Meeting of the Westchester Psychoanalytic Society

April 4, 1961. DREAMS AND THE STRUCTURAL THEORY. Charles Brenner, M.D. and Jacob A. Arlow, M.D.

The authors review systematically the explanations of dream phenomena offered by the topographical and the structural theories and compare them. The topographical dream theory as expressed in Chapter Seven of The Interpretation of Dreams is summarized and the following questions raised: 1. The belief of the dreamer in the reality of his dream is explained by the fact that the elements of the manifest dream are sensory images. Freud himself rejected this explanation in 1917. 2. The phenomenon of discounting the reality of a dream by the thought, 'This is only a dream', is explained as a belated attempt of the censor to belittle material that has been allowed through to consciousness by mistake. 3. The topographical theory maintains that the dream work is done in the system Ucs. This makes it difficult to conceptualize the locus of the censorship outside of the system Ucs but still influences the dream work going on in this system. 4. The same problem arises in relation to secondary revision which is an ongoing process throughout dream formation and yet at the same time is located in the system Pcs. 5. The explanation of punishment dreams as due to masochism is not satisfactory in all cases.

The structural theory does not, as does the topographical, use the basic model of the reflex arc. It conceives of mental phenomena as being determined by interaction of the three psychological institutions: id, ego, and superego. By recognizing that primitive functioning is not the exclusive characteristic of one or another division of the mental apparatus, the dream work is seen as the result of selective regression of one or more areas of the personality. It consists of an interplay of id, ego, and superego with the final result in the manifest dream. The mechanism is fundamentally similar to that seen in mentation during waking life. Dream work is characterized by