“The Light Militia of the Lower Sky”: The Deeper Nature of Dreaming and Phantasying

Sharing Alien States and Experiences through Dreams: Working with Adolescents on the Autism Spectrum

“…When the young man reported his first dream about himself and his friends being abducted by aliens, he spoke, as the co-leader wrote in the process notes, "for the first time in a confident, projecting voice." Psychoanalysts and psychodynamically oriented psychologists know the answer: that dreams allude to powerful experiences and psychic states that we may be unconscious of, but which are never, as Grotstein (2004) remarked, unconscious of us. Freud referred to dreams as the royal road to the unconscious, but the dreams reported by the young patients on the spectrum revealed not so much their unconscious as psychic states that could only be expressed in the transitional space of a dream, the space where not-me experiences and states of being can be named and shared with others.…”

The adaptive function of fantasy: A proposal from the perspective of control-mastery theory.

“…Philip Bromberg (2008) claimed that, by analyzing their fantasies, patients become able to fit with reality in a healthier way. Additionally, Grotstein (2004, 2009) considered phantasies central for understanding, accepting, and adapting to reality; and Robert Emde (1995) defined fantasies as expressions of expectations, intentions, planning, and goal-oriented activities with the aim of mastering internal and external reality and adapting to the environment. This modern view of fantasy is also supported by Ethel Spector Person (1995) who claimed that fantasies and sexual fantasies are often adaptive and that they give indications about the representations of oneself and of others, providing key information about one’s inner and external world.…”

“…From a Kleinian/Bionian point of view, James Grotstein (2004Grotstein ( , 2009 suggested that, "All defense mechanisms themselves constitute unconscious phantasies about the interrelationship between internal objects, and between them and the self" (Grotstein, 2009, p. 159). According to Grotstein, it is central to develop "a phantasy (dream) about impersonal truth in order to accept and adjust to the personal realities (inner and outer) that confront us" (Grotstein, 2009, p. 152).…”

“…According to Grotstein, it is central to develop "a phantasy (dream) about impersonal truth in order to accept and adjust to the personal realities (inner and outer) that confront us" (Grotstein, 2009, p. 152). Grotstein underlined how each psychopathology may be caused by a nonadaptive capacity to fantasize related to an inadequate alpha function (Bion, 1962;Grotstein, 2004Grotstein, , 2009. Therefore, if Freud (1899) stated that dreaming is the royal road to the unconscious, the modern Kleinian/Bionian psychoanalytic approach suggests that "dreams-that is, phantasies-are the unconscious" (Grotstein, 2009, p. 154) and that psychological health depends on the capacity to fantasize/dream reality.…”

The Mystery of Analytical Work: Weavings from Jung and Bion by Sullivan, Barbara Stevens

“…In ‘The creative unconscious and the Self’ Sullivan makes links between Bion's O and Jung's collective unconscious in a convincing series of illustrations which provide fertile ground for further research. She notes Grotstein's (2004) acknowledgment of the creative unconscious she is describing, rare in the psychoanalytic literature. De Masi (2000) like Andrade de Azevedo (2000) quoted by Sullivan (p. 49) also attempts to delineate different models of the unconscious within a psychoanalytic spectrum and notes Bion's view of the unconscious as a function not a space for ‘depositing the repressed’.…”