M.A. in Psychotherapy and Counselling.

Year One Term One.

?. 1995

In this essay I propose to examine a dream from a phenomenological-existential perspective. The dream was brought by a client, whom I name Wendy, to her fourteenth session of therapy some four years ago. It was chosen because it illustrates some key existential concepts. My understanding of the essential nature of the dream at the time was that it dramatically revealed the process of splitting that occurred in my client's psyche, originally in infancy, under the pressure of negative mothering. In this I followed Fairbairn and Guntrip's theory of ego splitting in the schizoid personality (Guntrip, 1968). My method of working with the dream involved a combination of active imagination, gestalt, and assertion techniques. I shall examine the use made of this dream in the session from the two theoretical and methodological standpoints and make some comparisons.

Fairbairn's theory concerns the splitting of the supposed original infantile unitary ego as a result of unsatisfying early experience. The partial egos are repressed and relate internally to each other and to repressed part representations of the mother in a structurally embedded replay of the original external conflict situations. These postulated dynamic structures are revealed in dreams showing the dreamer in problematic relationships with others.

Rather than analyse such dreams, I treat them as opportunities to work at healing the basic, disabling, split in the psyche. As a surgeon faced with a broken leg concentrates on correctly aligning the broken bones, so I focus on clarifying and bringing to a resolution the dream conflict. In the external world a touch, such as a handshake, often confirms a resolved argument. Just so in the dream world I have found that a touch can signal successful alignment of the split partial egos.

For this work I draw on Jung's technique of active imagination in which patients observed the fantasy products of their imagination and dialogued with the imaginary characters. I add to this the Gestalt therapy innovation which allowed the client to feel and express both sides of the interaction by identifying with, for example, an imaginary person. Thirdly, I bring to this work the insights of Assertiveness training, that in conflictual situations agreement between opponents can best be obtained by each communicating truthfully, concisely and non-judgementally with the other, most particularly by accurately naming their own emotions. In the session that is the subject of this essay, I encouraged my client to re-live, or re-dream, the dream as a present experience and with my voice reached into the dream world to facilitate an effective dialogue between her part selves as, at my suggestion, she identified with each in turn.

This is a method fundamentally at variance with the ideas and practice of existential psychotherapy which starts from the premise that there is no such thing as a constant self. Persons are considered to exist essentially as on going processes in the world, continually re-creating themselves through their experiences and actions in their world which they also create by their perceptions. The general aim of this psychotherapy is to work with the client towards an understanding of their own way of being in the world so that they can develop an openness to their own possibilities and limitations and so make authentic choices for themselves about the direction and meaning of their lives.

To organise the material under consideration, the client's life can be examined in relation to four aspects of their world (Van Duerzen-Smith 1988). These have been named as, first the 'umwelt' or physical world. This includes the physical environment whether natural or humanly constructed with all the material objects in it, chief of which is the client's own body. This, with all its skills, limitations, health and ill-health, is also part of the umwelt. The 'mitwelt' is the public world of social relationships and all that affects them such as the culture class or race of the client and others with whom daily interaction occurs and the ways the client deals with all the necessary engagements with people from bus drivers to work colleagues. The private world or 'eigenwelt' is defined as the client's relationship with themself, their own thoughts, emotion and desires, past experiences and future possibilities. Although many people would consider their relationship to close family, and perhaps closest friends, to be part of their personal world investigation often reveals that these are in fact structured with the same ingredients of conflict and domination or submission as relationships in the mitwelt (Van Deurzen-Smith, 1988). The 'uberwelt' is the area of the client's values and beliefs. It encompasses their relationship to an ideal world which may involve religious belief but need not. It will include those abstract concepts that bestow significance on the choices made and actions taken, all that in the client's view gives their life meaning.

The existential way of working with a dream is to treat it as if it were a real life experience. That is to say the dream is not interpreted but is explored as fully as possible and the phenomena of the dream initially described and accepted just as they appear. The client is encouraged to investigate their way of relating to the four levels of the dream world, to examine their motives and behaviours, their values revealed and so to arrive at their own meaning for the dream experience. All this, when viewed in conjunction with the client's waking life, can be very revealing of the client's current existential stance. While facilitating the client in this endeavour, the existential therapist would be aware of, but as far as possible prevent the work being influenced by, their own responses and assumptions relating to the dream.

The Client reported that the first part of the dream was visually very vague but the second part very clear. She recounted the dream in the first person and I transcribe her words.

'I am staying in a house with a woman with whom I feel relaxed. She has shown me several new improvements and alterations to the house - I am staying there, I don't feel any ownership for this house - I've been very impressed by them. The house is rambling, it is complex and full of unexpected interesting features. In the dream I am going "Oh" with surprise. There is a strangeness about it. I am impressed with the atmosphere she has created but she is not enthusiastic, she is neutral. We enter a room which she feels needs to be cleaned up (how I know that I don't know). She remains in the room, I leave searching for something to use, presumably to clean with, I don't know what the thing is.

'She says to me to look outside, so I look at the outside wall of the house. It is not there. "Maybe it's in the garage" she calls through the open window of the front room, and now for the first time I see her face framed in the window. I cannot find the garage and so, completely unworried by this, I walk away. I walk along the path and let myself out of the garden and go through a gate in tall fencing that you cannot see over. I follow the fence to reach a tree bordered road, a normal suburban road which takes me past another house, then it gets dark. Now the last part of the dream which was very clear.

'As daylight fades I walk along the lane and up into hills. The path is wide and grassy. As darkness falls the wind rises and I can see the village lights below me. Stars come out and I can hear the wind in the trees. The path is exposed to the wind. I increase my pace feeling a sense of urgency but no worry, just a sense of time running out. I turn into the wind and call out. Then I see lights ahead and steps leading up to an open door, a polished foyer, immaculate, impersonal. I'm aware I may enter as it is open to the public, a bit like a hotel but it is not one. I may enter yet I am sad as I do - and that's it, the dream faded'.

Although outwardly beginning much as would an existential dream session, with the client recounting the dream in the first person, inwardly my attitude was in direct contrast. I was assessing the dream in relation to my theoretical understanding of the client's endopsychic structure. This understanding however was not an arbitrary imposition. A major issue that caused Wendy to seek counselling was her difficulty in handling conflict and anger. She experienced herself as split and in her first session had stated 'we are a good team me and me'. In talking of this dream in our session she wondered if it showed the two parts of herself which she had designated long ago as the law-giver and the risk-taker, but if so she did not know which was which. It could be said, in existential terms, that she had recognised that she has two ways of being-in-the-world. This is an example confirming Binswanger's view that people's relationships with themselves can be 'structured in the plural mode of the public world' (Van Deurzen-Smith, 1988: 91) that is to say divided against themselves and relating to themselves in a struggle of domination and submission. My understanding of my role as therapist is to assist the client in her endeavour  BOOKMARK  to come into relationship with herself and her own truth and in this might seem to have an affinity with the existential viewpoint but my theoretical understanding is psychodynamic not philosophical.

When asking a client to re-live a dream, with closed eyes, in front of me, I suggest they start at the beginning as this allows time for them to engage fully with the alternative reality but the sections of transcript below are taken from the more critical part of the session. I use words like 'right' and 'O.K' to maintain contact with the client who, of course, is not seeing me.

Transcript

Interventions 1, 2, 3 were in the form of questions but were intended not so much to elicit information but rather to move Wendy to what I considered to be the focal point of the dream when the relationship with the woman changed. In this I was not following one of the basic tenets of the phenomenological method, the rule of horizontalisation which enjoins that all the elements of an experience such as this dream be initially accepted by the therapist as of equal importance and that no different degrees of significance be imposed upon it by their response. If I had been working existentially, I would have tuned in to my client's fascinated involvement with the details of this house and perhaps she would have expanded on the 'almost as though' in R1. Instead, I was aware of my impatience with what I perceived as my client's reluctance to approach the conflict point, recognised this reaction as confirmation of the degree of conflict, monitored my emotion to prevent it disrupting the work but acted directively on the basis of my understanding.

Intervention 4, again in question form, was phrased to slow the pace since Wendy had now arrived at the focal point and I wanted her to move deeper into her experience. In R4 Wendy was again allowing her attention to drift back to other rooms and so again in my intervention 5 I did not give equal value to each part of her response but emphasised the indeterminate quality of this room. Once she was attending to it, I could reflect her words as an existential practitioner might have done to encourage her to explore further her impressions of the room. When the character of the room was clearly revealed, I spoke to move her on (7). In her response (7), Wendy made an assumption based on feeling that the woman wanted something done and a tentative guess, with no evidential basis, as to what this was. She again moved away from the present by referring to what she had written so actually starting to come out of the dream experience. An existential way of working could have been to bring the assumption and guess to her attention so that she could reflect on what she had done and perhaps make the links with how she related through unconfirmed assumptions to her boss and partner. However, this would have avoided yet again the immediate dream conflict. My next intervention 8, accepted her assumption and moved her on and after that I needed only to make some prompts and acknowledgements as Wendy talked quite freely about her private world reactions to her dream situation until suddenly, R11 she walked out of the house. This was again a point at which she could have been confronted with her own contradictions by applying the rule of horizontalisation and reflecting back, 'You feel you want to help, you feel you can cope with the task and you walk out of the door'. However, I did not want to encourage self reflection at that point but to keep her in the dream present and so my intervention (12) was again selective.

Within the dream story from an existential viewpoint it can be seen that she had faced a moment of decision, an opening to potential, a possibility of affirming herself in action and she had fled from the overwhelming freedom ('the room could be anything'). She had shown neither the courage to be as herself (Tillich 1953) nor the courage to be as a part by participation in the woman's project for the room. By not acknowledging any anxiety in that moment she had acted, as Sartre put it, in bad faith (Manser, 1966) and suffered the penalty of finding herself in 'ordinariness'. The house that had been so intriguing and exciting was now transformed into one just like any other.

This moment can be understood in terms of Kierkegard's scheme of the stages of life (MacQuarrie 1972). The exploration of the house showed Wendy in the aesthetic stage of feelings and enjoyment but she had found that following these feelings led her back to her starting point. Her pleasure in getting to know the house had achieved nothing, it left no profound mark. The moment was an opportunity to move to the deeper ethical stage and affirm herself as a moral being (Tillich 1953) in some concrete action.

This was also a moment of choice in relationship both to self and other and both contain the possibility of conflict. Wendy had acknowledged two feelings (R11) in relation to becoming involved in work on the room and the stronger of the two suggested an unacknowledged desire to carry out this task on her own. Wendy could only act in the physical world of the house if she first acted in the social world of the relationship by speaking and she chose the third way of resolving the power conflict by withdrawing.

Interventions 13 and 14 were again prompts to encourage Wendy to keep re-experiencing the dream and in that she described in illuminating detail her situation and thoughts, they achieved what an existential-phenomenological approach would seek to achieve. Similarly the mood, emotions and feelings experienced in the dream world would be considered important factors to be re-evoked by the client's exploration but my method from this point became quite antithetical to that approach. I gave the client a direct instruction (15) and followed with very specific questions (16 and 17) aimed at clarifying the relationship between the two parts of Wendy. I, in effect, stopped the action so that the conflict could emerge. This conflict would also have been revealed, I think, by the existential methodology as something the client would have recognised as she reflected on the whole of her behaviour in the dream story and saw this in relation to her motivations and values. My chosen method of using the dream as a present experience which can be slowed to a stop made it possible to observe the client in her process of being and provided information that I was not concerned with at the time but which examined from the existential perspective is revealing.

If a person is their decisions (MacQuarrie 1972) the tragic consequences of Wendy's choice of withdrawal were visually demonstrated. She was now alone in a restricted environment without any life entrancing character, she saw nothing to mention in the garden but concrete paths, and found herself looking at a wall that excluded her from the home of activity and relationship. It was the exclusion she had chosen and she continued in her inner world to act in bad faith, that is she avoided the reality of herself as a responsible person free to choose. Instead she deceived herself pretending she was not choosing but was constrained to act as she did by the absence of a necessary object which R14 shows her actually creating. This allowed her to believe she was following her acknowledged intention of helping the woman, and was therefore still in a close and submissive relationship with her. She had alienated herself from her freedom, her own potential (Manser, 1966). The only descriptive term used of this woman originally was 'framed' and she used it again as if she was attempting to reify the other, perceiving her as she might a picture. This would protect her from recognising any perception the other might have had of her, which could have threatened her pretence.

Wendy's way of being in the mitwelt was also clarified by her responses 16 and 17. Inside the house communication seemed to happen for my client without words, as if this was a private world relationship. Outside she perceived the other as kin and maintained that the manipulations of social world relationships were not necessary. She wanted to merge the social and private worlds. She tried to preserve the illusion of intimacy by not speaking but her self-deception only transfered the conflict she had tried to avoid into her inner world. Since she was holding on to the role of helper she began to perceive the woman in the role of the one not helping, seeing in the other what was prominent at that time in herself (Van Deurzen-Smith, 1988).

A major issue for this client in early sessions was conflict with her new boss, who used to be a close colleague of equal status. In reality at work relationships were subsumed into the private world and when this illusion broke down her response was an attempt at withdrawal, working independently in her job to her own agenda.

For me this was the heart of the work and my aim was to facilitate the two people in the dream in talking truthfully to each other, to change the dream experience to a new more healing outcome. However, looking back at this work from an existential perspective reveals more in the work than I took note of at the time. Wendy's withdrawal from the house had created a factor of distance between herself and the woman which Buber considered an essential factor in a relationship, allowing space for the 'otherness' of the other (MacQuarrie 1972) which is blurred if people try for a false unity. As I held Wendy to her face to face position with the woman more of her internal experience became conscious.

Now she had said enough to enable me to suggest an appropriate and accurate assertive statement expressing resentment and need which I suggested she spoke to the woman and she was able to do this and told me that the woman responded by leaning out of the window but looking along the wall as if for the object. Wendy felt angrier than before at this and when, again using the words I suggested, she spoke this the woman looked directly at her. When I asked Wendy how that felt for her, the answer was hopeful and when she expressed that to the woman she reached towards her and they clasped hands. This is what I was aiming for but it had been only partially achieved. My next move was to ask Wendy to identify with the woman and see the dream world of the garden from her viewpoint. When she did this she saw Wendy looking anxious, the denied affect (R18) was then visible. As the woman she admitted she was teasing Wendy, was sorry for hurting her and expressed this again at my suggestion. She needed Wendy to understand and was disappointed and despairing when she did not.

I continued to direct my client in her identification as first one and then the other of the two dream world individuals until the dream Wendy expressed love and again physical contact was made between them. My aim of a form of reconciliation was achieved but in this exchange Wendy's two conflictual ways of being in the world were clearly revealed and some of her self deception challenged. The risk-taker was in fact an avoider of the risks of public world relationships and the law-giver was a teasing hostile manipulative controller. Wendy had seen these ways of being only in others and had not recognised that she adopted these roles at different times with her boss, with her partner and in therapy. In this facilitated interaction in the dream world Wendy had experienced a greater range of emotions in relationship than she had previously allowed herself. She had opened to her vulnerability and anger and found that she could manage them and not succumb to them. Psychodynamic theory could interpret the woman as representing her boss, her therapist or her mother but I did not make use of this. As in existential theory and practice the client's relationship to herself was the central focus and I treated the dream phenomena as 'just what they are as they shine forth' and the 'being-in-the-dream-world' of the client as one of her autonomous ways of being-in-the-world (Boss, 1963: 261). In seeing both people to be aspects of Wendy, since this was my client's own interpretation of the dream, it could be said that I was acting in line with the existential practice that makes the client the only authority in the matter.

This dream and the session work demonstrate for me the value in the existential view that a dream can show a client's way of being-in-the-world. My client avoided commitment and relationship in the dream world as she did at that time in therapy and at work. However, my more directive way of working with the imagination informed by psychodynamic theory allowed this client to experience both her ways of being-in-the-world in their true relationship to each other and so begin to heal the inner conflict.