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The following facts are not unknown to you. The way, however, in which they are composed and the consequences ensuing therefrom in respect of our technical proceeding in interpreting dreams may be something new. Let us take it for granted that we all—even though we may not be expressly aware of it—apply various methods of dream-interpretation simultaneously. In the first instance there is the 'classical' method of the so-called interpretation of content, almost exclusively applied in the beginning of psycho-analysis. It seeks to evaluate the manifest content of the dream as the processing of real persons, objects, events or of imaginations from the dreamer's present or former life even though all these points may have been distorted by dream-work beyond recognition.
When in the first decades of this century the transference proved more and more emphatically its importance for the therapeutic process this was bound to influence therapeutic procedure in interpreting dreams also. The interpretation of content was increasingly being replaced by the interpretation of transference, a method in which the analyst for therapeutic reasons deliberately selects and accentuates from the total dream material all points which may refer to the analytical situation or the analyst's picture respectively.
For years we all have—at least tacitly—applied these two principles either combined or side by side, even though we may prefer one to the other, be it for the reason that we subscribe to a particular analytical line of thought or on the ground that a certain dream categorically seems to demand one of these methods of interpretation. The fact that, as a rule, we are not even aware of having made this choice without further reflection, proves that the two principles of interpretation apparently do not conflict with, or at least do not exclude, each other.
Hence two questions follow:
i.Does one of these principles of dream-interpretation rank above the other? And if so are we in a po