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Existentialism, unlike psychoanalysis, as yet has not offered—and, I believe, should not offer—an extensive systematic theory to explain the psychotherapeutic process. This, as well as the fact that existentialism is so many things to so many people, makes it difficult to convey in a meaningful way how existentialism has concretely and specifically influenced my own therapeutic techniques. A brief report of the interpretation of a patient's dream may offer the best possibility for demonstrating this.
However, let us examine a number of presuppositions. I propose, first, to discard the usual assumption that the manifest content of the dream reflects latent thoughts relatively inaccessible to consciousness but revealed through interpretation of the patient's free associations. In other words, let us think of the dream not as if it were an expression or revelation of some more important phenomena otherwise hidden from view; let us assume instead that the overt manifestations of dream life have a unique and valid reality of their own. I propose also to discard the idea that some kind of censorship is responsible for distortion, displacement and symbolization, with the dream being a mere epiphenomenon reflecting more important libidinal drives in conflict with a punitive super-ego. At the same time we will lay aside the concept of the primary process, with its disregard of usual time-space relationships and its concrete pictorialization, as an inferior or more