Summary
Brains, Dreams, and Reflections: The Psychodynamics and Neuroscience of Dreaming in Clinical Practice
Join us at UT Social Work for an important lecture from the Sue Fairbanks Psychoanalytic Academy featuring Daniel Morehead, MD, the Program Director of Tufts General Psychiatry Residency.
Dream analysis has been a core feature of early psychoanalytic practice from both Freudian and Jungian perspectives. While the use of dreams continues to be important in psychoanalysis and Jungian analysis, it is less prominent in contemporary psychodynamic psychotherapy. At the same time, scientific research on dreams has continued to progress and has revealed fascinated areas of continuity with psychodynamic thinking on the subject.
Specifically, dreams appear to be critical for both emotional processing and implicit memory formation. Neuroscientific studies show high levels of activity in critical limbic structures associated with both memory and emotion. Associative learning is enhanced during REM sleep and dreaming, and unconscious pattern recognition also develops during this state. At the same time, emotional experiences from the day and week are processed and integrated with earlier experiences and working affective assumptions.
Such research confirms that the understanding of dreams creates possibilities for directly examining unconscious and implicit patterns of interpreting and navigating the world. Through a mix of discussion and presentation, we will integrate dream research with dream interpretation techniques from the psychodynamic tradition, practicing these with specific dream examples. We will use a broad approach to dream interpretation which will allow for a diversity of theoretical perspectives
At the conclusion of this lecture, participants will be able to:
