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It Is Never easy to present, briefly yet exhaustively, a psychotherapeutic method, and it could even be considered disrespectful to the method itself.
Nevertheless, I shall attempt to give an idea of the rêve éveillé dirigé; for, having had the opportunity of a direct acquaintance with it in my work as a psychotherapist, I think it might be useful to communicate, in a condensed form, the concepts which underlie this kind of psychotherapy and on which it is developed. I should also like to examine briefly the affinities and the differences which, I believe, exist between the rêve éveillé dirigé, behaviorrism in general, and certain basic principles of analytical psychology.
To these notes I have added an appendix giving the report, with comments, of a number of rêves éveillés dirigés that I have carried out with the same patient, in the hope that a direct reading of the material may give substance to the inevitable scantiness of my presentation.
Let me say at once that Robert Desoille was the first to experiment with, and to improve, the rêve éveillé dirigé method, or R.E.D. as it is now commonly called internationally (DESOILLE 8).
Other writers, contemporaries, or near contemporaries of Robert Desoille, had had an inkling of the importance of the ‘waking dream-state’. Léon Daudet, for example, by differentiating the rêve éveillé from real dreams suggested that phobias and obsessions be considered as day-dreams (DAUDET 7). Other authors, like A. Arthus, had gone farther by using the technique of the free rêve éveillé in clinical practice (ARTHUS 3). Desoille, however, rejects this insofar as he maintains that without an effort of attention on the part of the patient, and of direction on the part of the psychotherapist, the anarchic flow of images does not allow the pathological mechanisms to be broken and does not, therefore, give satisfactory results from the therepeutic point of view. It is, above all, by being directed that the spontaneous flow of images can lead to