Response to Commentaries

I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude both to Bonnie Litowitz for accepting my case presentation for publication in JAPA and to the five colleagues who have provided their deeply engaged and much appreciated commentaries. In many respects this process of presentation and forthright collegial discussion is in keeping with the process that was engaged within the two workshops (held in and ) in which the case material was initially presented.

Freud and other analysts have elucidated the intimate relationship between patients’ dreams and underlying traumatic experiences. However, the process of analyzing dreams and working through those experiences in various phases of the analysis has rarely been addressed in the analytic literature.

The purpose of this presentation has been to highlight the working through of the patient's traumatic experiences by understanding and interpreting dreams in successive phases of the analysis and to do this in concert with a clear appreciation of the evolving transferences and countertransferences.

Briefly, the model of dream analysis that informed this analytic process involved an integration of both Freud's early model centering on the dreamwork, which he considered “the essence of dreaming” (Freud 1900, p. 650), and his later model of traumatic dreams as lacking dreamwork (Freud 1920; for further discussion of these two models, see Levy 2009, ). Relying on this integrated model and working with the patient's dreams allowed me to try to gauge Anne's response to the analytic interventions—whether they were helpful and advanced the analytic process or whether they were unhelpful and blocked the analytic process.

In attending to Anne's dreams I reflected on the multiple meanings of the manifest dream, seeing each dream as both revealing and disguising the patient's traumatic experiences. This reflection also helped me learn from the patient about the various influences, until then unrecognized, I had on her experience of the analytic