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To many readers it appears that in his book The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud (1900) tended to minimize the significance of the manifest content of dreams. He did this in the effort to emphasize the dream work and the latent content so as to find the desired interpretation. Later psychoanalysts have paid detailed attention to the manifest content, treating it as a psychologic product worthy of very careful scrutiny, and have found important meanings in its formal features and in its subject matter (Erikson 1954; Roth 1959). There was only one area in which Freud felt that associations to the elements of the manifest dream were not necessary, and that was in the interpretation of symbols where the analyst could himself supply the requisite information.
Psychoanalysts have learned to carry this procedure even further. While knowing the essentiality of associations from the dreamer to enigmatic and idiosyncratic dream material, probably every experienced analyst jumps quickly to tentative interpretations on the first recitation of a dream. Indeed it has become a frequently employed teaching procedure to examine the manifest dream content in order to see what can be learned from it while knowing little or nothing about the patient. Freud himself employed this technique in his lengthy section on “Representation by Symbols in Dreams.”
It is an interesting exercise to see whether a dream, interpreted without associational material from the dreamer, can be proved to have been correctly understood when that material is later forthcoming. Much can be learned about the meaning of symbols and the nature of the dream work by such experiments. It is the intent