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Dream interpretation was at the center of psychoanalytic interest in the first three decades of this century, constituting the royal road to the unconscious. Even though Freud insisted that the meaning of the dream should be sought in its latent content, he early warned against excessive interpretation of dream symbols and underlined the importance of eliciting the patients' associations and taking the total clinical situation into consideration when analysing dream material. He later stated that “a dream is as a rule merely a thought like any other”. Later analysts have expanded and developed both dream theory and psychoanalytic theory in general, which has led to focus on different aspects of both the understanding of dreams and its position in clinical practice. This paper presents some of these aspects concerning the poetic diction in dreams, the integrating and adaptive functions of dreams, implications of the structural theory, the internal world and object relations and the psychoanalytic setting and process. Emphasis is placed on the Kleinian critique of Freud's dream theory which presupposes a well integrated ego, leaving out the impact of what excessive use of primitive defense mechanisms may have on both dreaming and the analytic process in less integrated individuals. The “capacity to dream” and to use “the dream space” has been compared to Winnicotts ideas about a persons capacity to “use an object” and his relationship to “transitional space”. Even though different psychoanalytic “schools” differ in what aspects of dreams and dreaming are emphasized, there are convergent lines.
Dream interpretation is still a major, if not the royal road to a patients' unconscious. There are, however, other roads, an important one consisting of the transference-countertransference pattern as it evolves in the psychoanalytic situation.