The Rough Road: A Single Case Study of Dreamtelling in a Group during the COVID-19 Pandemic and Military Conflict.

Sharing dreams is a common practice, and several motives, such as emotional processing, emotional relief, and request for containment, have been identified. An exploratory single case study research design was used to explore the experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic and local military conflict among a group of Israeli students. The group discussed a dream previously shared in social network sites during the first COVID-19 lockdown. A qualitative content analysis of the meeting transcript yielded three meaningful and coherent themes: feeling blocked and helpless in front of a barrier; a sense of intrusion, defense, and psychological coping; belonging to the group as a means of coping with an individual and a collective threat. Each of these themes reflected personal, interpersonal, and social aspects of the participants' experiences. The results deepen the understanding of people's dominant experiences and main psychological coping mechanisms during a collective stressful event. Further, they support the positive effect of the dreamtelling approach on individuals' coping experiences and on enhancing hope by sharing and discussing dreams with others.

The Group Analytic Model.

Drawing upon psychoanalysis, sociology, and group dynamics, the basic clinical model of group analysis was first described by Foulkes (1948, 1964) and Foulkes and Anthony (1964): Four men and four women, plus the conductor, sit around a small table and engage in free-floating conversation for a 90-minute session once a week. Groups might meet more often and be supplemented by combined or conjoint therapy (Maratos, 2000). All group members actively engage in treatment processes, but the conductor is responsible for monitoring and maintaining the boundaries of the group and facilitating the processes of clarification, translation, and interpretation. The conductor should resist being tempted to give personal information to patients and should not violate the boundaries of the group in ways that impede the development of the group and the individuals within it (Sharpe, 2005). Further descriptions of this model can be found in Roberts and Pines (1991).

Dreamtelling as a request for containment: three uses of dreams in group therapy.

This article is an attempt to develop a coherent, unified, and consistent conceptualization of dreaming and dreamtelling in the clinical setting. Dreams told in a therapeutic setting are challenging events: fantastically rich in content, but often overwhelming in their implications for peoples' relationships. When told in therapy groups, dreams provide additional challenges for all participants. Learning to work with dreams not only enhances understanding of unconscious intrapsychic and group processes, but may also have a strong impact on the therapeutic culture and working relationships in the group. After differentiating dreaming from dreamtelling, I briefly describe three uses of dreams in groups-the classical "informative" and more familiar "formative" uses, and a new perspective that focuses on the "transformative" aspects of a dream told. According to this perspective, a dream told has an interesting past, an important present, and a worthwhile future because of its interpersonal, intersubjective influence on the dreamer-audience relationship.

Developing partnership promotes peace: group psychotherapy experiences.

Partnerships are often optimal processes for interpersonal growth. The ability to have and keep a partner in mind should, therefore, be thought about and learnt. Although reciprocity, some symmetry, and mutual give and take are important aspects of partnerships, this article emphasizes a partners ability to process difficulties for the other as an aid to growth. The containment and elaboration of distress in partnerships is discussed using three examples of such potential relationships. The emotional beginning of a partnership, whether starting from love, working relationship or from hate, is the focus of the article. Individual, dyadic, and group aspects as separation-individuation and containment processes are described as contributing to partnership-building. The ability of a therapy group to process splitting and projecting phenomena are discussed. Co-therapists seem to have to work through painful conflicts between themselves to develop the therapists' containment abilities inside a functional partnership. Supervision may help process these emotional hardships. Within families, mothers could contribute to a better processing of their sons violence shared through infant dreams, which represent an effort to cope with inner and outer aggression. Growth-promoting aspects of dream telling as potential partnerships in families and groups are discussed. Finally, partnership building between hating foes is exemplified by the efforts made by participants in Israeli and Palestinian peace dialogues. In groups, interpersonal development may be furthered by helping participants mutually contain and be contained, enabling partnership opportunities to grow after love and sympathy are over.