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Samuels's article comprises a review of several models for approaching dreams in analysis. He describes a clinical case and a particular dream which he discusses, first, in the light of each of those models and, in the final section, in the light of his own integrating model.
Freud's reductive view of dreaming was of a mental activity with which the unconscious fulfils desires that are unacceptable to a person's conscious life. Dreams are potentially deceptive representations in need of careful decoding work on the part of the analyst.
Jung's synthetic view of dreaming was of a mental activity with which the unconscious compensates imbalances experienced in a person's conscious life - unconscious and conscious being seen as complementary to each other. Dreams are psychic events that, far from being deceptive, can be trusted to speak for themselves. They have a typical structure - exposition, development, culmination, and solution - to which an analyst in his interpretative work relates his patients' dreams, finding associations with their personal lives and archetypes.
Dieckmann modified Jung's classical approach by focusing on the ego of the dreamer - dreams and waking life being linked by a process of similarity rather than by compensatory complementarity.
Lambert criticized the practice in analysis of requesting dreams from patients which in his view puts too much value on dreams and loses sight of the patient and of the transference/countertransference relationship with the analyst.
Hillman disagreed with the search for consciousness for its own sake, so much valued by some Freudian and Jungian analysts. For him the gap between conscious and unconscious does not need to be filled. A dream does not have a cause in need of being found, nor a lesson in need of being learnt, nor a reference to the dreamer's personal life. Dreams have their own agenda and they do not need interpretations. They belong to an archetypal area - the night world - and they cannot be approached