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Lewin continues his attempt to apply the metapsychology of the dream to the analytic situation (Psa. Quarterly, 1954, No. 4). He points out that unconsciously the couch is the place for sleeping, and that this basic analytic situation may need to be interpreted, as for example if sleep is equated with death. In general the narcissistic phenomena of the analytic situation are neglected in interpretation. Rank
approached them, but his fallacy was to take at their face value fantasies of the uterine state and rebirth which really referred to sleeping and waking.
Searching for equivalents for components of the analytic situation in The Interpretation of Dreams, he compares the analyst, as a transference-figure, with the indifferent day-residues to which unconscious ideas lend their cathexis. As an interpreter the analyst is to be equated with an external stimulus which threatens to arouse. Lewin also finds in the analyst the opposite number of certain external stimuli which did not interest Freud in connection with the dream—the stimuli which promote sleep. Such stimuli are crooning, the full meal, and the memory of the nursing situation. In so far as the analyst lulls he represents the trace of the pre-oedipal mother and of all the wish-fulfilments leading to sleep. In so far as he wakes he represents the trace of the pre-oedipal father.
Analysis is formed from the wish to free-associate with the object of interpretation as dreams are formed from the wish to sleep, and using the same psychic systems, though in different proportions. The analyst, being a stimulus 'at both ends of the diagram of the psychic apparatus, is "around" the couch as the external world is around the dream'.