Defences in dreams: a necessary multiplicity for survival in pieces; clinical reflections

Combining elements of attachment theory and his clinical experience with patients suffering from early trauma, the author shows how, in the analytical setting, imaginative dream work staging primal defense mechanisms contributes to transforming the unconscious dissociation into a conscious conflict. Dream defenses are revealed to be an excellent approach to psychic wounds received in infancy. The reality of primal defense mechanisms and their life-destroying potential should be included in Jungian metapsychology.