Psychoanalytic mythology teaches us that psychoanalysis was born in the crucible of Freud's self-analysis. The primary data and experience of that creative self-analytic enterprise were Freud's dreams, culminating in his discovery of infantile sexuality in his (1900) analysis of the Irma dream.1 The topographic model of the mind that resulted emphasized the paradigm of discovering the repressed latent wish behind the manifest facade.
The purpose of the workshop from which this book originated was the discussion of the clinical significance of the interpretation of dreams. The focus is the collaborative therapeutic situation rather than the solitary creative self-analytic endeavor. In the twenty-seven years following Freud's analysis of the Irma dream, his clinical experience influenced him to emend his theory of dream formation and his corresponding model of the mind. In 1919 (Freud, 1900, pp. 557–558), Freud described the gratification of a wish for punishment as a motive for creating a dream, presaging his (1923a) formal introduction of the structural hypothesis and adding the superego to the id as an instigator of dreaming. In 1920, in describing an “original function” of the dream work, Freud added a third factor, the ego, to the list of motives contributing to the mind's penchant for creating dreams. In regard to the ego's “original function” Freud was moving “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” and the wish fulfilling function of dreaming and emphasizing the ego as a structure of adaptation working to assimilate trauma. Analytic work also influenced Freud (1911, 1923b) to deemphasize the uniqueness of dreams. He came to conceive of dreams as data to be dealt with as part of that process and warned against the urge to think of the analysis of dreams as an art to be pursued for its own intrinsic pleasure. Debate about this point persists to this day. In addition, in the same year that Freud (1923a) formally introduced
the structural hypothesis, he (1923b) legitimized “dreams from above.” Thus, Freud's ultimate view was, as Brenner's (1982) work has emphasized; namely, that dreams, like all other products of the mind, are to be thought of as compromise formations. Dreams are fantasies created by contributions from the three agencies of the mind.
In the sixty years since Freud's last contribution to this subject, numerous authors have questioned his emphasis on the wish fulfilling function of dreaming. Some (Spanjäard, 1969) have emphasized clinicians' tendencies to make more of the manifest content of dreams than traditional theory would suggest advisable, while others have stressed one or another aspect of the assimilative or adaptive aspects of the dream work. Some colleagues (Greenberg and Pearlman, 1978) have studied dreams in sleep laboratories and emphasized the manifest content and adaptive aspects of dreaming, while others (Polombo, 1976) have made similar points from other nonclinical perspectives such as those that stress the mind's memory and information processing functions.
Waelder (1930) and Erikson (1954), from an ego psychological perspective, stressed the complexity of the dream. Waelder explored the dream from the perspective of “the principle of multiple function” (p. 59). Erikson described the complexity of the surface of the reported dream. Erikson suggested the term manifest configuration to more accurately connote the complex nature of the data available in the manifest dream. He provided a rich schema for organizing the links between the more manifest and more latent elements in dreams.
The editor raised the following questions for the contributors to this work with the intention of facilitating the development of their presentations: In work with dreams, how does the analyst think about the dream as presented by the patient? In that regard, how does the analyst's theoretical commitments and/or data available from other than clinical experience influence his understanding of the patient's dreams? How does the analyst conceptualize the relationships between the manifest and latent content of the dream? Does the analyst think of dreams as a unique type of clinical data? In that regard, does the analysis of dreams provide a unique opportunity for insight and integration? Is the analysis of dreams particularly helpful in working with certain kinds of issues, such as the reconstruction of trauma or the recovery of masturbatory
fantasies, or particular types of patients such as those prone to enactment and acting out or those thought of as “borderline” or “narcissistic”? Does the patient's ability to analyze his or her own dreams offer unique evidence of a successful treatment and is it a positive prognostic indicator of successful postanalytic self-analysis? Finally, do the contributors think of dreams differently when doing psychoanalysis as compared to psychoanalytic psychotherapy?