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Masud Khan's paper was given to the International Psycho-Analytical Congress in London in 1975 and I was one of the discussants.1
When Dr Pontalis wrote asking me to contribute to this discussion he said it was because I seemed to use dreams in a very personal way, as described in my last book about a patient who did doodle drawings.2 I answered that I did not think I used them in any special way, as I only looked for associations, and if there were none I tried to see if I could find understandable symbols. I therefore asked him for examples of what he meant. He wrote back quoting what I had said in the book, about two of the patient's dreams; he then said that I had considered the dream neither as a message or text to be deciphered nor as a compromise between repressed desires and ego defence mechanisms, but as a witness of a state of being; in fact as an attempt at symbolization, rather than as a symbolic language to be decoded, and how this makes it possible to work on the manifest content without necessarily considering it as a distortion of the latent content. He said he wants this approach, although it may be ‘usual’ for me, made explicit. I will try, very tentatively, at least to make some comments on this problem.
First, I think that what I do is perhaps not so way out: I think it does follow from Ernest Jones's list of what gets symbolized, since he includes the word ‘self’ in his list. So this is perhaps the central problem, just because what it is that this word self denotes is so very elusive.
In listening to the discussions here this week on change in patients