You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The occasions when the patient expresses a number of feelings verbally – “I am anxious, I don't know why.” “I am feeling a bit better, I don't know why.” – may be an expression of an experience such as I suggest takes place when he has a dream. That is to say, he has an emotional experience on which dream-work-α is done so that the emotional experience can be made available, stored for use in consciousness. Ordinarily α operates to enable a conscious emotional experience to be stored in unconsciousness; it just occurs to me that this may be very like the function performed by logic in the elaboration of a scientific deductive system in which premises and derived hypotheses are so arranged that they follow each other.
But how is α related to logic? There are logical dreams, but on the whole they would seem to be rare. Yet the ordinary dream has a logic; it is ‘narrativized’. The patient today said he had had a dream, but in fact could only report disjointed fragments in a way not unlike the ordinary session. (He said, incidentally, that in twenty years' time a new patient might be cured by psychoanalysis in half the time that he is.)
But what else can one say about the construction? Freud assumed that the interpretation, the latent content, was the origin of the dream, and that it had been worked on by the dream-work to produce the dream. I say that the origin is an emotional experience – perhaps even an experience that is emotional and nothing else – and that this is worked on (rationalized?) to produce the dream, the manifest content as we know it, and that it is the analyst who then does the interpretation to produce the so-called latent content. Then what validity or significance is to be attached to this product, the latent content?