Dream seminars and dream stations

A workshop report from psychoanalytic practice at the Psychoanalytic Seminar Zurich

Abstract

This article deals with two practical forms of current psychoanalytic dream interpretation practiced at the Institute for Continuing Education Psychoanalytic Seminar Zurich (PSZ). It discusses the dream seminars by Fritz Morgenthaler and the dream stations project of the Missing Link team, which consists of members of the PSZ. With his newly conceived dream seminars, Morgenthaler has created an instrument that provides participants with a deeper understanding of a presented dream by interpreting it, but also of the psychoanalytic context in which the dream took place and which is approached within the framework of the seminar. Dreams are even more strongly detached from the psychoanalytic setting at the dream stations, which were set up at various locations in German-speaking Switzerland and into which dreams could be entered in written form to receive a psychoanalytic interpretation, also in written form. In addition to these dream stations, there were also an e-mail address and a hotline where dreams could be submitted. Here, dream interpretation is no longer part of a psychoanalytic setting in practice rooms, but takes place in new virtual ways, to which podcasts will be added at a later date. So the dreams do not come to psychoanalysis, but psychoanalysis comes to them, to everyday life, where they happen. This project is intended as a practical creative experiment in the psychoanalytic approach to dreams and does not contain a scientifically based research approach.