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At last I think I see daylight on a point that has baffled me for a long time: what does the psychotic patient think analysis is? Partly an activity that is followed by consequences such as those that attend on events in the realm of physical fact; partly a mental event in which consequences (as they exist in the world of physical reality) do not exist – there are only sequences. In a dream an act appears to have consequences; it has only sequences. What is needed is a spatial model to represent a dream. The verbal description would then be seen as an artefact in which certain elements, in an agglomeration that has no time component and no events that are consequent on other events, are highlighted by the imposition on them of causality and temporality. The capacity to impose on these elements both causality and temporality depends on the existence of a non-psychotic personality. This non-psychotic personality must be capable of (a) frustration, and hence awareness of temporality, (b) guilt and depression, and hence an ability to contemplate causality (since contemplating causes involves the possibility of having to contemplate one's own responsibility for certain events in the chain of causes). The capacity for verbalization is, as I have shown already, itself a function of the depressive position [see ‘Notes on the Theory of Schizophrenia’, read at the Eighteenth International Psychoanalytical Association Congress in London, 1953 (see Volume VI, pp. 73-84)].
One result is that verbal reporting of a dream is only possible when enough work has been done for the patient to be able to tolerate temporality and causality, i.e. frustration and guilt-depression, and the patient is therefore able to produce the artefact we call ‘a dream’ from the ‘agglomeration’ of mental urine and faeces [see ‘Attacks on Linking’, Volume VI, pp. 142-145].