Chapter 5 The Dream and the Ego

In previous chapters I put forward the idea that a dream is a way of expressing and elaborating an unconscious phantasy. What Freud called a ‘compromise’ takes the form of a wish-fulfilling phantasy, satisfying contradictory wishes and defences. That phantasy is expressed and further worked through in the dream. A dream performs many functions. It provides a phantasy expression of an unconscious conflict and seeks a phantasy solution—wish-fulfilment. Dream-work is part of the elaboration of unconscious conflict. It provides also an intrapsychic communication between the unconscious and the conscious. When we remember a dream we retain communication with symbolic expressions of the unconscious. In the analytical process this internal communication becomes also a means of communication with the analyst.

In Chapter 1 I commented on how great is the task of the ego in accomplishing psychic work—dream-work—involved in dreaming. And I raised the question of what happens to dreaming and dreams when the ego is temporarily or permanently not capable of carrying out the tasks involved in producing a neurotic or a normal dream. In the acute psychotic there is often no distinction between a hallucination, a dream, and a real event. I remember sessions early in the treatment of an acute schizophrenic, when he would give me a jumbled account of his night in which it was impossible to tell what really happened, what he hallucinated whilst awake, or what he hallucinated whilst asleep. Bion describes a patient who was terrified because he had dreamed of his analyst and therefore concluded that he must have devoured him, and was amazed to find his analyst alive in the real external world. In such cases, the patient is unable to differentiate between the psychic event which is a dream and actual events in the external world.

In the less acute cases in our daily practice, we find patients whose dreams occasionally or habitually do not fulfil the dream function as described by Freud. The