Erikson attempts to reinterpret Freud's Irma Dream. He emphasizes the clues in the manifest dream, applying his ideas about the 'systematic configurational analysis of the manifest dream and the manifest social patterns of the dream population'. Ego regression during sleep is demonstrated by reference to 'psychosocial criteria [for] the ego's successive graduations from the main crises of the human life cycle'. The Irma Dream deals predominantly with matters of 'generativity'; it also reaches into problems of 'intimacy' and 'integrity'. Fliess became in the dream the object of a 'creative as well as therapeutic transference'.