On Dreams

The authors of this article on dreams from a self-psychological perspective met as an advanced study group in self-psychology in 2013 and engaged in a close reading of the works of Heinz Kohut. This article is based on the results of these meetings. We suggest that Kohut’s ideas about dreams were of greater utility than even he was inclined to give them. Dreams are an important part of the ongoing self-object relationship in the therapeutic context. The self, that is to say experience, is both the agent and the topic of the dream. We describe five aspects of the dream process that build on and extend Kohut’s ideas on dreams and discuss their clinical implications. We illustrate those aspects with material drawn from our practices. We conclude it is time to stop distinguishing self-state dreams from those with latent meanings and consider what a dream means from a self-psychological point of view.