So That Our Dreams Will Not Escape Us: Learning to Think Together in Time of War

An instrument to evaluate nightmares, bad dreams and alters

“…The frequency of aggression in those reporting nightmares is about 12% 11 . Dreams with increased vividness, violence and aggression contents and increased motor activity indicate the presence of REM sleep behavior disorders 26 . Impulsive, affective, reactive or hostile aggression is a response to frustrating or threatening event that induces anger and may be associated to sleep-related violence 27 .…”

A Beginning Theory of Action for Community Analysts based on Group Observation, Theories of the Unconscious, and Evolutionary Psychology

“…Chimpanzee and bonobo social groups have evolved, as have we, to develop crucial structures for conflict resolution, for mutual caring and for creating clear dominance hierarchies, often dependent on individuals' personalities and on the interventions of central personalities who side with or against the putative leader, lending him strength or encouraging him to back down (De Waal, ; Wrangham, McGraw, De Waal, & Heltne, ) To participate in group life in this manner, humans have evolved a kind of social intelligence that theorists such as Daniel Stern (Stern et al, ) and Jay Greenberg () see as forming a particular aspect of the procedural unconscious, enabling even infants to discern basic intentions and motivations of others (Tomasello, ). When community psychoanalysts work at strengthening mentalizing capacities in communities (Bragin, ; Twemlow and Sacco, ) they are helping these groups to enlist and develop their members' capacities for social intelligence unimpeded by competing regressive agendas.…”

“…Where Twemlow's efforts build on existing community structures, Martha Bragin () writes about the creation of new stabilizing environments following the devastation of war. In thinking through the structures for such environments, she writes about the essential need for victims of violence to overcome disorganizing feelings of badness by offering them the possibility of engaging in reparative activity: “When they could do good things, feel good about what they did, they could begin to feel able to tolerate, to some small degree, awareness of the destruction that they had experienced and participated in” (Bragin, , p. 130). Opportunities for reparative activity were thus embedded in the type of educational program that Bragin worked to create for children traumatized by war experiences with the Ministry of Education and Sports in Uganda.…”

The Impact of Social Hierarchies on Efforts at Organizational Change: Comparing Two Approaches from the Tavistock Institute for Human Relations

“…Those who consult from this perspective often offer consultation to mental health or professional organizations, usually with in‐depth, interpretive experiences of the powerful forces encountered within regressed, unstructured groups. Community analysts working from this approach and developing its ideas further include: Vamik Volkan (, ) Bruce Sklarew (Sklarew, Handel, & Ley, ; Sklarew, Krupnick, Ward‐Wimmer, & Napoli, ) and Martha Bragin (, ), who address incomplete mourning, fantasies about and enactments of violent experiences, and the intergenerational transmission of trauma within families, groups and cultures.…”