Dreaming of the Clinic. The Münsterlingen Nurses’ Dream Collection

Abstract

This article examines a corpus of dream reports produced by nurses at the Münsterlingen psychiatric hospital (Canton Thurgau, Switzerland), compiled by the psychiatrist Roland Kuhn between the 1950s and the 1980s and incorporated into psychotherapy documentation. It argues that these dream narratives — mediated through a layered documentary chain (clinical dictation, secretarial typing, and filing in patient records) — constitute a distinctive historical source not of «raw» subjectivity but of the clinical and therapeutic order that renders experience reportable and interpretable. Through recurring motifs and selected cases, the article traces how institutional role boundaries become porous: nurses appear at once as employees and as therapeutic subjects, while the clinic’s head occupies the intersecting positions of therapist and administrator. Finally, it shows how, amid power asymmetries and chronic staffing pressures, organisational problems and moral expectations are reframed in psychotherapeutic terms and take on a disciplinary valence. In this sense, the dream archive is approached as an interface where therapeutic work, epistemic practices, and modes of institutional governance converge.