Chronic depression associated with early trauma remains one of the most treatment-resistant conditions in mental healthcare. Clinical and empirical findings have increasingly suggested that patients with histories of early trauma may benefit differentially from intensive psychoanalytic treatments compared to symptom-focused or short-term psychotherapies. Our conceptual article aims to elucidate...
This work is a literature review on the use of psilocybin in psychotherapeutic treatment of mental illnesses. The review answers the question of what opportunities and risks are associated with the use of the psychoactive substance psilocybin. Peer-reviewed studies between 2017 and 2022 were included. Nine studies were found regarding the following indications: tobacco addiction, anxiety and...
ABSTRACT As is well known, dreams are still seen as via regia to the unconscious by many psychodynamic and psychoanalytic clinicians and researchers. Therefore, this article reports on decades of efforts to understand changes in manifest dreams in psychodynamic therapies as indicators for relevant, sustaining transformations in the inner object world of patients and to use them in comparative...
Dreams are still an enigma of human cognition, studied extensively in psychoanalysis and neuroscience. According to the Freudian dream theory and Solms' modifications of the unconscious derived from it, the fundamental task of meeting our emotional needs is guided by the principle of homeostasis. Our innate value system generates conscious feelings of pleasure and unpleasure, resulting in the...
Although psychoanalysts are interested in symptom reduction as an outcome, they are looking for instruments to measure sustaining changes in the unconscious mental functioning. In this article it is discussed that conceptually well-founded transformation of manifest dreams analyzed with precise empirical methods could be considered as a promising indicator for such therapeutic changes. We are...
To many psychoanalysts dreams are a central source of knowledge of the unconscious—the specific research object of psychoanalysis. The dialog with the neurosciences, devoted to the testing of hypotheses on human behavior and neurophysiology with objective methods, has added to psychoanalytic conceptualizations on emotion, memory, sleep and dreams, conflict and trauma. To psychoanalysts as well...