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The forgotten dream has been interpreted by Lewin in oral terms as a concrete object which has been lost. Kanzer suggests that the oral elements may sometimes be a defence against phallic and anal sexuality, particularly when the forgetting is associated with blank dreams with orgasm.
He reports two sets of three dreams. In each set the first dream dealt with the upper regions of the body, or world, from which there was a fall, the third with the lower regions. In the middle, and associated with orgasm, was in one case a blank dream and in the other a dream which 'slipped away'. The middle dream clearly referred to the middle, or genital, region of the body. The dream which 'slipped away' was associated both with a severed phallus and with faeces which slipped away. The blank dreams in Kanzer's patient had their origin in adolescent dreams with seminal emission in which both vision and dreaming were arrested at the moment of penetrating the vagina. He suggests that the blankness represented the nothingness of the vagina, and quotes Freud's interpretation of a 'gap' in a dream in the same sense. The interest in the oral zone associated with the complex breast and dream screen may therefore sometimes be due to an upward displacement from the maternal vulva, serving the interests of regression. The breasts may moreover play a rôle in relation to the downward sweep of the eyes towards the blankness of the vulva similar to that which the hair or garment plays with the fetishist. The orgasm of the blank dream is evidence of the repressed voyeuristic impulse and testifies, moreover, to the oedipal basis of these psychic mechanisms; furthermore, by ridding the body of tension, the regression supplements the visual block as a defence against the perpetuation of dangerous instinctual excitement.
The picture of the feeding breast represents a further defence by turning from active to passive, from mother-identification to child-identification, as well as from phallic t