Transference, Dreaming, and Unconscious Communication

Semester and Year Offered: 3rd Semester; 2nd Year

Course Coordinator and Team: Prof. Ashok Nagpal, Prof. Honey Oberoi Vahali

Email of course coordinator: rachana[at]aud[dot]ac[dot]in

Pre-requisites: familiarity with basic psychoanalytic concepts, in particular the topographical model of the mind.

Aim: This course will help the student to “feel and think” through the unconscious routes of communication while foregrounding how transference and dreaming are furthering healing processes in the clinical context, as in life in general too.

Course Outcomes: On successful completion of this course the student will be able to

1. Work with positive transference and negative transference; Become aware of transference patterns while working in cross-cultural, cross-class and cross-caste contexts.
2. Develop a sense of the ongoing transferences and relating them to the life of the patient, patterns of transference in borderline patients and states of psychosis.
3. Appreciate the importance of attending to the patient’s free association through the analyst’s/psychotherapist’s reveries, free floating and evenly suspended attention.

Brief description of modules/ Main modules:

Module 1: Transference: Listening to the rhythms of one’s counter-transference: explorations into the notion of counter-transference and its evolving meaning, as well as a glimpse of specific forms of counter-transference with specific patient groups.

Module 2: Dreaming and Dream-Work: Freudian reflections on dreams and processes of dream interpretation. Relationship between Dreams, symptoms, creativity and the unconscious, Dream as a universal psychic activity.

Module 3: Unconscious Communication: reflections on symptoms, dreams, jokes, and slips as productions of the unconscious; Discussion of Freud’s writings on communication between the patient’s and the analyst’s unconscious

Assessment Details with weights: Written - 50% ; Viva - 50%

Reading List:

• Bollas, C. (1996). Cracking Up: the work of Unconscious Experience. Psychology Press.
• Freud, S., & Strachey, J. (1991). The interpretation of dreams. London: Penguin Books.
• Green, A. (2005). Psychoanalysis: A Paradigm for Clinical Thinking. Free Association Books.
• Searles, H. (1994). My Work with Borderline Patients. Jason Aronson Publishers
• Searles, H. (1999). Countertransference and Related Subjects. International Universities Press.
• Ogden. T (1999). Reverie and Interpretation. London: Karnac Books.