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IN VIEW OF THE FACT THAT PATIENTS have been talking about their dreams and analysts writing about them for the best part of a century, it is striking that very few analysts have wished to write about their patients' dreams of them. The Chicago Psychoanalytic Index, for example, documents that analysts have been prolifically interested in their patients' dreams about beer, cakes, rings and razors but over the past fifty years there are perhaps no more than a dozen papers about dreams of the analyst, and a number of those mention the significance of such dreams only peripherally. Analysts on the whole are not noted for their reluctance to come forward with ideas about the meaning of clinical data, so the apparent dearth of interest in our patients' dreams of us is worthy of note. Freud (1923) in a paper concerned with the practical implications of working with dreams pointed out that the manifest content of patients' dreams is necessarily influenced by occurrences in the analysis itself, and that it is no disgrace when this happens. Why, therefore, have dreams of the analyst proved a relatively uninviting area for comment and exploration? It is tempting to speculate and since, as Oscar Wilde said, "The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it, " allow me briefly to speculate.
Freudian drive theory requires that dreams be seen as compromise formations, along with jokes, symptoms and parapraxes. As a result of the dream work, unacceptable instinctual impulses are able to elude the dream censor and find limited discharge or expression. This model also requires that each dream be seen as made up of latent content, the hidden instinctual depths, and manifest content, the story the dreamer remembers and tells to us. The latter is a disguise and is useful only in as far as it may