Ziegler, A. J. (Zürich). ‘Der pathognomonische Traum’ (‘The diagnostic dream’),  Therap. Umschau,  24,  9 (1967).

A paper addressed to general practitioners who are interested in psychosomatic medical theories. In it Ziegler recapitulates, in his usual interesting way, his view on the linkage between certain illnesses, particularly cardiac ones, and basic emotional problems. Among his clinical examples he here also includes two women suffering from progressive chronic rheumatoid arthritis in whom he found what he would consider a typical conflict between freedom and mobility in its widest sense and a restrictive attitude based on a strong mother tie. Certain dreams from which the patient wakens in pain, he thinks, stem from the common root of the somatic symptom and the emotional conflict. They therefore should help the doctor to understand the causation of the whole syndrome. These he calls ‘diagnostic dreams’, and mentions in particular those in which there is no lysis, in the sense of Jung's formulation of the dream structure, suggesting that they point to a moment when the disease is threatening to become chronic. He goes on to discuss the research done in recent years, and now also in Zürich, into sleep and dream states. He is especially interested in correlations between certain physiological changes during sleep and some of the recorded dream states. He is cautious about drawing firm conclusions but hopes that out of these his thesis of diagnostic dreams will be able to be confirmed.