Co-creation of Dreams

A therapist discloses to a patient the dream she had about him the night of their previous session:

I was sitting next to you on the couch in my office. You were sitting in the middle of the couch and I was to your left. We were facing each other. I reached over and touched your face. Your skin was soft. You then reached over to me and I felt guilt and sadness. So I turned away crying, feeling that loss. I wondered if you felt I was rejecting of you. I turned back to you and you said, “I love your father.”

The therapist recognized the resurgence of familiar feelings: her love for her patient, the patient’s love for her, and how it could not be; also familiar feelings with the therapist’s father. The therapist knew she also loved her father, and he, her, and it could not be. So, said the therapist, I am in touch with my sadness.

  

The patient shares his dream:

I was in the backyard. There was a helicopter overhead. It started coming down, through the trees. I could see the pilot, we made eye contact, and waved, two men with white hair. Then the fence disappeared. Then it changed to the backyard of my childhood home and there were fields with no end.

The patient quipped [associated], Why can’t I dream about sex instead of about benevolent old men with white hair?

The therapist mused aloud, Maybe this is about your father, the unspoken lifelong wish that there were no longer barriers between the two of you, instead of your usual, professed indifference toward a preoccupied, distant and disdainful father.

The patient and therapist had long since past been in the throes of an erotic transference- countertransference. The patient, old enough to be the father of the female therapist, had, before therapy, used extra marital affairs to help him feel desired and competent. The female therapist had lost her own father when she but was a toddler. Now there was more honest, intimate relating between therapist and patient, able now to uphold boundaries without the presence of fences between them, and without the fear that boundary violations would occur. The patient, now able to talk about sexual desires without the urge to have to act on them. He no longer could accept hurting his wife with his infidelities.

Bromberg writes that the feelings stirred up in the therapist about the patient are not the personal property of the therapist, but belong to both.

The therapist, having understood about co-creation, no longer felt ashamed about her dream. She was able to feel the mutuality of her own father’s love. The patient said, “There is something  so romantic about recognizing feelings that one can’t act on.” The therapist felt  sadness, not romance.