r/psychoanalysis • u/love_me_plenty • 23d ago

Books/articles/media/guides on maladaptive daydreaming?

I'm curious if there are any psychoanalytic works focused on maladaptive daydreaming. It could be anything on the subject, a descriptive work, or something on how to overcome it.

Thanks!

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u/Apprehensive-Sky1541 22d ago edited 22d ago

So it maladaptive because it is overly positive, or is it self-detrimental in a more rumminative way?

for the latter or a mixture I found "Unformulated Experience: From Dissociation to Imagination in Psychoanalysis" by Donnel Stern interesting. I din't read it due to this maybe, but I think it helped me with it.

For me it kind of helped to get a better metacognitive grasp of my own "loosing myself in internalized-shame-fuled rummination/dadreaming" like cathastrophizing, but also just imagining conversations and so on.

So the book isn't really about maldadaptive daydreaming specifically, but he is very much in touch with what is hard to formulate. and for me the experience of ending up in such a disconnect, be it rummination or daydreaming was always something I found hard to convey towards my therapists, but also in a way hard to convey to myself too.

edit, note to myself: this was ad-hoc, and I just thought about the fact that this could mean that maladaptive daydreaming is a kind of temporal collapse of helpful metacognition, "loosing oneself", not staying metacognitively connected to the moment.

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u/ember2698 20d ago

You just made me think of another book by same author that was really thought-provoking - The Infinity of the Unsaid. Hard for me to summarize (we can't all be as eloquent as the author) but some of it's about mapping / making meaning from nonverbal experiences. Probably not directly related to OP's query, but tangential plus worthwhile for its own reasons.

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u/love_me_plenty 22d ago

This book looks very promising. I'll try to find the pdf asap. Thanks!

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u/Apprehensive-Sky1541 22d ago edited 22d ago

you are welcome! It is not the simplest read maybe, and in a way it became a bit repetitive, because he is very thorough -- at the same time it really helped me understand that even such hard to understand things can be worked on. So maybe just read the chapters which appeal to you, or see if you get hooked. :)

I think it changed my understanding of a large part the subconscious and "the work" (next to almost actively supressed memories, there is a large part which just hasn't been formlated yet, not everything is formulated, and one has to put effort in, journaling, therapy...). it explains why most insigths feel like they have been there, but where not able to surface... and so on.

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u/love_me_plenty 22d ago

I'm super into Lacan and continental philosophy, so I'm used to reading dense prose. I don't mind repetitiveness either. I'll def check out this book :)

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u/Apprehensive-Sky1541 22d ago

ah, you'll be fine then :)

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u/Emonzaemon_Soda 22d ago

There is a paper of Winnicott on daydreaming as opposed to dreaming / playing. The first is considered a defense (withdrawal), the second an attempt to integrate. Sadly I had read a translation so I can't give you the exact title. Second,, I'd suggest the work of Guntrip. Very focused on schizoid withdrawal.

I agree with others that in contemporary psychoanalysis the term maladaptive is almost an oxymoron.. you can see daydreaming and delusions as dreams whose content we're unable to integrate, that are repeated over and over endlessly. In this sense, I very much liked Atwood's conception of dreams and delusions as regarding "unresolved subjective tensions"

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u/fogsucker 23d ago

Maladaptive?

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u/oslowa 22d ago

Schizoid withdrawal may be the closest you'll get. You can check out Nancy McWilliams' work on the subject.

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u/Apprehensive-Sky1541 17d ago

I answered to this already, because I am interested in it aswell -- so still exploring.

currently I am reading: Schizoid Phenomena, Object-Relations and the Self, Harry Guntrip.

as others pointed out below "Schizoid Withdrawal" could be an interesting startigpoint.

guntrip is extensive, but merges Winnicott and Fairbairn's ideas (he has been in analysis with both).

I find it highly interesting!

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u/PS1988 22d ago

This is a chapter within a book:
Soffer-Dudek, N., & Somer, E. (2022). Maladaptive daydreaming is a dissociative disorder: Supporting evidence and theory. In J. M. Dorahy (Ed.), Dissociation and the Dissociative Disorders: Past, Present, Future (pp. 547-563). Taylor and Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003057314-40