The Dream-Symbolism of the Analytical Situation1

The ideas suggested to Freud by his study of dreams not only struck those outside the medical world as absurd to begin with, but even appeared strange to members of his own profession. Since those early days they have won general acceptance and have not only enabled us to understand the wonderful structure of the neuroses and psychoses, but have opened up quite new perspectives in all fields of knowledge and in the study of art. In fact, we may say that they have radically changed our conception of the whole world as we know it. The interpretation of dreams has thus become for psycho-analysis the field of its daily labours and perhaps its most secure possession; but there is at the present time too much of a tendency to regard the subject as one on which the last word has been said. It is true to say that, since Freud published his standard work, scarcely any fresh aspect of dream-interpretation has claimed our attention, if we except the very important writings of Federn. This is the more surprising since no such conservatism prevails where the rest of the fabric of psycho-analytical theory is concerned; on the contrary, it is constantly being added to, renovated and also at times demolished. It seems that all of us have regarded the theory of dreams as so sound that there is no need to make any further investigations or to subject it to any modification. That theory as a whole is not the subject of the present paper: I propose rather to deal with the part played by dreams in psycho-analytic practice. During the many years in which I have been engaged in therapeutic analysis I have perhaps had more experience of the problem of dreams than has fallen to the lot of other men. Because of the particular type of patients whom I treat, I have been obliged to conduct short2 analyses, most of which lasted only a few months and some only a few weeks. Thus my dream-material, or perhaps I should rather say the number of dreams which I have on