Introduction

“Dreaming: psychoanalysis or neurobiology?” (May 5, 2012) was the third in the “Minding the Gap” series of conferences sponsored by the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute (NYPSI). As initiator and principal organizer of the series, I would like to thank NYPSI for its support of the first three conferences and also extend a special thank you to Mt. Sinai Medical Center and the Pfeffer Center for Neuropsychoanalysis for their assistance in sponsoring this particular meeting, the final event in the year-long celebration of the centenary of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute.

The “Minding the Gap” series is devoted to bringing those of opposing viewpoints on psychoanalysis together in dialogue. The first such conference addressed Relational versus classical perspectives; the second focused on the etiology and treatment of psychosis, that is, the medical versus the psychosocial models of severe mental disorders. The dream conference emanated from the dream theory debate begun some years ago by Allan Hobson and Mark Solms. I will leave it to Drs. Hobson and Solms—and to the eminent dream theorists whose responses to their papers and aspects of their own distinctive research and thinking on dreaming appear here—to argue for and against the primary issues. Suffice it to say by way of introduction that Freud's dream theory was at the center of the controversy from the start. The notion that dreams are “the fulfilment of a wish,” the disguised fulfillment of a wish,” the “disguised fulfilment of a repressed wish,” and the “disguised fulfilment of a repressed, infantile wish” (Freud Museum London, n.d.) was refuted by Allan Hobson some 35 years ago. What Hobson proposed as a replacement theory in the late 1970s was the “activation synthesis” hypothesis: the idea that what causes dreams are physiological processes of the