Discussion

It affords me a great deal of pleasure and stimulation to discuss Harold Kelman's paper. There is much in his approach, especially in its open-endedness, that I share. Both of us are part of a large and growing body of analysts who, in working with dreams and other biographical data of patients, work without the limiting constructs of sexuality and other instincts as the prime molders and movers of the personality. During the development of psychoanalysis,

much of man's symbolic expression, especially his dream life, was in a sense pre-empted in substantiating the theories constructed to explain his behavior and subjective experience. Extensive work remains to be done to reclaim, so to speak, these symbolic realms in the pursuit of dynamic understanding and its clinical application. It is in this pursuit that much of the value of Kelman's present paper lies. He expresses tersely his underlying dynamic and clinical orientation when he says, “… every dream and each symbol pattern that makes it up is unique to its context.”

Before proceeding, however, to the clinical considerations which form the burden of my remarks, I wish to take issue with Dr. Kelman concerning two statements on the nature of dreaming. In one of these he includes in his definition of dreaming that it is “communication to … others.” This I believe it is most certainly not. Some of the outstanding quality of the feeling and recalling and conceptualizing during sleep is that it is not communication. Remembered, related, explored in the waking state, the dream may form the basis of communication, but it lacks this aspect while it is an experience in sleep. Much psychic activity that might arise in the milieu of sleeping may occur also in our waking state, but from all this we select out and order for the very purpose of making a communication. During sleep the absence of necessity to communicate determines in part the strange disjunctiveness of the dream experience.

Dr. Kelman also says that “dreaming i