Dreams as Intersubjective Dialogic Experiences in Psychoanalytic Phenomenology
American Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience February 21, 2025 Sudhakar Venukapalli
Dreams hold personal and psychological significance, reflecting unconscious thoughts about inner concerns, worries, fears, wishes, expectations, and fantasies. They can guide attention to important aspects of life or aspects of self that cause worry. Dream research benefits from combining quantitative and qualitative methods, notably synthesizing phenomenological and psychoanalytic psychology as an alternative qualitative approach for exploring beliefs and conceptions in both children and adults. Psychoanalytic phenomenological investigations aim to describe, explicate, and understand dream experiences by capturing individuals' experiences through reflective analysis. This hybrid methodology is well suited to studying unconscious representational processes and internal representations of self and others.