Working with dreams which take on a landmark significance

This paper examines dreams that become landmarks in analytic work, opening new pathways for understanding a patient's internal world. Through the analysis of a young patient whose sessions oscillated between despair, omnipotence, and intense claustrophobic anxieties, it shows how dreams provided a shared space for the development of imaginative conjectures. A central dream-structured as a film perceived from multiple points of view-revealed the patient's unstable contact-barrier and her confusion between psychotic and non-psychotic modes of experience. The paper shows how this dream provided a perspective from which to observe the mental functioning of the patient, changing the initial atmosphere of despair into a possibility of exploration and thinking, becoming a landmark in the development of the analytic process. A supervisory vignette further illustrates how approaching dreams as a way of understanding the architecture of the mind could transform a negative therapeutic atmosphere into one of curiosity and collaboration.