Conference

Gordon Lawrence’s Social Dreaming Matrix suggests that our dreams are communal, rather than personal. Arising from the social unconscious and belonging to the community, dreams can offer guidance, healing, and problem solving for a community of dreamers. I had such a dream. It included many symbols, some incomprehensible to me, yet the dream revealed a pathway for communal healing. The dream inspired the co-creation of the International Institute for Trauma Studies (IITS), an online immersive trauma training and certification program for graduate students and clinicians in war time Ukraine. IITS is a scalable contemporary psychoanalytic group approach to communal trauma for the treatment and prevention of war related depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and transgenerational trauma. This is a story of “Dreaming into Being”: ordinary citizens working together to create the extraordinary, an international training center and outpatient clinic for Ukrainian families, children and combatants. The paper also cites scholarly contributors in the current resurgence of community psychoanalysis and thinkers in social and phenomenological psychoanalysis.