotic method of his mentor and colleague, Josef Breuer . Freud described it as such: "The importance of free association is that the patients spoke for themselves, rather than repeating the ideas of the analyst; they work through their own material, rather than parroting another's suggestions". Freud developed

507-656: The College of the City of New York in 1935 and graduated from the New York University School of Medicine in 1938. Ullman completed training in neurology and psychiatry and, after returning from military service, entered private practice in 1946. He completed his psychoanalytic training at the New York Medical College and served on the psychoanalytic faculty of that institution for 12 years, beginning in 1950. In

546-473: The "fundamental rule" of free association...[which] could have the effect of bullying the patient, as if to say: "If you do not associate freely - we have ways of making you"'. A further problem may be that, 'through overproduction, the freedom it offers sometimes becomes a form of resistance to any form of interpretation'. Some studies suggest a lack of relevance or validity of this method. Adam Phillips suggests that 'the radical nature of Freud's project

585-646: The 1960s he pursued psychosomatic research in dermatology at the Skin and Cancer Unit of Bellevue Hospital and was associated with the Bellevue Stroke Study for four years. In 1961 he also founded one of the first sleep laboratories in New York City at the Maimonides Medical Center, devoted to the experimental study of dreams and telepathy. Ullman resigned from Maimonides in 1974 and, since then,

624-539: The TAT is still used today, especially with children. Robert Langs helped to bring Freud's earliest work back to the forefront, which depended on free association and insight rather than decoding by the psychotherapist. As object relations theory came to place more emphasis on the patient/analyst relationship, and less on the reconstruction of the past, so too did the criticism emerge that Freud never quite freed himself from some use of pressure. For example, 'he still advocated

663-484: The adjutants - hypnosis, suggestion, pressing, and questioning - that accompanied it at its inception". Subsequently, in The Interpretation of Dreams , Freud cites as a precursor of free association a letter from Schiller , the letter maintaining that, "where there is a creative mind, Reason - so it seems to me - relaxes its watch upon the gates, and the ideas rush in pell-mell". Freud would later also mention as

702-451: The agent should have known the target and no other person until the judging of targets had been completed, however, an experimenter was with the agent when the target envelope was opened. Hansel also wrote there had been poor controls in the experiment as the main experimenter could communicate with the subject. An attempt to replicate the experiments that used picture targets was carried out by Edward Belvedere and David Foulkes. The finding

741-399: The appearance of true free association as a signal to terminate the analysis'. As time went on, other psychologists created tests that exemplified Freud's idea of free association including Rorschach's Inkblot Test and The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) by Christina Morgan and Henry of Harvard University. Although Rorschach's test has been met with significant criticism over the years,

780-753: The dream and through the dreamer's emotional status, they may be able to understand the dream better and to gain information about the dreamer that they may not be aware of or be willing to share. Montague Ullman Montague Ullman (September 9, 1916 – June 7, 2008) was a psychiatrist , psychoanalyst and parapsychologist who founded the Dream Laboratory at the Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York and for over three decades promoted public interest in dreams and dream sharing groups. Ullman received his Bachelor of Science degree from

819-426: The dream telepathy experiments of Ullman and Stanley Krippner at Maimonides have failed to provide evidence for telepathy and "lack of replication is rampant." The picture target experiments that were conducted by Krippner and Ullman, were criticized by C. E. M. Hansel . According to Hansel there were weaknesses in the design of the experiments in the way in which the agent became aware of their target picture. Only

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858-423: The formation of dreams is displacement. This is where the dream may direct feelings or desires onto an unrelated subject. This is similar to the practice of transference, which is a common technique used in psychoanalysis. Another step in the formation of dreams is symbolism. Objects or situations in a dream may represent something else, commonly an unconscious thought or desire. The fourth and final step in formation

897-400: The importance of the unconscious mind . According to the theory, the unconscious does not only affect a person during the day, but also in dreams. In the psychodynamic perspective, the transferring of unconscious thoughts into consciousness is called dreamwork ( German : Traumarbeit ). In dreams, there are two different types of content, the manifest and latent content. The latent content

936-404: The internal mental conflicts which kept them buried deep within the mind. However, the technique of free association still plays a role today in therapeutic practice and in the study of the mind. The use of free association was intended to help discover notions that a patient had developed, initially, at an unconscious level, including: The mental conflicts were analyzed from the viewpoint that

975-400: The latent content allows for these hidden away thoughts to be unlocked. Psychoanalysts use the knowledge of the process of dreamwork to analyze dreams. In other words, the clinician will study the manifest content to understand what the latent content is trying to say. According to psychoanalytic view to be able to understand dreamwork fully, a person needs to understand how the mind transfers

1014-530: The latent thoughts to manifest. The first step is called condensation, and it is the combining of different unconscious thought into one. The combining of the unconscious thoughts makes it easier for the mind to express them in the dream. The step of condensation has two sub-steps, day residues and censorship. (On the other hand, according to Ullman and Erich Fromm dreams have no censorship at all). Day residues are left over daily issues that bring up some unconscious thought. The mind then displays this thought through

1053-424: The ones who had the dream, they use a variety of methods with their clients, such as free association , to gain more insight into the context of the dream. Free association is where the client describes the dream and relates as many aspects of it to their life as possible. The dreamworker listens intently and once they have gained as much information as possible about the dream both through the dreamer's description of

1092-481: The patient to put himself into a state of quiet, unreflecting self-observation, and to report to us whatever internal observations he is able to make" - taking care not to "exclude any of them, whether on the ground that it is too disagreeable or too indiscreet to say, or that it is too unimportant or irrelevant , or that it is nonsensical and need not be said". The psychoanalyst James Strachey (1887-1967) considered free association as 'the first instrument for

1131-399: The patients, initially, did not understand how such feelings were occurring at a subconscious level, hidden inside their minds. 'It is free association within language that is the key to representing the prohibited and forbidden desire...to access unconscious affective memory'. Jung and his Zurich colleagues 'devised some ingenious association tests which confirmed Freud's conclusions about

1170-482: The questions have been asked—and the answers carefully listened to—before the dreamworker (or dreamworkers if it is done in a group setting) offers any suggestions about what the dream might mean. In fact, a dreamworker often prefaces any interpretation by saying, "if this were my dream, it might mean..." (a technique first developed by Montague Ullman , Stanley Krippner , and Jeremy Taylor and now widely practiced). In this way, dreamers are not obliged to agree with what

1209-757: The scientific examination of the human mind'. In free association, psychoanalytic patients are invited to relate whatever comes into their minds during the analytic session, and not to censor their thoughts. This technique is intended to help the patient learn more about what he or she thinks and feels, in an atmosphere of non-judgmental curiosity and acceptance. Psychoanalysis assumes that people are often conflicted between their need to learn about themselves, and their (conscious or unconscious) fears of and defenses against change and self-exposure. The method of free association has no linear or preplanned agenda, but works by intuitive leaps and linkages which may lead to new personal insights and meanings: 'the logic of association

Dreamwork - Misplaced Pages Continue

1248-408: The session. Dreamwork or dream-work can also refer to Sigmund Freud 's idea that a person's forbidden and repressed desires are distorted in dreams, so they appear in disguised forms. Freud used the term 'dreamwork' or 'dream-work' ( Traumarbeit ) to refer to "operations that transform the latent dream-thought into the manifest dream". Sigmund Freud's theory of psychoanalysis is largely based on

1287-470: The technique as an alternative to hypnosis , because he perceived the latter as subjected to more fallibility, and because patients could recover and comprehend crucial memories while fully conscious . However, Freud felt that despite a subject's effort to remember, a certain resistance kept him or her from the most painful and important memories . He eventually came to the view that certain items were completely repressed , cordoned off and relegated only to

1326-449: The technique from Galton's reports published in the journal Brain , of which Freud was a subscriber. Free association also shares some features with the idea of stream of consciousness , employed by writers such as Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust : "all stream-of-consciousness fiction is greatly dependent on the principles of free association". Freud called free association "this fundamental technical rule of analysis... We instruct

1365-525: The unconscious realm of the mind. The new technique was also encouraged by his experiences with "Miss Elisabeth", one of his early clients who protested against interruptions of her flow of thought , that was described by his official biographer Ernest Jones as "one of the countless examples of a patient's furthering the physician's work". "There can be no exact date for the discovery of the 'free association' method... it developed very gradually between 1892 and 1895, becoming steadily refined and purified from

1404-427: The way in which emotional factors may interfere with recollection': they were published in 1906. As Freud himself put it, 'in this manner Bleuler and Jung built the first bridge from experimental psychology to psychoanalysis'. Freud, at least initially, saw free association as a relatively accessible method for patients. Ferenczi disagreed, with the famous aphorism: 'The patient is not cured by free-associating, he

1443-648: Was a president of both the Parapsychological Association and of the American Society for Psychical Research . He served on the Council of Advisors for the Dream Network Journal from 1990 to 1994, and was honoured with a special edition of the journal in 2006 "A Tribute to Monte Ullman". Ullman's dream telepathy experiments have not been independently replicated. James Alcock has written

1482-581: Was engaged in work on dreams and dreaming. He was in the forefront of the movement to stimulate public interest in dreams and to encourage the development of dream sharing groups. Working in a small group setting that he believed to be both safe and effective, Ullman spent the last three decades of his life leading such groups both in the United States and overseas. Ullman was also Clinical Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and

1521-399: Was that neither the subject nor the judges matched the targets with dreams above chance level. Results from other experiments by Belvedere and Foulkes were also negative. Free association (psychology) Free association is the expression (as by speaking or writing) of the content of consciousness without censorship as an aid in gaining access to unconscious processes. The technique

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