Dreaming of the Clinic. The Münsterlingen Nurses’ Dream Collection
M. Tornay
Another one. December 31, 2025 DOI: 10.62988/2949-5202-2025-5-2-144-165 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Historical analysis Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Population | Nurses at the Münsterlingen psychiatric hospital (Canton Thurgau, Switzerland) |
| Topics | Dreaming |
| Keywords | Dream Subjectivity Narrative Power physics Therapeutic relationship Order exchange Discipline Consciousness Psychoanalysis Aesthetics Staffing Corporate governance Epistemology Psychotherapist |
| Key points | Argues that dream narratives from nurses, mediated by clinical documentation, show institutional role boundaries becoming porous and organizational problems reframed in psychotherapeutic terms with disciplinary valence. |
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.
Comparable studies
Other theoretical and historical papers on dreaming, most cited first.
| Study | Year | Design | Participants |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dreaming: a conceptual framework for philosophy of mind and empirical research | 2016 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Metaphor and hyperassociativity: the imagination mechanisms behind emotion assimilation in sleep and dreaming | 2015 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Varieties of Lucid Dreaming Experience | 2000 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Experimental Research on Dreaming: State of the Art and Neuropsychoanalytic Perspectives | 2011 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| The Neurobiology of Consciousness: Lucid Dreaming Wakes Up | 2009 | Theoretical or philosophical paper |