‘Dreams that Turn Over a Page’: Integration Dreams with Paradoxical Regressive Content

The subject of this paper is ‘dreams that turn over a page’, whose primitive anxiety-inducing content frightens the dreamer, although the psychoanalyst sees them as a sign of progress in psychic integration despite their regressive appearance. This thesis is illustrated by clinical examples. Because such anxiety dreams typically occur at a time of integration, the author considers that the analyst must interpret them as showing that the patient is now able to accept hitherto unrepresentable parts of himself, while the dream content proper should be interpreted at a second stage once the anxiety has subsided. The author postulates that these seemingly regressive dreams are a token of progress because they occur at privileged points in the transference when projective identification is giving way to introjection. The reintegration of previously expelled fragments causes anxiety but also gives the dreamer a sense of inner cohesion, while at the same time accounting for the particular clarity and coherence of these dreams. The author compares his concept of dreams that turn over a page with similar notions in the literature and contends that such dreams retrospectively illuminate changes in the dreamer's intrapsychic conflicts on a more elementary level of unconscious fantasy than the classical approach would suggest.