Meeting of the Westchester Psychoanalytic Society

DISCUSSION: Dr. Mortimer Ostow was reluctant to jettison the topographical theory. He pointed out that Freud himself had not completely given it up in his last work, An Outline of Psychoanalysis. He felt that the structural theory did not adequately account for phenomena like the quality of consciousness related to instinctual pressure and the problem of hallucinatory apperception. He felt that the topographical theory offered precise formulations of a quantitative nature which could not be matched by the structural theory, and illustrated conscious, preconscious, and unconscious elements of a dream. In his opinion the essence of analytic work is the transformation of unconscious into conscious, and the dream is one of the best means of doing this. Only thus can instinctual discharge be obtained. The topographical theory is central to a therapeutic orientation.

Dr. H. Robert Blank cited certain visual dreams of blind patients in which the dreamer knows that he is blind. He saw in these dreams the operation of a defense against re-experiencing the trauma of being blinded upon awakening. He emphasized the role of reality factors in dreams of the blind. Freud characterized such dreams as coming from above (reality). Dr. Blank felt that the structural approach to dreams was very useful, although he indicated that it does not negate the topographical theory except in a dialectic sense. It does subsume the valid essence of the concept of unconscious, preconscious, and conscious psychic functioning.

Dr. Peter Glauber introduced the concept of ego feelings, using it as a bridge between the two theories. Dr. Edward Joseph raised the question whether the ego functions acquired later (verbal, integrative, reality testing) require an external stimulus level. He referred to isolation experiments in which the subject becomes disorganized and eventually hallucinates, a state comparable to dreaming.

In his closing remarks Dr. Brenner referred to the last statement of Fre