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The importance of dreams in the analytic process was historically paramount. But, as time went on, some analysts began to discover that the transference-countertransference set-up could be equally, if not more, important and as a result dream analysis sank into second place; the transference was a dream enacted in the analytic interviews and so had greater impact, and could be more easily elucidated. Jungians have, by and large, stuck to the dream, so that it can even be asked: how can you analyse a patient who does not remember his dreams? Yet, though they were central, very little has been written about their nature; they are recorded but not much has been discovered about them—except for their frequently compensating nature. Otherwise they are taken to be messages from the unconscious, personal and collective, or set in their mythological matrix.
A feature of the reports from Jungian sources is that the patient's work on his dream is seldom given much notice, and though Jung gave vivid accounts of his relation to his own, most records are embellished with amplifications or fitted into the nexus of mythology with which the analyst is familiar.
As a psychoanalyst Meltzer had a method which differs from the one I have just outlined. His point of departure is a critical estimation of Freud's theory: he considers that Freud trivialised the dream by calling it the guardian of sleep, and that the censor and the mechanisms of condensation, displacement and symbolisation, making possible the disguised fulfilment of a wish, were conceptions far too much influenced by the topographical model derived from neurophysiological thinking. The theory was not, Meltzer says, sufficiently reconsidered when the structural model was developed. Nor has the metapsychology of dreaming received enough