Dreaming of the Clinic. The Münsterlingen Nurses’ Dream Collection

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.

Study at a glance

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.