Constructive Forces in Dreams

I should like to start my brief contribution to this Round Table by quoting a diagnosis, concerning the members of our own profession, which once was made by Professor John Whitehorn. He was speaking of a professional neurosis among psychiatrists which makes them fix their attention upon the morbid and pathological in the patient, tear the patient to pieces, and pay far too little attention to the constructive forces in him.

These forces are our most powerful ally in therapy, an ally of whose existence not only the patient may remain unaware for some time, but unfortunately the psychoanalyst, too.

Psychoanalysis has had to learn this basic fact. Born in the nineteenth century, a child of the period of enlightenment, it has followed too long the concept that dissecting and debunking is the road to mental health. The analytical X-ray machine has been used indiscriminately against all human emotions. Insufficient distinction has been made between unhealthy and healthy feelings, between sadistic aggression and healthy assertiveness, morbid submissiveness and genuine friendship and love. Affection, love, friendship were mis-diagnosed as aim-inhibited sex drives; moral values were seen as a reaction formation to incestuous impulses. Thus, the analytical X-ray machine often destroyed much healthy tissue, so to speak, together with the diseased. The result was cynicism, and the constructive forces remained immobilized.

“The dream,” said Freud, “is a royal road to the unconscious.” Where this road leads must necessarily depend on what we expect to find at its end; in other words, on our concept of human nature and of unconscious motivation. If the unconscious is considered to contain only irrational wishes for libidinal, aggressive, or destructive satisfaction, then dreams can express no more. An unconscious that harbors no rational, constructive forces cannot be expected to express constructive forces in dreams. We see and stress, however, the existence and unconscious activit