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One of the most wondrous things about dreams, for Jane Haynes, is their autonomy: ‘Did my imagination really create this dream, or was it created for me?’ (p. 9). Imagination? Objective psyche? Created from where? The questions are mine rather than hers, but this engaging paper brings them and others crowding in, and stimulates other amplifications too. This is what dreams do, perhaps. They can not only ‘bring analyst and analysand into a new and unique relationship to themselves and to one another’ (p. 2), but also kindle - as anyone who has participated in any dream discussion has surely experienced - a unique shared energy among the participants.
Haynes is clear about what her own approach is not: ‘Like Freud I regard dreams as a, if not the, royal highway to the unconscious. I make use of his technique of free association and pay attention to the latent content of dreams, but that is where our agreement ends’ (p. 1, her italics). She is not convinced that The Interpretation of Dreams was the gift that depth psychologists have considered it, not least for the way in which it has, she feels, obscured much of the dream theory that preceded it. She herself honours the Romantics, and in particular Coleridge's theory of the imagination, in which she sees a convincing forerunner of Jung's technique of active imagination. I am also grateful to her for a delightful quotation from William Hazlitt's essay on dreams, which predates Freud's by a clear century and, as she says, offers its own theory of dream censorship and repression: ‘We are not hypocrites in our sleep. The curb is taken from our passions and our imagination wanders at will. When awake we check these rising thoughts, and fancy we have them not. In dreams we are off our guard, they return securely and unbidden’ (Hazlitt 1900, quoted p. 5).
The provision of a space in which dreams may once more ‘return securely’, and now invited, are surely central to the psychotherapeutic task. Haynes evokes the ancient art of