Holding in mind: Dreams in Continuing Case

So our therapist, having recently dreamed about her patient (see post of 11-28-18), opens the door for reciprocity and inquires about the patient’s dreams, particularly dreams about the therapist. The patient, red-faced, shares a previously unshared dream from three months earlier:

I am in a session with you and I come toward you to kiss you. As I get closer, you turn into my mother. I don’t stop but go ahead and kiss you. Suddenly I am my room in my childhood home and you have turned into my father. The scene changes again and I am at my mother’s childhood home and I am kissing a man.

The patient says she woke up from this dream very upset, more upset than from any remembered dream. The patient asks why therapist made this inquiry. The therapist makes the decision to share her dream with her patient. She makes this decision based on ideas about co-creation and from Philip Bromberg’s idea that the therapist’s thoughts, feelings, dreams, about the patient are the purview, the property, of both the patient and the therapist.

This patient’s [maternal] grandmother, now dead six months, had been safe haven for the patient, protecting the patient from the wrath of the parents. As the therapist is describing to her patient the patient’s grandmother as found in the therapist’s dream, the therapist recalls that this grandmother’s brother, the patient’s maternal great uncle, had been eschewed by the family for his political views and activities. While literally dead, this great uncle was also ‘dead to’ the family as they never spoke of him.

Saving associations to the patient’s own dream for a later time, the therapist asks the patient what it was like for the patient to hear of the therapist’s dream. The patients says it had been a tough week for she had been considering when would be the right moment to come out to her parents; and she had run into her father in public that week while with her female lover. Also, the patient and her mother had had their first, in a very long time, serious conversation, all jokes aside, over coffee that week, and her mother had cried. The patient had not overreacted with her mother and she notes that the mother had to choose between living in a faraway town with her husband or staying with her own mother. Choose one, lose the other.

The therapist notes aloud to the patient a connection: the patient believes she, too, must choose between her parents and her girlfriend (and her Self as a lesbian). Furthermore, there will be the feared additional loss of the therapist, for the patient believes therapy can end after she reaches her last goal of coming out to her parents. The therapist shares her own feelings and dilemma: the pride she has for her patient; the therapist’s own loss when the patient leaves. The patient asks for homework [housekeeping; see post of 11-28-18].

The beauty of this session is the ongoing deepening of the relationship between the patient and therapist. The patient had already been growing (mustering her courage to come out, being able to converse with her mother without overly reacting), and one wonders if the patient implicitly experienced and made use of the therapist holding the patient in the therapist’s mind, made explicit by the therapist sharing her dream of the patient.