The Manifest Content of the Dream

Samuel D. Lipton introduced the panel with the following words: "In the preface to his book Basic Theory of Psychoanalysis, Robert Waelder makes some statements which are relevant to this panel discussion. He states that two of his three goals in writing his book are to combat misunderstandings of psychoanalysis and thereby to help conserve what we have inherited and to help to discover the most promising avenues of advancement.

The aim of advancing our knowledge requires no explanation, but the question of conservation merits some comment. As Waelder points out, scientific achievements can be lost, and change does not always men progress. Psychoanalytic theory is always in jeopardy because it arouses resistances from which no one is exempt. Expanding briefly on this idea, psychoanalysis is peculiarly vulnerable to attack. We are constantly being offered, if not deluged with, ideas that are designated as advances, and we constantly have to test them against our proved theories. This is an arduous task and may gain less recognition than the advancement of so-called new ideas. At times the most meticulous and scholarly defense of analytic theory is unjustly thought of as doctrinaire, and I think it is unfortunate that so much of the necessary constant formulation of analytic theory is relegated to undergraduate teaching and that cogent reformulations are not more prominent in our meetings and in the literature.

The paradoxical problem of integrating advancement and conservation specifically confronts this panel. Perhaps it is more in relation to the psychology of dreams than to other areas that we have acquired definitive understanding from Freud. Here particularly we are justified in viewing any basic modification of theory with caution and skepticism. On the other hand, we are obliged to review any new idea objectively. In recent years there has been evidence of renewed interest in the manifest content of the dream and an effort to exploit it further than