You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In his article on ‘The use of dreams in contemporary analysis’ in the April 1979 issue of this Journal Kenneth Lambert refers to Freud's opinion that the dream is ‘the royal road to the knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind’ as ‘a revolutionary step for a mind of his time, rationalist and scientifically orientated, but too topographical and static for today’ (p. ). Lambert takes the position that ‘dreaming is to be taken as being as significant as any other area of experience, though not in principle any more or less so’ (p. ). Agreeing with Jung that ‘the dream is to be understood as a spontaneous and natural product of the psychesoma’ he points out that ‘the last quarter-century's experience has enlarged the range of understanding, interpretation and practice in a number of ways’ which he discusses under four headings: (1) the problem of ‘eliciting’ dreams from patients, (2) ‘the fascination that Jung's discoveries about dreams can exercise upon intuitive and imaginative analysts’, (3) the rôle of the transference-countertransference in its impact both on the content of the dream and ‘the manner and mode of the patient's reporting of dreams’ (p. ) and (4) recent psychoanalytic advance as regards the contents and actions in the dream.
I agree with Kenneth Lambert's discussions of the problems, pitfalls and dangers associated with dreams and dream analysis. I am less convinced that his part- whole- and inner object terminology is more than a relic from a world view which is in the process of disappearing today. But this is not important in this context. The main point to which I want to address myself is the question of the real significance of dreams. To say that they are ‘in principle’ not ‘more or less significant’ leaves important questions unanswered. When Freud said that dreams are the royal road to the unconscious he did not speak about the way in which dreams should be dealt with. He spoke about the basic significance of dreams. Kenneth Lambert