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I am impelled to respond to Hobson's essay and his and Pace-Schott's subsequent reply to Solms, Braun, Reiser, Nersessian, and Gilmore. This exchange is seriously compromised by Hobson's failure to decouple his discussion of the neurophysiology of dreams—actually the neurophysiology of REM—from his vendetta against Freud and Freudians. He provides friendly advice to Freudians to drop a number of their favorite positions. I adduce here two clinical examples which I think might convince any reasonable observer of the validity of the concept of latent content, and in the latter case, that the understanding of latent content can be lifesaving.
The patient is a 37-year-old woman who started treatment with me 12 years ago while she was in a state of shock, immediately after she had been informed that her father had killed himself by jumping from a bridge. Shortly after I had read Hobson's essay and his reply to the commentaries in the second issue of Neuro-Psychoanalysis, she reported the following dream: “I am standing in front of the kitchen cupboard and my husband hands me a dish. He puts it in-my hand. I am afraid of breaking it.”
This woman had been married just 6 weeks previously and was now troubled by her husband's frequent use of politically incorrect language and opinions in relation to the relative status of men and women. She felt that in reality he loved and respected her. He was basically a decent person but given to derogatory comments about various individuals and groups. She, on the other hand, was extraordinarily committed to universal tolerance and freedom from prejudice. Lately she had heard him putting down women in his choice of language, and she was becoming angry. She was recalling a number of friends who had divorced and remarried happily, and she was thinking of divorce. The dishes in the dream were wedding gifts they had used that evening for the first time when entertaining some guests. She interpreted the dream to mean that she was afraid that s