A major part of the analyst's task is to discover the basis for the patient's misidentification of his present life situation with significant but threatening events of his earlier life, now repressed and inaccessible to conscious recall. Reconstructing the patient's history is a crucial step in this process of discovery, but the dynamic relation between the present and the past must be reconstructed as well.

The structure of the manifest dream contains the key to this relation. The imagery of the dream is a composite of experiential materials drawn from important drive-related events of the present and the past. The complex formed by the manifest dream and the patient's associations provides the analyst with data about both of these distinct sets of drive-related experiences.