Meeting of the Psychoanalytic Institute of New England, East

October 3, 1983. THE MANIFEST CONTENT OF THE DREAM: PANEL DISCUSSION.

Dr. Sheldon Roth, the Chairman, gave a brief introduction in which he traced the status of the manifest content of dreams. He pointed out that Freud initially was wary of focusing on the manifest content, but later felt that analysts had gone too far in ignoring the manifest content in favor of the latent meaning. Ego psychology uses the manifest content to look at character styles and defenses. Currently, much dream research focuses on manifest content in the search for evidence of information processing and adaptation. Dr. Roth also asked what the manifest content really is. Dreams are primarily visual and must be translated into words to be described. The report of the manifest content is already the patient's first "interpretation" of the dream.

In the first paper presented, "On Imagining Another's Dream: The Uses of Wonder," Dr. Alfred Margulies suggested that with our increasing sophistication about the dream process and latent meanings, we have lost the capacity for wonder about the feelings, sensations, and other factors that may go into making a dream seem real to the dreamer. The therapist should try to "experience" the dream before attempting to explain it, in order to achieve "a broader dimension to empathic understanding." Dr. Margulies reported a dream of a man, who, though usually quite subdued, has a history of manic psychosis. The patient's wife was pregnant, and the dream occurred during Easter week: "I was in a church with a group of people. My father said, 'Look at that ray of light coming into the church. Go stand in it.' I did stand in the light. Suddenly there was a clap of thunder. [Here the patient clapped his hands loudly.] In fact, I actually heard it and woke up, but I kept dreaming. It was very powerful—it was a lightning bolt that hit me. I started to rise higher and higher in the air and could see the chandeliers. My father said, 'Look up.' I fel