The Dreamer's Creation of Compromise out of Conflict

Throughout recorded history people have been fascinated by their dreams, yet we still do not know exactly why we dream. But dream we must, that much scientific research has shown; anyone deprived of dreaming for a few nights becomes upset and nervous and then, for the next few nights, dreams more often than usual.

This paper uses dream examples from patients in analysis to show the clinical usefulness of viewing them as inventive compromises which dreamers make from their conflicts. Freud suggested that one function of dreaming is to keep us asleep, and that may be true, since we often wake up when the compromise fails, as one of my examples will show.

First, a bit of history: The Interpretation of Dreams was published in 1900, long before Freud developed the structural hypothesis. He never revised his dream theory in terms of the fundamental theoretical advances he made in the 1920s. It was not until 1964 that the concepts of structural theory were applied to Freud's dream theories by Arlow and Brenner. They demonstrated the usefulness of viewing the dream work as consisting of “an interplay, often a very complicated one … among id, ego, and superego, of which the final result is the manifest dream” (p. 122). In 1982, Brenner explicitly described all manifest dreams as compromise formations. He said that the components of the conflicts which make up the compromise formation of a dream are: drive derivatives; calamities and their related affects of anxiety and depression; defenses; and superego elements (p. 192).