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No general explanation seems to have been achieved of why patients report their dreams on some occasions and not on others. It is true that we commonly refer the failure to report dreams, as we do the failure to suggest associations to them, to the patient's resistance, that is, to a disturbance as a result of anxiety of the synthetic function of the ego. The absence of a positive theory of the significance of reporting a dream is especially surprising when we consider that a dream has been regarded as an important psychic event throughout the history of mankind.2 If the evidence of the literature were taken alone, dream interpretation might seem to have been the cornerstone of Freud's technique for as long as twelve years; but Freud discusses the psychology of the dream process and its relationship to the remembered fragment of the manifest content, rather than the psychology of reporting dreams and the question of why patients report them when they do. In 1913, Ferenczi referred, as though to a commonplace, to the psycho-analyst's knowledge that people tell their dreams to the person to whom their contents refer. If this also holds true of the fragment of the dream life reported in analysis, then its clinical implication would be that all dreams in analysis concern the psycho-analyst. Though many analysts regard all the phenomena of the session primarily from the standpoint of the transference, I do not recall any statement that all dreams in psycho-analysis refer directly to the analyst; for instance, Rosenbaum in his paper "Dreams in which the Analyst appears Undisguised" (1965) drew only the cautious conclusion that dreams in which the analyst appears undisguised in the manifest content may well be concerned with an aspect of the patient's real relationship with him.
In recent years the operation of the ego in the dream process has been given increased recognition. In 1954 Erikson emphasized the reflection of the dreamer's total situation on every level o