Horst Kächele, Dreams as Subject of Psychoanalytical Treatment Research

Abstract: This paper will focus on the last of the six functions and will – by providing three empirical illustrations – point to the rather meager attention given to dream reports in treatment research. When we speak about dreams in psychoanalytic therapy, we tend to think of a specific dream; quite rarely it is considered that the repeated commu¬nication of dreams belongs to the core features, especially of psychoanalyic therapies. How else could one under¬stand that an expert panel of North-American psycho-analysts places this feature on rank one of a list of features that discriminates a “psycho¬analytic prototype” from prototypes of other psychotherapies. (Ablon & Jones 2005).