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Diatkine is concerned with the function of the dream in mental life. Some theorists attempt to move the dream out of any save a historically privileged place in psychoanalysis. In this view, the dream is simply one in a series of mental events, distinguished only by its relative diminution of censorship and by a special mode of elaboration. Any special quality of dreaming as a process would be due merely to a quantitative difference in primary and secondary process contributions. Diatkine opposes this view of dreaming and believes that dreams have a special place and a particular quality that permits contact with elements which otherwise have to be reconstructed. He is thus opposed to the view of Serge Viderman, who argued, in The Construction of Analytic Space, that the unconscious fantasies reached therapeutically through dreams are a product of the analytic situation and constructed out of it. Diatkine is also critical of Lewin and Isakower on the manifest content of the dream. He views their efforts, and especially the more fanciful theses of Garma, as re-emergences of Rankian-type hypotheses about very early primitive reminiscences. In addition, Diatkine is critical of the neurophysiological studies on dreaming, because of the problematic identification of experimental dreams with dreams from ordinary life and during the course of an analysis.