Working with Dreams in Systemic Practices and Perspectives

water
dreams
music
Working with
Dreams in
Systemic
Practices and
Perspectives
Massimo Schinco - Psychotherapist, Italy

introducing myself
I’m a psychologist and a psychotherapist, working with individuals and families . I’m
also a supervisor in social services for children
I’m Co – director of the School of Systemic Psychotherapy and Clinical Centre at the
Milan Centre of Family Therapy
I also teach in the Conservatory of Music, Cuneo and lead learning groups in the
University of Pavia
I’m a member of the International Association for the Study of Dreams. I’m currently
serving as a Member of the Board of Directors
I’m an amateur musician and I play violin in the Orchestra Sinfonica Amatoriale
Italiana
as an author, I focus on creative change related to dreams and music. My last book is
“The Composer’s Dream”, published by Pari Publishing

in the current systemic practices dreams are just seldom taken into
account
this seem to happen because:
dreams are considered mostly as a product of an individual mind
they are taken into account referring to their contents as if they
were primarily kind of witnesses of the dreamer’s past
practitioners and scholars are afraid of falling back into lineal
thinking and interpretative practices

we know instead that it is possible to approach dreams in many
different ways and some of these are closer to systemic sensitivity
and awareness
for example narrative approaches seem to be more and more
appropriate to the practitioners
small surprise: the dream we are working with is already a dream’s
narration in itself. A peculiar narration indeed, being a re – narration
of something only partially subject to the common rules of a
narration
in a key as such sometimes dreams are also used during the training
to systemic psychotherapy in our School, but this happens rather
sporadically, depending on the bias of the teacher. It is not
considered as an essential part of our learning methodology

Milan, Spring 2012:
Ernest Hartmann
led the Seminar
“Boundaries and Mind”

“Siamo fatti degli stessi sistemi di cui
sono fatti i sogni”
Dott.ssa Leonarda Fascia, allieva, IV anno, CMTF
Dott. Massimo Schinco, Co – Direttore e Didatta, CMTF
“IDENTITÀ SISTEMICHE”
CONVEGNO NAZIONALE CMTF,
Montegrotto Terme, 26 – 27 – 28 ottobre 2012

“ … Mere purposive rationality unaided by such
phenomena as art, religion, dreams, and the like, is
necessarily pathologic and destructive of life”
“These algorithms of the heart, or, as they say, of the
unconscious, are, however, coded and organized in a
manner totally different from the algorithms of
language. And since a great deal of conscious thought
is structured in terms of the logics of language, the
algorithms of the unconscious are doubly inaccessible. It
is not only that the conscious mind has poor access to
this material, but also the fact that when such access is
achieved, e.g., in dreams, art, poetry, religion,
intoxication, and the like, there is still a formidable
problem of translation.”
Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind
Gregory Bateson and Dreams

dreaming state
narratives
and
waking state
narratives

recent theories, though in a rather individual view of dreams,
emphasize the elements of continuity with waking states
Ernest Hartmann’s approach relies on identifying the central
image of a dream
both in systemic psychotherapy and supervision a dream’s
narrative can be integrated in a therapeutic conversation
the identification of the central image allows to discover
and connect the emotions of family members, as well as
those of a group at work

… an example from the family therapy room …
a family member is invited to tell a dream. The other members are invited to
make comments with the help of therapist’s questioning
to the dreamer:
“when did you have this dream? How did you feel when you woke up? How
do you feel now that you told it? How do you feel in your body? Which color
had your dream? What title would you give to the dream? With whom
would you like to share it? And with whom you would not like? If the
therapist would be part of your dream, what role would you assign to the
therapist?”
to the other members of the family:
“which kind of emotions did this dream rise into you? Were this dream yours,
who would you like to be and what would you like to do?”

… an example from a supervision group …
an educator, after listening to a child telling him how he was abused by his father in
a severely degraded family context, incurs recurring dreams, long and quite
unpleasant :
“I see J. in bad situations, often using drugs in run-down public toilets. Accidentally I
get in and find him laying down on the floor, yet conked out.”
for the dreamer the central image relates to the public toilet’s squalor, and the
connected emotions are disgust and misery. Group members emphasize images
and feelings of sorrow and helplessness (the child is near to die). One of the
educators attending shares his sens of nausea, which resonates with the same the
dreamer had (he tells he felt anger, loathing and sorrow when he listened to the
child’s accounts) but, most of all, with the feelings of the child himslef, who recently
has had vomit repeatedly without an apparent reason
useless to say how valuable has been to take these feelings into account and to
elaborate them in order to improve the relation with the child

furthermore, due to the continuity between diurnal and
nocturnal life, a psychotherapist can take into account not only
nocturnal dreams, but open-eyed ones also
both in psychotherapy and in supervision can encourage
working with imagination and creativity making connections to
the dream narratives and foster the development of resilience
a systemic psychotherapist can take advantage from dreams as
a way to look ahead, as a tool to realize life projects, likewise a
bridge to different types of a possible future

a new frontier:
collective consciousness
lucid dreaming
group dreaming
applied to psychotherapy

the paradigms about the nature of consciousmess are
changing and with them also our views about dreams are
changing radically
several authors (e.g. Manousakis, 2007) depict individual
consciousness as a subsystem, just relatively authonomous,
of an infinite stream of global consciousness
in this bias dreams show themselves as phenomena
capable to reapproach us to the collective foundations of
our identity, since the conditions allowing our “separate”
individuation are softened and even suspended
one of the most authoritative representative of this
tendency is Montague Ullmann

emphasizes that “we are much less separate than we
think we are” and dreaming is “an adaptation
concerned with the survival of the species and only
secondarily of the individual”
“dreams can offer an aesthetic and creative
approach to knowledge, oriented to wisdom,
which is complementary to the “objective” one of
science, oriented rather to mastery”
Montague Ullman (1916 – 2008)

Ullman points out that
“…that part of us which is linked to others through
feeling is more real, more enduring and more
significant than other dimensions of our existence.
It compels belief. It dissolves distances, creates
unity and links us to the real world.
This is the stuff of reality.”

these assumptions pave the way to a multidimensional
view of identity and personality, in which traditional
western culture’s basic assumptions, such as
reductionism
materialism
separation
are going to be left behind

also perspectives founded on
strict determinism
are to be replaced by
explanations not pretending to be complete
whose outcomes are not fully predictable,
where the role of human choice is kept in
more respect than before

consciousness is envisioned as an infinite
collective stream whose
individuals are distinct but not separate
explications
some examples …

Jean Campbell is a pioneer in the field
of group dreaming applied to
problem solving related to life issues
Gregory Scott Sparrow, a family
therapist and counsellor himself,
studies lucid dreaming in the
epistemological frame of co-creation
Robert Waggoner explores the
healing potential of lucid dreaming

it is too early to draw well shaped theoretical
models from these experiences , and
consequently, to elaborate a formal theory of
technique
nevertheless these experiences account
effectively for phenomena that all psychotherapist
know very well, such as
non locality
jungian synchronicity
the strict bond between intuition and action in
leading the session

so, although a serene consensus from the professional
community seems still far to be granted
and, due to cultural conditioning, it is not always easy,
and sometimeseven impossible to help clients to get
accustomed to approaches including the practices I
mentioned above
I’m persuaded that this is the direction to be followed if
we want to seriously remain psychotherapist on a
relational and systemic basis

THANK YOU!

Working with Dreams in Systemic Practices and Perspectives

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