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Jean-Michel Quinodoz's paper was published in Part 2 (Int. J. Psychoanal., 1999, 80: 225-238), and was placed on the IJP web-site (http:/www.ijpa.org) several weeks earlier for discussion. The subject of his paper is what he terms ‘dreams that turn over a page’, the primitive content of which frightens the dreamer, although the analyst may see them as a sign of progress in psychic integration. Quinodoz's thesis is illustrated by clinical examples. Such seemingly regressive dreams represent progress because they occur at points in the transference when projective identification gives way to introjection. The reintegration of previously expelled fragments causes anxiety but also gives the dreamer a sense of inner cohesion.
One of Quinodoz's patients consistently arrived late and never closed the waiting room door. Attempts to interpret the unconscious transference reasons for her claustrophobic symptom were in vain. One day the patient began to come on time and to close the door. She subsequently brought a dream, the manifest content of which had made her think that she would stay mad for the rest of her life: she had dreamed that she was being locked up in a prison from which she would never again emerge. After reaching the stage of overcoming her claustrophobic symptom in the transference relationship she paradoxically produced a dream of claustrophobic anxiety. Another analysand, in the process of resolving difficulties in his emotional and sexual life, had a dream that made him despair.
He dreamed with intense anxiety that he had to catch a train but could not manage it, and had to go in a lift, but was unable to do this either. ‘I miss everything! I shall never get anywhere! I am not making any progress!’ he told Quinodoz, adding that he had tidied up his house and written letters he had been putting off for a long time. Just as things were falling into place in his mind, he had become able to see how intensely he believed that he would never succeed in reaching su