Dreams and Transference

Every psychoanalytic enterprise must render tribute to Sigmund Freud, who left so many ideas open to further development. Dreams and transference is one of these topics.

At one point Freud emphatically states that the only valid interest one can have toward the manifest dream is that it is the “Royal Road” to that of what we are not conscious, to “the latent dream content,” to which we arrive by the analysis of the events of the dream day and by free associations. He adds (1915, 1917, p. 181) that “It is natural that we should lose some of our interest in the manifest dream…. In general one must avoid seeking to explain one part of the manifest dream by another, as though the dream had been coherently conceived and was a logically arranged narrative.”

Freud was persistent in his search for truth and the range of his enquiry often led him into contradictions left open for later research to clarify. In fact, Freud (1905, pp. 64ff) contradicts his above statements when he interprets the “First Dream” where Spanjaard (1969, p. 224) correctly shows that Freud's ‘interpretation of the superficial and contemporary conflict is identical with the manifest dream content.” Thus, Spanjaard, after Erikson (1954) and other Freudians, returns its indicative value to the manifest dream, which is also true for Fromm (1951, 1979), who followed Freud's method of dream interpretation to reach an ample knowledge of the latent content. It is true that the ideograph of the manifest dream may often seem absurd, confused, incoherent, but it does lead us to the coherent intrinsic logic of what has so far been unconscious to the therapeutic dyad; the latent content becomes clear and precise as the psychoanalytic dialogue progresses.

It is valid to compare the responses to the Rorschach test and the dream since both are valuable indicators of unconscious material; the understanding of either of them requires experience, patience, and close attention. Sometimes the manifest dream allows us to form