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.
The paper presents ways in which the adverbial abstractions perhaps and maybe can be represented in dreams. In the first example, it was noted that the patient characteristically reported that his dreams were fragments and incomplete. Rather than being the form and related to withholding, it was realized that it was the gloss to indicate that the significance of the dream was tentative and uncertain, the dream representation of his 'perhaps'-ing and 'maybe'-ing.
In the second case, the patient characteristically moved away from severe competitive conflicts with the analyst, especially regarding dream interpretation, by pondering what the nature of the dream might have been, had a different event from the linking event occurred. By so doing, this patient prevented anticipated severe competitive struggles by taking both patient and analyst to what might have been as opposed to what was with regard to his dreaming, just as his frequent 'maybe'-ing and perhaps'-ing did for other interactions in the analysis.