Dream Treatment in Addiction Recovery
It’s December 31st 2018.
I’m thinking about a specific aspect of a recent essay on St. George and the Dragon and how it can help us understand Jungian psychology and other psychodynamic theories.
Now is the time to explain the aspect further. It’s the study I mentioned that will help us apply these theories to concrete, clinical examples.
If you’re keeping score, it’s what I described in alchemical language as “the crucible.”
In brief, I’ll explain the study design.
Study participants will be selected from a pool of existing attendees from the Pittsburgh Smart Recovery meetings that I facilitate and from a public call for volunteers.
It’s an intervention experiment conducted among individuals with a substance abuse disorder to assess the effectiveness of a psychodynamic dream treatment to decrease the use of addictive substances.
In short, it’s testing if a psychodynamic dream analysis will impact abstinence from addictive behavior.
My hypothesis is that participants who receive the treatment will self report higher rates of abstinence.
There will be a total of 50 participants in the study. 25 participants will receive a Smart Recovery treatment and 25 will receive a Smart Recovery treatment and a dream analysis treatment.
I’ll use a difference of means test to compare the effectiveness of both groups. A 0.1 level of significance will be used.
Since this is the first study I’ve ever designed, I still have a lot to learn.
However, I am strongly committed to as much scientific rigour as possible and in that spirit, I’m publishing preregistration before officially commencing with the study.
I’ve summarized much of this document above, but you can find the official version by clicking here.
My goal with publishing this document is to be as clear as possible with what I’m studying and what I expect to find. This transparency can help mitigate potentially dubious incentives for researchers to publish data that makes the study or the researcher look successful.
I’m a strong believer that commitments to things like preregistration can help address issues like the replicability crisis and be an overall boon to the social sciences.
My next step in the project is to recruit volunteers. Cohort 1 will begin when the first 10 volunteers commit to the study. It will commence until all 5 cohorts complete 12 weeks of treatment.
I will not be updating the blog on this study specifically until I publish the results. However, will be updating regularly unpacking what the specifics of both the Smart Recovery and dream treatment actually look like in practice as well as continuing our exploration into Jungian, depth, and psychodynamic theory.
