Dreaming of the Clinic. The Münsterlingen Nurses’ Dream Collection
Another one. December 31, 2025 M. Tornay
Dream reports written by nurses at a Swiss psychiatric hospital between the 1950s and 1980s, compiled by psychiatrist Roland Kuhn, offer a historical record not of unfiltered inner experience but of the clinical and therapeutic frameworks that made experience reportable. The reports, mediated through dictation, typing, and filing, reveal how institutional roles blurred: nurses functioned both as employees and therapeutic subjects, while the clinic director acted as therapist and administrator. Amid power imbalances and staffing shortages, organizational problems and moral expectations were reframed in psychotherapeutic terms, acquiring a disciplinary function. The dream archive thus becomes a site where therapeutic work, epistemic practices, and institutional governance intersect.