I had a session with her psychotherapist my. We sat on two uncomfortable chairs in the hallway of my apartment. She has her back to the front door, I have my back to the rest of the house. “Easy,” replied the friend I told about my dream. “Obviously, the process of psychotherapy is tiring. The way you sit shows that you don’t want your therapist to go deeper. If the cure is home, you’re still in the lobby! “Indeed,” I replied as more questions began to flood in. “Why do I dream of … beginners? Does my bad sleep affect the artistic result? After all, I do not close access not only to my psychotherapist, but also to my subconscious?

Few topics so ignite the imagination and arouse so much interest among experts and non-specialists alike. dreams. Do we learn from them? If yes, then? And can we trust them? Our grandmothers may have believed that dreams were prophetic, but according to psychoanalysts, our dreams do not predict the future. On the contrary, it is an expression of what we want to think and dare not. “They are part of us, but self-censorship cuts them off, so they come in disguise” says Mrs. Jenny Sumaki “K”.if Professor of Child Psychiatry and Vice President of the Hellenic Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (HEPSH) on the occasion of the Dream and Practice Symposium organized by the Hellenic Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (HEPSH) May 5-7. at the Eugenides Foundation.

“In 1900, Freud refers to sleep and the regression of the psyche, which thus leads to childhood, to memories and passions, to scenarios of seduction, to primary fantasies. I may, for example, be aroused by some man, but since it is forbidden, it comes as a desire in a dream, and a show is put on around it. The dream becomes a road to unconscious complexes, that is, to our repressed elements.

When listening to the dreams of their patients, psychoanalysts ask questions such as “what made you think?”, “what impression did it make on you?”, “what did it leave you with?”. As Ms. Sumaki says, dream material can reveal aspects of the unconscious, but it must be presented in conversation to release knowledge. “That’s how trauma is released, like an old molestation.” A random event of the day can lead through dreams to the appearance of unresolved pieces. “If I have been subjected to sexual harassment that has been repressed for years and I meet a man and fall in love with him, I may have a nightmare in a dream that will not be about him, but about a man’s face. However, in this nightmare, a repressed memory begins to appear, which gradually comes to the fore.

This moment is critical for both the patient and the therapist. “Sleep is the royal road to the unconscious. We get in touch with the deepest within. It’s not easy, it’s necessary. But I need to get rid of the obsessive thoughts that I have inside in order to have a relationship with the person I met.”

We have hundreds of dreams a night; when we wake up, the question is whether we remember one or two when the disgust is renewed.

According to neurologists, during the night we see hundreds of dreams. However, in the morning it all depends on whether we remember one or two. As Ms. Sumaki says, this is because when we wake up, the disgust, the “censorship”, kicks in again and sends him back. Often a word we hear in the context of a business meeting or from a stranger on the street talking on the phone can make a click in our psyche and remind us of something we saw in a dream.

Execution

“practice”, the second axis of the Symposium, is about acting out. The term is understood as any reaction of the individual, the motives of which he is not able to realize. However, unconscious needs and desires are transformed into action and released through action. “When a teenager breaks down a door, for example,” Ms. Sumaki explains, “if he could tell his parents, ‘You hurt me,’ he wouldn’t break anything. But he can’t put his feelings into words. The goal of psychoanalysis is to put things in context. When we talk, we discharge, we reveal ourselves.”

The symposium is dedicated to the memory of Athena Alexandris, Andreas Yannakoulas, Matthaios Iosafat, Panagiotis Sakellaropoulos and Ioannis Tsiantis, who made the dream of founding the first Greek psychoanalytic company come true.