Dreamtelling, Relations, and Large Groups: New Developments in Group Analysis

Description

Robi Friedman is an experienced group analyst and clinician specializing in conflict resolution, and in this important collection of his work, he presents his most innovative concepts. Dreamtelling is an original approach to the sharing of dreams with partners or within families, exploring how the dreamer’s unconscious messages can be communicated, and helping to contain emotional difficulties. The book also explains Friedman’s concept relation disorders, which locates dysfunctional behavioural patterns not within intrapsychic issues, but rather as a function of dynamics in group relations. And finally, the book presents the soldier’s matrix, a method for conceptualizing processes in highly stressed organizations and societies which are either under existential threat or pursuing glory. In the process of becoming a soldier’s matrix, subgroups and nations progressively lose shame, guilt and empathy towards perceived enemies and the Other, and every society member embraces a selfless role. Applying this method to training in groups provides an optimal way out of organizational and national crisis. The book will be of great interest to group analysts. It will also appeal to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and clinical psychologists with an interest in conflict resolution. Cover Half Title Series Page Title Copyright CONTENTS Foreword General introduction PART I Dreams and dreamers in relation and some research on dreamtelling in families Introduction to Part I 1 Dreamtelling as a request for containment: three uses of dreams in group therapy 2 The dream narrative as an interpersonal event: research results 3 Using the transpersonal in dreamtelling and conflict PART II Who is sick? About pathology in relations Introduction to Part II 4 Where to look? Supervising group analysis: A relation disorder perspective 5 Individual or group therapy? Indications for optimal therapy 6 Group analysis today: developments in intersubjectivity PART III The soldier’s matrix, or how to live with existential anxieties, trauma and hopes for glory. The encounter with conflict in communities through the sandwich model – a combination between small and large groups to heal society Introduction to Part III 7 A soldier’s matrix: a group-analytic view of societies in war 8 The group sandwich model for international conflict using large groups as a social developmental space 9 Beyond rejection, glory and the soldier’s matrix: the heart of my group analysis Index