Houston Psychoanalytic Society
Online Evening Lecture
The Use of Dreams
in Creative Psychoanalytic Transformations
Marilyn Charles, PhD, ABPP
Thursday, March 6, 2025
7:30PM – 9:00PM Central Time

Live via Zoom
*Pre-Registration required for Zoom invitation
This event will not be recorded

Registration Fees
HPS Active Member: Free
HPS Student Member: Free
Non-Member: $30

1.5 CME/CEU/CE Credits

Instructional Level: Intermediate
REGISTER NOW
Nowhere do we see our psychic struggles so clearly as in the world of dreams, where images call to our attention the emotionally-charged, aesthetically-driven aspects of experience, and patterned relationships help reveal aspects of our stories that have remained hidden. Dream images afford metaphors embedded in the person's own experiences and history, providing a grounding through which the person might more fully discover themselves. Following Bion’s suggestion that the purpose of psychoanalysis is to enhance the capacities for feeling, thinking and dreaming, Bionian field theorists conceptualize psychoanalytic work as a dreaming process through which dream elements become elaborated into meaningful symbols. Working with dreams allows analyst and analysand to avoid becoming ensconced in conceptions that might obscure the issues at hand, but rather to learn to play together with possibilities. This process affords sufficient displacement to allow condensed, highly personalized meanings to formulate themselves into symbols and characters that can be recognized, worked with, and integrated into narratives through which personal transformations might occur.  

LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After attending the program in its entirety, attendees will be able to:
  1. Describe two ways that attention to dreams can benefit clinical practice.
  2. Describe one benefit of a field theory approach to dreams.
Presenter

Marilyn Charles, PhD, ABPP is a staff psychologist at the Austen Riggs Center, a psychoanalyst in private practice in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and Chair of the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society (APCS). Affiliations include Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis (CCP); Universidad de Monterrey (UDEM); Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis; and Harvard Medical School. She is a contributing editor of Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society, and a member of the editorial boards of numerous other psychoanalytic journals. She is actively engaged in mentoring, creating professional opportunities, and promoting community involvement and socially relevant research. Research interests include creativity, psychosis, resilience, reflective function and the intergenerational transmission of trauma. Marilyn is also an artist, a poet, and a writer, and a former member of the Stockbridge Dream Group. She has presented her work nationally and internationally, publishing over 100 articles and book chapters and five books: Patterns: Building Blocks of Experience; Constructing Realities: Transformations Through Myth and Metaphor; Learning from Experience: a Guidebook for Clinicians; Working with Trauma: Lessons from Bion and Lacan; and Psychoanalysis and Literature: The Stories We Live; and five edited volumes: Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis; Fragments of Trauma and the Social Production of Suffering (with Michael O’Loughlin); Women and Psychosis and Women and the Psychosocial Construction of Madness (with Marie Brown); and The Importance of Play in Early Childhood Education: Psychoanalytic, Attachment, and Developmental Perspectives (with Jill Bellinson). Forthcoming from APA Press: Trauma, Identity, and Development: A Clinician’s Guide.


REFERENCES

Charles, M. (2019). The dream and the image: Creative transformations in psychoanalytic space. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 79(2): 174-195. 


Koslowski, M., de Haas, M.-P. & Fischmann, T. (2023). Converging theories on dreaming: Between Freud, predictive processing, and psychedelic research. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 17: 108177. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2023.108177.


Roesler, C. Dream interpretation and empirical dream research – an overview of research findings and their connections with psychoanalytic dream theories. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 104(2): 301-330.


IMAGE of dreamer from Can Stock

Agenda

7:30 - 7:35 pm Introduction

7:35 - 8:30 pm Presentation by Dr. Charles

8:30 - 9:00 pm Presenter-led question and answer session

Disclosures
ACCME Accreditation Statement
This activity has been planned and implemented in accordance with the accreditation requirements and policies of the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) through the joint providership of American Psychoanalytic Association and Houston Psychoanalytic Society. The American Psychoanalytic Association is accredited by the ACCME to provide continuing medical education for physicians.

AMA Credit Designation Statement
The American Psychoanalytic Association designates this Live Activity for a maximum of 1.5 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit(s)™. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.

Disclosure Statement
The APsA CE Committee has reviewed the materials for accredited continuing education and has determined that this activity is not related to the product line of ineligible companies and therefore, the activity meets the exception outlined in Standard 3: ACCME's identification, mitigation and disclosure of relevant financial relationship. This activity does not have any known commercial support. 
Houston Psychoanalytic Society is approved by the American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for psychologists. Houston Psychoanalytic Society maintains responsibility for this program and its content.

HPS, through co-sponsorship with the Center for Psychoanalytic Studies, also offers approved CEUs for Texas state-approved social workers, licensed professional counselors, and marriage and family therapists.
1302 Waugh Dr. #276, Houston, TX 77019
(713) 429-5810
Facebook  Twitter  Linkedin