Dreams as Intersubjective Dialogic Experiences in Psychoanalytic Phenomenology

Abstract

Dreams are part of our lives. Day and night, we live with them. Dreams are personal and significant to the individual who is dreaming them. The psychological significance of dreams is evident in the unconscious thoughts of our inner concerns, worries, fears, wishes, expectations, and fantasies. No one should underestimate the value of dreams in their lives because they can provide the right direction towards the domains of our lives that require attentiveness, significant associations, or characteristics of ourselves that we are worried about. The significance of dream research primarily lies in its unique and distinctive research methodology, which combines quantitative and qualitative approaches. Most importantly, attempting to synthesize phenomenological psychology and psychoanalytic psychology as an alternative qualitative methodology to explore the beliefs and conceptions of children and adults has added much value to recent research work. Psychoanalytic phenomenological investigations search for meaning, aiming to describe, explicate, and understand dream experiences. This approach seeks to capture the experiences of individuals as they experience them, primarily through reflective analysis of experience and meaning. Such hybrid methodologies are well suited to investigating unconscious representational processes and internal representations of self and others.