Kohut’s Dreams

Abstract

This chapter provides a close study of Heinz Kohut’s idea of the self-state dream. Dreams have long been of great interest in psychoanalysis. Freud’s theory that distinguished the latent thoughts from the manifest content and privileges the unconscious dimension of dreams has dominated thinking in the field. Although he never wrote a paper or book about dreams, Kohut’s ideas about self-state dreams represent something new to psychoanalytic dream theory. His theory of self-state dreams interprets dreams within a vocabulary of self, noting the dream itself and its relation to self experience. The chapter elaborates the categories of self-state dreams and includes a link to an appendix and a database of all dreams mentioned in Kohut’s writings, along with the dreams of patients whose analysts were in supervision with Kohut and a few other dreams Kohut analyzes in literature and history.