Complementary Dreams: A Window to the Subconscious Processes of Countertransference and Subjectivity

The British psychoanalysts were the first to be interested in reciprocal and interpersonal interactions of psychotherapy. The Freudian mirror model was progressively questioned in the 1940s and 1950s. Throughout the 1950s, positions and terms were created that either defended or attacked the use of subjectivity and countertransference in psychodynamic psychotherapy.

The objective of this article is to discuss the participation of the therapist’s subconscious mind, as it is involved in communication with the patient’s subconscious mind during psychodynamic treatment. Specifically, this takes the form of complementary dreams, a clinical phenomenon that I will describe as secondary to the therapist identification with the patient infantile object relations. Complementary dreams will be discussed as a helpful therapeutic tool used to understand the subjective communication that happened between patient and therapist in two separate cases. Complementary dreams will be presented as a helpful therapeutic instrument in containing countertransference enactment.