In lecture XXIX of “The New Introductory Lectures” Freud lamented the disappearance from the International Journal of Psychoanalysis of the section entitled “On Dream Interpretation,” and the fact that “analysts behaved as though there was nothing more to say about dreams, as though there was no more to be added to the theory of dreams.” Now one hundred years since The Interpretation of Dreams it may be useful to consider the fate of the study of dreams in psychoanalysis. I will speak here only as a so-called classical analyst, which in this country means those who continue to adhere to Freud's theories and their subsequent development through the works of Hartmann, Kris, Lowenstein, Arlow, and Brenner. My education has been in what is commonly labeled the American Ego Psychology School and its modification by Brenner leading to Modern Conflict Theory.
Prior to embarking on describing a personal view of the fate of dreams, I would like to say a word about another interest of mine, which is the newly emergent dialogue between psychoanalysts and neuroscientists. I hope that over time new insights will ensue from this important exchange, leading to a better understanding of the three aspects of dream theory elaborated in The Interpretation of Dreams, which is to say, the function of dreams, the meaning of dreams, and the dream as an entry point for research on the workings of the mind-brain. As you know, many theories abound as to the function of dreams. Yet we do not possess a fuller understanding beyond that which Freud said, namely. that the dream serves to protect sleep or to be more precise to protect the “wish” to.
While most dream researchers (including the psychoanalyst Chuck Fisher) dispute this role for dreams, to my knowledge nothing conclusive has been determined about why we dream, though it is quite likely that dreaming has a larger role in mental functioning than was anticipated by Freud. For example, research on affects and memory may, in the not-too-distant future reveal the role dreaming plays in various aspects of
these properties of the mind. Naturally, the function of sleep itself needs to be fully elaborated and understanding sleep may contribute to the understanding of dreaming.
As to the meaning of dreams, our psychoanalytic view has come under serious attack over the past three decades, mostly from work done on REM sleep by the Harvard researcher Hobson and others. It is encouraging that Hobson no longer considers dreams as meaningless, but instead thinks that salient memories and emotions serve as the primary shaper of dream plots. Disagreement remains, however, about the psychoanalytic idea that in a dream a wish is represented as fulfilled. My own training as a psychoanalyst combined with my readings in the neurosciences have me to think that dreams probably play a role in managing affects. especially the so-called negative affects.
Whatever the eventual resolution as the function and meaning of dreams, I firmly believe that we will all benefit from a sustained dialogue between psychoanalysts and neuroscientists, particularly in terms of elucidating the workings of the brain-mind. Recent brain imaging studies are showing great promise in this area, by demonstrating, for example, the areas of the brain that show more activity during dreaming (see Braun).
This summarizes some currents in the developing understanding of dreams taking place outside of psychoanalysis, within psychoanalysis, and particularly within my own school, I could schematically describe two trends. First, up until the late 50s, there was a move towards supplementing Freud's ideas, spear-headed by Otto Isakower and Bertram Lewin. In the years that followed, a second trend emerged, diminishing the emergence of dreams both in clinical work and in psychoanalytic theory. Arlow and Brenner initially advanced this which was later enlarged upon by Brenner. All four of these clinician theorists have been important teachers at my institution, the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, and their writings form the backdrop from which my views on dreams in clinical practice have emerged,
Let me say right away that for my part, I continue to find dream analysis extremely useful. I am gratified with the help they sometimes provide and hope with the three brief examples that follow to demonstrate their usefulness. Naturally, not all dreams lend themselves to analysis and not
all patients work with dreams in the same way. Additionally, what constitutes a useful analysis of a dream also varies greatly. In my experience, dreams that lend themselves to the kind of analysis Freud demonstrated with his botanical monograph dream are rare but do occur with some patients who seem particularly curious about their dreams. Lest anyone suspect these particular patients are students in psychoanalysis, let me dispel that notion. In my experience, people who are very knowledgeable about psychoanalysis report dreams regularly but rarely actually want to analyze them. Parenthetically, I would add that my own ability to contribute to a dream analysis also varies and seems to be not only a function of what I know about the patient, the context, the day residue,, but also the particular state of mind I am in, and the affective curiosity aroused in me by the dream. I do not know whether others share this feeling, but from experience I can see myself more or less interested in a dream, while remaining curious about the rest of the material. At times, such countertransference reactions can be profitably analyzed, but at other times they remain limited to one particular dream and are left unattended. It is also to say that one does not wish to analyze all dreams thoroughly and especially in the early phases of an analysis, it is sometimes prudent not to bring out all the latent themes that can be detected, in order not to arouse too much anxiety or excessive defensive intellectualization. Furthermore, it is important not to come across as wizard of dream analysis early in a treatment, this can have problematic consequences.
With these introductory comments, I will now present three vignettes. None of these examples demonstrate an exhaustive analysis of dreams, which as I have already indicated seldom happens, nor are particularly unusual; instead, I hope they show the usefulness of dreams in the every day work of analysis.
Prior to reporting the first example I would like to say a word about transference, which is often the focus in most dream reports in seminars and published papers. There is little or no doubt that in ongoing analysis the transference will inevitably appear in the dream that the person of the analyst, a transference figure, distorted in the customary ways, will frequently be present. Since the analysis and analyst are often in the day residue. this is not surprising. I think, however, that we fail to take sufficient advantage of what dreams can offer if we do not attempt to go
beyond and even beside the obvious manifestations of the transference. Too often, as soon as the evidence for the transference is detected in a given dream, it is interpreted. and all other potentially rich material is ignored.
I hope the example that follows illustrates this point. I should warn the audience by saying that the elements of an erotic transference are so clear, that whoever has heard this dream has focused almost exclusively on it, but I would like to suggest that, though present, other affects were stronger.
Example 1: The patient was a young married woman, with one young son, who had been in analysis for three years at the time of this dream. She had a great need to be in control and put up a cheerful, intellectual, and friendly attitude to defend against intense inner emotions. One of her complaints was that since the birth of her son she did not enjoy sex with her husband very much, but on the day before the dream, she so enjoyed sex with him that they had intercourse twice. That night she dreamt that she was climbing up a cold white marble statue of a young male, and when she began sucking on the white and very smooth testicles of the statue, it slowly carne to life.
The patient was then somewhat cheerful in the session and talked in the same upbeat way about her ongoing anger and jealousy of her husband who had surpassed her in professional success in the same field as they both practiced. From there, her thoughts went to my upcoming week-long vacation, and since it was during spring break for the New York City schools, she assumed was going away with my family and children. She especially focused on a daughter she imagined I have and towards whom she believed I was very loving and affectionate. Not at all like the distant and cold professional I was towards her. She also reported talking to her mother the day of the dream. The mother, who had breast cancer, had complained about some aches and pains which had worried the patient in a passing way as to their possibly metastatic origin. but which she had later dismissed as just being the usual pains of old age or possibly a flu.
Naturally, I thought that perhaps the dream was expressing her feelings about my lack of affectionate availability to her, with the desire to transform me from a cold psychoanalyst to a warm, aroused, lively lover. I was
struck, however, by her description of the texture and color of the testicles. Knowing her intense fear of the loss of her only surviving, highly ambivalently loved parent and her inability to deal with the inevitability of this loss except through mild hypomanic defenses and an intense need to control all emotions, I chose not to interpret what seemed to me as the more obvious transference meaning of the dream. Instead, I asked her if she was very worried about her mother, whom she knew had metastatic cancer in the bone and whom she wished she could keep alive. Somewhat to my surprise and for only the second or third time in the analysis, the patient began sobbing intensely and talked about the unfairness of it all. She revealed, while sadly crying, a series of fantasies about her mother's death, the funeral arrangements, whether her mother would be alive the next New Year and so on. Prior to this point, none of these fantasies had been available to the analysis and concerns about the mother's health had either been minimized or dealt with in a very matter of fact manner.
I will interrupt this report here and once again stress that an excessive focus on the transference may obscure other useful avenues of exploration in the dream. I am not trying to oversimplify and to ignore how various issues are related, but instead to highlight the need to be parsimonious in interpreting a dream, and in doing so, hopefully to touch on what is affectively most charged at the moment.
My next vignette has to do with the observation that there are times when a dream helps bring to light a childhood memory which has remained out of the patient's awareness up to that point.
Example 2: A man in his early thirties who had been in treatment for less than a year at the time the following dream was reported initially presented with a depressed mood accompanied by obsessive fears about the well being of his loved ones, Extremely intelligent and a good observer of the world around him , he had rather severe inhibition about observing the world within; in other words. he had more voyeurism than curiosity and communicated with people with difficulty, He also had sex on his mind all the time.
“I am in this house, upstairs, and the room I am in is green. I am with a woman. and then there seems to be a danger, like the color green becomes dangerous, and we have to escape, and I wake up.”
Associations: I visited my parents over the weekend with my wife and went upstairs to the apartment my aunt and her husband used to rent in our house when I was a kid. I was trying to see if it was as I remembered it or not. We were there for Mothers' Day, and my mom was happy that we went. That afternoon, I started thinking of J. and wondering if I should call her and wish her a happy Mother's Day. (J. is a woman he is very attracted to and has been very flirtatious with.) I decided not to because if my wife ever found out, she would kill me.
Analyst: In your dream you were with a woman, and there was danger.
Patient: I didn't think about it that way. It was the green color that was dangerous, and I can't imagine why I would be afraid of a color.
Analyst: Does the color bring anything to mind?
Patient: It is my mother's favorite color. In our house when I was growing up, everything was green … walls, curtains, bedspreads. Not upstairs though, only in our part of the house. My mother also loves plants, so we had plants everywhere. but my aunt didn't have any because they only lived upstairs a few months a year. I remember when they were away, I would go up there and play. In high school, I would go there with girls and fool around, but my mother never caught us. When I was much younger, 8–9 years old, I would play doctor with our next door neighbor's daughter who was my age, but I don't remember doing that upstairs. They had a big back yard, and we would go there and take our clothes off.
Following session:
Patient: had another dream. I was in my country house. There was a station wagon. I was in the station wagon and there was someone else in it.
Associations: My car is not a station wagon, but my parents used to have one when I was a kid. I remember when I was 8 or 9 years old we took a long cross country trip in that car. I loved that trip, it's funny, but what comes to mind is that one time my mother was very angry at me during the trip. My sister (two years younger) and I were in the back of the station wagon, and I think we had taken our clothes off under a blanket. and I asked her to touch my penis, and my mother heard it and was furious. Maybe the dangerous green is my mother. (Laughs)
Analyst: So, did you also play doctor with your sister?
Patient: Oh, a lot. We were very sexual together when we were young, but I don't remember where we did that. I clearly remember the backyard with the neighbor, but with my sister I don't seem to picture a place except that time in the car. But I just know we fooled around a lot.
Analyst: Could it have been upstairs?
Patient: Could have been. I don't remember being upstairs with my sister.
In the next and last vignette, I think we see the interrelationship between transference, memory, and dreams. Here. what was difficult for the patient to become aware of in the here and now brought into consciousness a memory about a repetitive occurrence in childhood which then facilitated getting in touch with his transference feelings.
Example 3: The session was after the weekend, and Ms., C. began reporting on a fight she had with a good male friend, G. A woman, L, who was a mutual friend was staying with her and C. had arranged to meet L. on Saturday evening. My patient, upon hearing this, decided to accompany L. to the meeting, and G. was very upset. He felt that he was friendly with L. independent of C. and should be able to spend an evening with her alone. This story occupied a good part of the hour, but then the patient stopped, and after a brief silence said: I had a dream last night, “You will think it significant. It is the kind of dream shrinks think is important.”
After a few more similar qualifying comments, she reported the following dream: She was in a bathroom. It was very large and steamed up. I was there, and I told her to get undressed, that I wanted her naked. I was naked, but she did not really look, the way she always avoids looking at naked people. The situation was sexually very arousing. In real lite, she would find such a situation—a man ordering her to take her clothes off—very exciting. She then went back to discussing the weekend events further, and then, changing the subject, she said.
“I have been thinking about what you said in the last session. I agree that I want to be special here and feel my relationship with you is different than with your other patients. I realized that when I had complained to you about my breasts and that they are deformed and too small and not
firm, I was excited by it. I felt as if I were showing myself to you naked. I was craving your attention to my body.”
In order to clarify the context of this material and the dream, it should he added that some two weeks earlier she had reported from the time that when she was between the ages of 7–8 to 11–12 on a number of occasions she would be taking bath in her parents' bathroom (the only bathroom in the house with a tub), and her father would walk in naked to take a shower in the shower room, which was behind the head of the tub. At the time she had reported this, she had not recalled any other feeling except that “well that is how it was in our house” and a certain mild annoyance. Yet in the transference with me whenever sexual matters carne up, she would feel disgusted towards me and think me as a disgusting, dirty old man. The dream not only helped bring together many of the issues we have been struggling with, but most importantly it brought forth an awareness of her own wishes and desires and made possible for her to recognize the ongoing influence of her childhood experience in her current fantasies both within the analysis but also in the outside world.
Last year we celebrated the hundredth-year anniversary of the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams. I hope it is clear from the above that now, a century later, I continue to benefit in my work from the help offered to me by dreams. And I predict that dreams have many more insights left to offer to psychoanalysts and to all interested in the study of mind-brain.