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DISCUSSION: Dr. Charles Fisher felt that Dr. Rosenbaum's method could serve as a model for the investigation of simple problems. However, he pointed out that this method tends to disregard individual differences between patients and between analysts treating different cases. Not all analytic data, even though obtained from well-conducted analyses, are comparable. The significance of such dreams occurring more frequently than the 'normal' incidence is questionable. It could be argued that the failure of this type of dream to occur has a poor prognostic significance; in Yazmajian's four patients who reported no dreams of this kind, one showed no change, one made slight progress, one discontinued treatment, and one made satisfactory progress. Many factors may influence the occurrence of such dreams: they may represent normal phenomena or they may have pathological significance.
Dr. Richard Yazmajian cautioned against the statistical approach and emphasized the importance of understanding such dreams in terms of the patient's past and the current transference situation, as well as the type of neurosis. He cited a case where the appearance of the analyst in the dream served as a screen memory of observing the father's penis; it represented an attempt to treat the analyst as a real person so as to avoid investing him with symbolic importance. Like all psychic phenomena, Dr. Yazmajian assumes that these dreams have a variety of meanings.
Dr. Rudolph Loewenstein agreed that the negative results obtained in this statistical study were significant, but felt that some dreams of this type reflect unresolved transference problems. He also pointed out that Gitelson emphasized that the analyst was actually the analyst and not a substitute for someone else. The specific case described by Gitelson involved a transference problem precipitated