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Are there any common premises shared by psychoanalysts of all persuasions when they interpret dreams? It may seem reasonable and conservative to begin by suggesting general acceptance of night fantasies as projective phenomena. That would ignore Sullivan's assertion that he did “not think that the mechanism of projection accounts for much of anything” (1953, p. 359). What troubled him about the concept is that like so many other terms in our psychoanalytic lexicon, projection has accumulated a range of meanings, so that it can be understood as both a paranoid symptom and also as entirely normal.
The complexity was inherent as early as Freud's analysis of the Schreber case. Then he cautioned that projection “makes its appearance not only in paranoia but under other psychological conditions as well, and in fact it has a regular share assigned to it in our attitude toward the external world. For when we refer the causes of certain sensations to the external world, instead of looking for them (as we do in the case of the others) inside ourselves, this normal proceeding also deserves to be called projection” (Freud, , p. 452). The latter or “normal” meaning has stood the test of time well enough to be restated thus in social psychology textbooks: “The content of our perceived world is to be understood as a function of our personality and need states” (Sampson, 1971, p. 150). The fact is that dreams have come to be accepted fairly widely as peculiarly sensitive indicators of the perceived world of the dreamer and in that sense as clues to the dreamer's personality and emotional states.
It would be precipitous to assume from this information that social scientists are always agreeable to the use of dreams as scientifically acceptable, projective techniques. On the one hand,