Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

December 15, 1964. DREAMS IN WHICH THE ANALYST APPEARS UNDISGUISED: A STATISTICAL STUDY. Milton Rosenbaum, M.D.

The purpose of this paper is to correct what the author feels are some commonly held misconceptions about the significance of dreams in which the analyst appears undisguised. From his own experience and from discussion with colleagues, Dr. Rosenbaum believes that such dreams are rather infrequent. Most writers in the rather limited literature on the subject have concluded that these dreams portend a poor prognosis as well as a difficult analysis when they occur early in treatment, and significant countertransference problems if the phenomenon occurs later in treatment.

Dr. Rosenbaum conducted a statistical study designed to support or refute previously reported implications of such dreams. Questionnaires were completed by twenty-two psychoanalysts, only one of whom was a woman, on twenty-two male and twenty-two female patients. The most significant finding was that in a total of over seventeen hundred dreams, the analyst appeared undisguised in about nine per cent. Only four patients reported no dreams in which the analyst appeared undisguised. In the initial analytic hours there was an apparent relationship between an unusually intense transference state and a greater frequency of dream reporting, but this was not statistically significant. The opposite trend was found in the terminal analytic hours and was considered statistically significant. In female patients intense transference was associated with frequent dreams in which the analyst appeared undisguised, and they had more such dreams than did the male patients. There seemed to be an inverse relationship that was not statistically significant between the existence of countertransference phenomena and both the frequency of dreaming and the occurrence of these dreams in the terminal hours. The presence of countertransference problems