Discussion1

IT IS A SPECIAL PLEASURE TO BE asked to comment on a paper which is so admirable. However, for a discussant, its excellence also creates a special problem. After all, what more is there to say?

Fortunately I also have another response as well, one which permits more extended discussion. That response is my conviction

that the approach towards work with dreams that is implied in this paper, though it is not fully suggested, let alone completely developed, can be carried even farther, and can enrich the analysis even while eschewing both the "cohesive narrative" approach and the "analytic" breakdown of the classical free associational methods.

Before considering these further applications of Dr. Aron's work, let me step back a bit and survey his achievement. He has pinpointed several major threads and controversies that have developed in the almost 90 years since The Interpretation of Dreams(Freud, 1900) —no mean task, that, in itself, to find those consistencies in the babel of voices. He has shown both their historical antecedents and their contemporary relevances. His discussions of primary and secondary process; of manifest and latent dream content; of changes, developments and revisions in metapsychology and in psychoanalytic theory itself, are informed and skillful. He shows simply and clearly how current divergences from classical thinking about dreams continue to have relevance for that classical thinking, and vice-versa; for example, contemporary fascination with secondary process aspects of dreams seems to have given impetus to modifications of the classical view of the dream as solely