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THINKING OF THE INTERVIEW as if it were a dream has facilitated my work, particularly with regressed patients. This brief communication focuses especially on two topics, (1) the clinical utility of assuming that the day residue of the imaginary dream, the interview, arises from the unresolved transference issue of the previous interview or interviews, and (2) a function of the dream that is served at times by the interview, the discharge of affects and mental contents.
Genetically, the analytic hour is an altered hypnotic situation (Jones, 1953) ; (Levin, 1955a) and patients equate the hypnotic state with being asleep (Freud, 1886). Lewin (1954) noted that the wish of the patient in the hypnotic situation to be put to sleep was supplemented by the wish to associate freely in the analytic situation. He (1955b) came to regard what happens on the couch as being both like a neurosis and like the dream. Lewin's seminal studies of the dream and some regressed patients influenced heavily the development of my therapeutic techniques (Lewin, 1932), (1946), (1950), (1953a), (1953b).
Freud (1900) found intrinsic connections between the structure of the dream and psychoses, analogies pointing to their being essentially akin, and applied the topographical hypothesis to the phenomenon of regression in both instances. Countless observers have discussed the similarities and differences in the structures of dreams and psychoses and psychic processes facilitating the merging of dream and psychosis (Bion, 1962a) ; (Freud, 1907) ;