Insight and Distortion in Dreams

In the course of a psycho-analytic treatment, an important interpretation is usually followed over a period of days or weeks by a series of dreams that have been obviously provoked by the interpretation and are reactions to the dawning insight that has been mobilized by the interpretation. In them one is usually able to detect an urge to confess, side by side with a vehement urge to deny the correctness of the interpretation. Frequently as the analysis proceeds one can observe a gradual decrease in the effectiveness of the denials and an increase in the patient's willingness to accept the proffered interpretation.

The resistance against an interpretation is in some cases expressed by direct denial of its content or by substitution of a content with exactly the opposite meaning, as for example when an interpretation of feminine sexual wishes will be answered by a dream of vigorous masculine protest. Direct denial, however, has the disadvantage that like the negative of a photograph, it leaves practically unchanged the essential relations contained in the proffered insight. The picture remains the same except for the reversal of black and white shades. For this reason, denial is dynamically very close to affirmation; often only a very slight quantitative shift in the dynamic balance is necessary in order to turn a denial into an affirmation. The girl who is too vehement in her rejection of a suitor often betrays by that fact that she is on the point of accepting him. This is, of course, the basis for Freud's well-known rule that in the unconscious a denial is equivalent to an affirmation; that the unconscious knows no negative.

There are, however, other and more effective methods of resistance to an interpretation. In the present paper I wish to call attention to one of these that is often encountered in the first dream after an interpretation. The dreams to which I refer are characterized by the fact that they at