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Recent studies of the dream use dreams not as an end, as a thing, but as a means of elaborating other subjects. Anzieu discusses dreams with a focus on auto-analysis. Lacan focuses on language in his discussion of the dream of Irma's injection. There is no question for Flournoy of the prominent place to be played by dreams in an analysis. They are indeed the royal road to the unconscious and can be used as a barometer of the movement of an analysis. But, Flournoy asks, why does a patient tell his dreams to his analyst? Why did Freud write the famous Chapter VII? Did he act with the object of healing patients always in his mind, or was he moved by his elevated scientific ideal, or was he under the influence of some thought which motivated him without his knowledge? To answer these questions about Freud, Flournoy notes how the concepts of dream and psychopathology are both opposed and assimilated to each other in Freud's book. The emphasis on pathology accounts for the concept of regression in the theory and is superfluous with respect to the dream activity itself. For if the dream is merely one aspect of psychological activity, why is it the privileged mode of access to the unconscious? Why does the analysis of dreams carry with it curative powers not to be found in the analysis of other modes of psychological functioning? Freud's scientific ideals were ever present, but the contemporary conception of the enterprise of science and of the nature of scientific truth now emphasize more of a coherence theory of truth, according to Flournoy. The scientific truth Freud was to discover in dreams, especially in the dreams of the death of persons dear to us, led him to the oedipus complex. Freud thus discovered the universal semantic aspect to be found in dreams which accords to them this privileged position. The author concludes that Freud's motivation in writing Chapter VII involved an exteriorization of what had become a foreign body, the dream, with its rei