You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
God's my life! stol'n hence, and left me asleep! I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream—past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass, if he go about to expound his dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had—but man is but a patched fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream: it shall be called Bottom's Dream, because it hath no bottom …
SHAKESPEARE, A Midsummer-Night's Dream
Since this is my third attempt to clarify and state my work on dreams, I hope, Mr Chairman, you will bear with me if I briefly state my earlier hypotheses. The fundamental bias of my thinking is that psychoanalysis tries to abstract and make sense of the very private subjective experiences in a person. This person can be a patient, the analyst himself or a mélange of both.
In my Edinburgh Congress paper (Khan, 1962) I had postulated the concept of a 'good dream' and argued that certain intrapsychic functions and ego-capacities were necessary for a person to be able to put together a 'good dream' from his sleep experience. Prominent among these were the ego's capacity to sustain the sleep-wish, controlling excessive influx of the primary process and appropriate dosage of 'day residues' to structuralize the latent 'dream wish' into a contained dream text. I had further stated that it entailed a capacity in the ego for narcissistic gratification from the dream experience in lieu of the more primitive narcissism of the pure blank sleep-state or the concrete satisfactions from reality. The capacity to utilize symbolization and dream work was also necessary for the articulation of the dream text. I had further tried to show how Freud had based the salient features of the analytic situation