Emergence of Hidden Ego Tendencies During Dream Analysis

From the early days of psycho-analysis dreams have been one of the main roads to uncovering the unconscious, and no other system of psycho-therapy or psychology has given them the same emphasis or put them to such constructive use.

It became apparent to Freud that the complex configuration of a dream is not a static phenomenon but the end product of various forces striving towards partly identical and partly disparate goals. His disentanglement of these forces, his ability to use the dream as a phenomenon to deduce and describe the forces which must be at work in its production and his reconstruction of what must be the structure of the apparatus which is endowed with the faculty of producing dreams is one of the greatest of intellectual achievements. Rarely was so much concluded from so little by succinct ratiocination and empirical observation. It would seem that little could be added after Freud's exhaustive analysis. And actually, as Freud himself mentioned, little new has been added, although he seems to have thought that our knowledge of dreams and particularly of the dream work is far from complete. With the shift of psycho-analytic interest to ego psychology it was logical that some analysts should scrutinize anew the dream contents for clues to the unconscious structure of the ego. In Freud's first publication, the ego's contribution to dreams was limited to its wish to sleep, to the censoring function, and to the secondary elaboration. In 1923, however, Freud distinguished between 'dreams from above and dreams from below'2 and in 1938 he wrote: 'dreams may arise either from the id or from the ego', 3 thus enlarging the ego's contribution to dreams. Yet from the beginning of the psycho-analytic interest in dreams, attention was paid to another series of dream problems albeit of minor importance, namely the vicissitudes of the dream after awakening. There are two main alternatives. The dream is either forgotten or distorted. Distortion is the engr