Dream Theory in Gestalt Therapy

Gestalt therapists look at dreams in several ways. F. S. Perls, expressing a viewpoint first explicated in Gestalt Therapy, characterized them as projections. The dreamwork he developed, where the dreamer enacted the elements of the dream, was designed to allow the dreamer to reintegrate what had been projected. Later on, he considered them "existential messages," summary statements about the present or general state of the dreamer's life. Here, the dream enactments were intended to clarify these summations.

Many Gestalt therapists approach dreams as he did. Others have suggested that dreams can be retroflections of reactions within therapy sessions-reactions to the therapist, for the most part--or to events of the previous day. An example is a dream in which a woman turns her back on the man dreaming about her. His therapist might ask if the dreamer felt dismissed by her and did not say so, or if the dreamer felt dismissive of her, and did not say so. When the understanding of the figure/ground process described by Gestalt psychologists has been applied to dreams, they have been treated as reversals of organization that permit background material to become foreground. (In the best known reversal picture, an ornate goblet can be visually reversed so it becomes two silhouetted profiles, face to face.) Dreams have also been considered unsatisfactory attempts to complete figures initiated earlier--attempts which are unsatisfying because the figures cannot be satisfactorily completely in the context of sleep. In this case, the dream work consists of continuing the dream while the dreamer is awake, as the dreamer's creative fantasy.

The idea that dreams are existential messages, it has been rightly pointed out, is out of tune with Gestalt therapy. It points us away from the actual, away from the phenomenology of dreams and in the direction of something to which it is supposed to refer. Also, as an interpretation, it forecloses discovering the dreamer's intention in making this dream in favor of introjecting a preexisting conclusion about the dream.

It is for these reasons and others that interpretation is generally avoided in Gestalt therapy. It encourages unaware introjection. It also encourages a relationship between the therapist and the individual in therapy in which the former encourages introjection in the latter. This arrangement promotes the authority of the therapist and the submission of the person in therapy and works against the stated intention of the therapy: to foster the individual's growth. Finally, interpretation short-circuits the process whereby the individual will discover for himself or herself the exact nature of every particular and unique dream.

These reservations apply to all these characterizations of the nature of dreams and dreaming. But these characterizations can be, and are, enormously useful in therapeutic work if they are instead considered as potentially fruitful hypotheses about the nature of a particular dream, to be tested and explored in therapy or outside it. Beyond this, Gestalt therapists are generally united in regarding dreams as quintessential instances of the spontaneous play involved in creative living, more adequate perhaps than most of the figures we are able to create while awake. Though good figures are perhaps easier to form in the context which dreams inhabit, it is also true that they therefore speak to us with a clarity and power which convince us of the virtuosity and richness of the creative capacities of our native intelligence.