Mr Bürgin, how do you interpret a dream today?

Child and adolescent psychiatrist Dieter Bürgin opens the conversation with a child as follows: "I don't know you, you don't know me. What would you like me to know about you?"
He does not ask for a dream. Instead, he tries to gain the child's trust and show them that they are not alone with their inner world. A lot of time can pass before the child finally tells a dream.
Dieter Bürgin is a professor emeritus at the University of Basel and now works in his own practice. He wears his pocket watch on a small chain. There is no need to look at it. The muffled sound of a pendulum clock can be heard from a neighbouring room. It has just struck the hour. There is a couch against one wall, behind it a dark armchair. The analyst is sitting in one of them.

A practice like any other?

Nothing in his practice reminds you that children come and go here, no toys, no drawings. And yet the room is inviting. Perhaps it's because of Dieter Bürgin himself. He reminds us a little of the bookseller Karl Koreander from Michael Ende's fairy tale «The Neverending Story». After the eleven-year-old Bastian confesses to stealing a book in the second-hand bookshop, Karl Koreander doesn't want to know anything about it: «You didn't steal this book from me,» he says. On the contrary. He thanks him and wishes to share experiences about Phantásia from time to time.

«The dream is a gift!»

«A child scrutinises exactly who it tells a dream to and what the recipient does with it,» says Dieter Bürgin. «The dream is a gift. If I put a stamp on it, I ruin the gift." A stamp can be to impose your own interpretation of the dream on the child. "That's a bad habit,» says Dieter Bürgin. «A dream can contain symbols, but their meaning cannot be generalised. I try to understand them together with the child.»
Dieter Bürgin listens, observes and thinks his way into the child's fantasies: Which elements does the child emphasise? What ideas does it have? What feelings and behaviour accompany the story and the relationship between the child and the psychoanalyst? Step by step, the two of them work out a meaning for individual parts of the dream that is relevant for the child at that moment.

A tiger as a playmate?

Dieter Bürgin only asks a few questions unless he doesn't understand something. One patient was unable to go to bed normally for a long time, she could only jump. «From the outside, you can see the child jumping. I ask about this kind of behaviour: What's going on? I don't understand why you're jumping.» He finds out: «There's a tiger under the bed. That scares me.»
The obvious thing to do would be to banish the tiger in order to get rid of the symptom quickly. Dieter Bürgin does the opposite: he gives the tiger space so that it can enter the analytical relationship and be worked on. «I don't know what the tiger stands for: Is it the child's imaginary playmate? A part of the child? Would I also remove part of the child by removing the tiger?» This is why the predator remains under the bed - possibly for a long time.
Since Freud founded modern dream interpretation a good 120 years ago, faster methods have been developed to eliminate frightening dreams. So why is Dieter Bürgin looking for the meaning of a dream? What does he hope to find? To explain this, he goes into some detail.

When logical thinking stops ...

Psychoanalysis distinguishes between two types of thinking. The first is primary process thinking, with which the infant is born. It is a primitive way of thinking, characterised by a lack of temporality, spatiality and causality: content can be shifted and condensed at will. This way of thinking corresponds to dream thinking. Secondly, secondary process thinking, logical thinking, develops from around the age of three. This is waking thinking. This is characterised by a linguistic order. This includes structure, temporality, spatiality and causality. Shifts and condensations are not so easily possible here.

Dream formation is a creative act, often not linguistic.

Logical thinking stops during sleep. People can suddenly fly or the grandmother is a collage of mum's clothes, dad's voice and the teacher's hairstyle. Dream formation is a creative act, usually a small scene, sometimes static, usually dynamic, often non-linguistic. The brain never sleeps, but generates thoughts, feelings, desires and intentions 24 hours a day. To prevent us from waking up, dream thinking feigns satisfaction.
We realise very little of what the brain produces day and night. We do not always remember dreams. If we do, they often enter our consciousness in a disguised form. This is where Dieter Bürgin comes in. He differentiates between the dreamed dream, the remembered dream and the narrated dream.

What does today's dream interpretation look like?

Sophia, for example, reports that she enriches her dreams when telling them so that the listener understands them. "Who is Sophia adding to the dream for? In which dialogue does she expand on it? And with what?" he would ask himself, says Dieter Bürgin. «Does she perhaps recognise the feeling of being misunderstood? So the formal becomes more important than the content.»
So there are many factors to consider when interpreting a dream. Eleven-year-old Luis dreamt that his father had died. What does that mean? In ancient times, this dream would probably have been interpreted as a prophecy. Sigmund Freud might have recognised a wish in it. Today's professional dream interpretation distances itself from fixed attributions of meaning. Dieter Bürgin simply says: «I don't know what this dream means either.»
If Luis came to him, he would first ask him: «What do you want me to know about you?»

About the author:

Read more:

• What do dreams mean and how do they come about? Our big dossier text
• Mr Schredl, why do children have nightmares? The sleep researcher provides information on how to get rid of bad dreams.