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The considerations I am going to make here are motivated by my wish to work on an idea regarding basic psychic functioning. To this end, I will use the metapsychologic foundations of dream, with its hallucinatory corollary, and transference, as they seem to meet the need to find a minimum common denominator that accounts for this kind of exploration. Starting from the theory of dream, as Freud (1900) presents it in the seventh chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams, I aim to examine the relationship between the dreamer's psychic functioning and the concepts of transference and hallucination. Finally, by focussing on the concept of negative hallucination described by Green in The Work of the Negative (1993), I am going to explore the difference between dream hallucination and psychotic hallucination.
In this paper transference is considered in terms of transference on a representation or on a thinking process, such as, for example, the day's residues of dreams. Unlike some authors (see, for example, Etchegoyen, 1986), I think that there are not any real differences between the meaning of transference as we usually view it — understood as an inadequate affect for the person and the current situation upon which a transference of investment is done — and a transference on a representation. In fact, I believe that one notion encompasses intimately and metapsychologically the other. As I will analyse later, to think of a cathected transference without the mediation of a representation is quite misleading: such a transference would belong to the realm of psychosis.
Before continuing, though, I believe it is helpful to remind that for Freud:
the true psychic is unconscious;
the unconscious, under normal conditions, appears only through a transference on a preconscious representation.
To illustrate the process whereby a cathected quantity belonging to a repressed representation is transferred on an innocent representation, as it is the case of day residues, Freud (1900) makes us