In our upcoming Colloquium, we will gather in conversation around Brent Willock’s (Canada) paper, “On Dreaming, Parasomnia, Dream Enactment, and Murder” (2022), recipient of the Gradiva Award. The discussion offers an opportunity to engage with a text that is at once clinically daring and theoretically generative.

We selected this paper for its relevance to foundational concerns in relational psychoanalysis: the interplay of mind and body, the co-construction of meaning, and the emergence of dissociated or unmentalized experience in action. At the same time, the article extends beyond conventional clinical discourse, inviting dialogue with justice system, neurobiology, trauma studies, and questions of agency and responsibility.

This productive tension—between the familiar and the unthinkable—is what makes the paper particularly rich for shared inquiry and discussion.