Commentary on Levy and Finnegan

It is both a privilege and a challenge to discuss an analytic case presented in such detail. I particularly welcome the opportunity to comment on the treating author's reliance on the analysis of dream material as crucial both to his understanding of the patient and to her progress at various stages of the analysis. In my comments I want to avoid any extrapolation from whether I agree or not with the author's reliance on dreams as a way of anchoring himself to his vision of what psychoanalysis required of this dyad, in this particular case, to a measure of my view of the importance of dreams in psychoanalyses more generally. I emphasize this distinction because I believe that the analyst in Anne's case was consistently distracted by his interest in analyzing her dreams, thereby failing to consider important aspects of her character as it interacted and clashed with his own. So while I attempt to elucidate my impressions of this analysis and the importance accorded the patient's many dreams, I need to clarify that my questioning of dream interpretation in this particular analysis indicates only my belief that close attention to dreams may distract both analyst and patient from attending to important dynamics in the treatment.

An overview of my perspective on this particular analytic dyad is important in understanding my doubts about the emphasis on dreams in this case. We have to begin with what I see as a considerable gap between the two participants in this analysis. The analyst is clearly a believer in dreams as the “royal road to the unconscious.” He is also a believer in the essential nature of free association and the need to associate to all “dream elements” and for the patient to always strive to say what is going through her mind. While he recognizes that Anne has had serious periods of depression-like regression, he seems not to interpret this as indicating a serious character disorder, one that would require his deviation from technical and theoretical posi