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IT WAS FREUD'S (1901) GREAT ACHIEVEMENT to have elucidated the psychology of dreaming: that "the dream is the dreamer's own psychological activity "1 (author's translation; italics Freud's). That the dreamer's psychological activity is a personal response to the perception of external reality is Freud's first and fundamental conception of dreaming (1900).2 This action-reaction paradigm of the dream was a continuation of the insights gained earlier in the studies of traumatic hysterical phenomena.
In the beginning Freud the clinician turned to investigating psychological reactions to traumatic experiences. Trauma, or more precisely the traumatizing event, occurs in external reality and it can be witnessed. The traumatic reaction to the event is private, communicable, and it can be as varied as the individuals and their life histories. Anna O. reacted with "hysterical phenomena" to traumatizing events in external reality. Anna O. suffered from a number of hysterical symptoms which turned out to be "… 'precipitates' … of emotional experiences [to which] we later gave the name of 'psychical traumas, ' while the particular nature of the symptoms was explained by their relation to the traumatic scenes which were their cause" (Breuer and Freud, 1895d). From these findings Breuer and Freud (1895d) concluded that the persisting, unconscious memory of the trauma—and the strangulated emotions