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An unusual type of transference is based on the dream screen. This type of transference appears as a long-lived, durable intrapsychic misen-scène, analagous to a dream screen, upon which other transferences are visualized and experienced. The manifest content of the intrapsychic mise-en-scène is drawn from aspects of the analyst or his surround while the latent content is based on a soothing preoedipal relationship. After reviewing Lewin's ideas on dreaming and the dream screen, I will describe a clinical case that demonstrates this type of transference and will then discuss it from several theoretical perspectives.
Lewin (1955) compares the analytic session to the dream. The manifest dream content matches the session content, and the day residue corresponds to the preceding analytic session residue. In both, a latent content is to be deciphered. The good analytic session resembles the successfully interpreted dream, since in each the latent content surfaces in a discussible way. Both occur in a recumbent pose with limited attention to outside stimulation. One gauge of the depth of the analysand's regression is his closeness to a sleeping state. Lewni (1954) has suggested that a result, and possibly a motive, of interest in ego psychology has been to rouse the analysand, nipping off the more regressive and primary process mental life of sleep in favor of the more clearly ordered secondary process focus of the awakened analysand.
Lewin stresses the importance of the deeply regressive aspects of the dream and of the analytic session. He cites Freud's (1900) remark that dreaming is motivated by the wish to sleep as leading to Freud's (1915)