J. Allan Hobson and Edward Pace-Schott's Response Commentary by Calvin Kai-ching Yu

We have always emphasized our own clinical interest in dreams as the transparent syntheses of current concerns, past conflicts, and cognitive-emotional style. We read the current PET evidence as highly supportive of this conceptualization which obviates Freud's complex and dubious assumption of latent vs. manifest content [Hobson and Pace-Schott, 1999, p. 206].

An intelligent conversation about dreams cannot take place without first clarifying Freud's true concepts. There is too much misrepresentation (or misunderstanding) of Freudian dream theory in the current dialogue, which has led to unfruitful and often unnecessary dispute. As an enthusiastic reader of Freud, I would like here to illustrate one example: the demarcation between manifest and latent content is not absolute and not always perceivable in Freudian theory as some authorities conceive of it and describe it. On the contrary, the manifest content is not infrequently equivalent to the latent content. Examples of this are common throughout Freud's works, but Freud tended not to study those undisguised dreams simply because there was no need to do so. This does not mean, however, that Freud himself did not give credence to the existence of “transparent dreams.” It is therefore wrong arbitrarily to confine Freud's understanding of dreams to a fixed divergence between manifest and latent content. Whatever the appearance might be, Freud did not in fact claim that all dreams are distorted or disguised.

Dreams can be divided into three categories in respect of the relation between their latent and manifest content. In the first place, we may distinguish those dreams which make sense and are at the same time intelligible, which, that is to say, can be inserted without further difficulty into the context of our mental life. We have numbers of such dreams. They are for the most part short and appear to us in general to deserve little attention.… A second