Circumambulating Chiron’s Dreams: Depth Psychological Illumination of Unconscious Material in a Therapeutic Community

Abstract

For professionals who work directly with clients who hear voices or suffer delusions, compulsions, or brain trauma, interactions can be taxing. In a residential therapeutic community, living and working with clients around the clock can add another layer of intensity to the professional role. Even with effective professional supervision and support, unconscious needs, desires, conflicts, and aspirations among the caregiving team can remain unrecognized and therefore unattended to. Moreover, depth psychological interventions for clinicians and other caregiving professionals are not common in the contemporary mental health environment. This study observes what happens when caregivers—from administrators to household, facilities, and kitchen staff; clinicians and nurses; work program and residential support staff—engage unconscious material through attending to their nighttime dreams. The research documents and analyzes employee reflections on their experience of tending their dreams, and whether and how tending dreams deepens understanding of their selves, their lives, and their work.