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Over the years between Freud's definition of a dream - firstly in the ‘Project’ (Freud, 1895) and then in The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud, 1899) - as the hallucinatory fulfilment of an unconscious repressed wish and the most recent contributions of the neurosciences on implicit memory and the so-called unrepressed unconscious, the psychoanalytic theory of dreams can be said to have travelled an immense distance along a path replete with transformations and developments.
With regard to the first question, on my conception of the function of dreams, it seems to me that, in clinical terms, dreams have a twofold potential for the analyst. On the one hand, they are an incomparable source of information on the affects prevailing in the analytic space; they can be the vehicle of choice for an analytic approach to the here-and-now of the transference relationship by means of interpretation; and they may in addition constitute an indispensable aid to the work of construction. On the other hand, dreams reactivate and can symbolize old emotions, stemming from sometimes traumatic experiences dating back to the earliest periods of relational life and to a phase of presymbolic, preverbal mental functioning, which are stored in implicit memory (Mancia, , 2008; Sandler, 1987). From this point of view, dreams also open the way to the possibility of reconstructive work.
Turning now to the second question, I do of course make a fundamental distinction between dreams resulting from traumatic emotions and experiences and other types of dreams. My approach will involve forging a theoretical link between what Ferenczi (1931) called the traumatolytic function of dreams, which complemented his brilliant contribution to psychoanalytic