Presenter: Peter Philippson​

We begin our 2026–2027 season with dreaming — a suitable mode of approaching our tumultuous world that is filled with hopes and despair, possibilities and constraints.

Description:

In this presentation, I will give an overview of how I understand dreams and different ways I have been working with them as a therapist. I propose that we understand dreams primarily as artworks, as improvised post-modern theater pieces written, directed, and played by us, with ourselves also primarily as audience. A dream tells us that we are at heart creative, artistic beings. What energizes our dreaming is usually something that is unfinished and pushing for further expression when the censoring actions of our everyday waking lives are put aside in sleep or dozing.

I then explore how this links with the two major ways of working therapeutically with dreams in Gestalt therapy: as projections of splits in the personality (Fritz Perls) and as retroflections of actions and contacts that could be expressed in the world (Isadore From). I also discuss how dreams can be seen in a wider way as an expression of field, rather than only individual, processes, and where interpretation of dreams is useful or not (I see interpretations mostly as simplifications of the artistic richness of a dream). I illustrate each of these approaches with reference to the different ways of working with a fairly common dream. I emphasize that dreams, like all good artworks, are multilayered, and will show different aspects of themselves depending on how they are approached. I will also present a way of working with dreams that I have developed that collapses the strict separation between waking and dreaming.

I will work with one or two dreams if people are interested, and there will be time for discussion.

Biography:

Peter Philippson, MSc (Gestalt psychotherapy), is a UKCP registered Gestalt psychotherapist and trainer, a Teaching and Supervising Member of the Gestalt Psychotherapy & Training Institute UK, a founder member of Manchester Gestalt Centre, a full member of the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy, a Senior Trainer for GiTa (Slovenia), a faculty member at IPsiG (Turin), an advisory board member for the Center for Somatic Studies, a founder member of IG-FEST, and a guest trainer for many training programs internationally. He has been working as a psychotherapist for 39 years. He is also a past president of the Association for the Advancement of Gestalt Therapy. Peter is the author of Self in Relation (Gestalt Journal Press), The Emergent Self (Karnac/UKCP), Gestalt Therapy: Roots and Branches (Karnac), and many chapters and articles. He is a teacher (4th dan) and student of traditional aikido.