Affektregulierung im Traum und Persönlichkeitsorganisation. Einblicke in eine aktuelle empirische Studie / Affect regulation in dreams and personality organization: Insights from an ongoing empirical study

Abstract

Summary Affect regulation in dreams and personality organization: Insights from an ongoing empirical study Affect regulation constitutes a central structural dimension of psychoanalytic personality theory and the theoretical foundation of the Zurich Dream Process Coding System (ZDPCS), the most elaborate instrument for the empirical analysis of dream-inherent affect regulation. Preceding studies demonstrated that impairments in personality functioning are associated with reduced affect regulation capacity in dreams but were limited to the comparison of neurotic and borderline levels of personality organization. The present article introduces the ZDPCS as a method of empirical psychoanalytic dream research and illustrates the expected differences in dream-inherent affect regulation across the three levels of personality organization described by Kernberg, using three dream reports from an ongoing multicenter study. The dream examples illustrate a gradient across the three levels of personality organization: at the psychotic level, the safety principle dominates entirely; at the borderline level, a richer yet still safety-regulated dream world unfolds; at the neurotic level, diverse and flexibly deployable regulatory mechanisms are available. The observations suggest that the level of personality organization is reflected in dream structure and may serve both as a diagnostic indicator and as a sensitive measure of therapeutic progress. The ongoing study will enable a statistically robust examination of these assumptions. The examples were selected to illustrate expected group differences and do not claim to be representative.