Sleeping and Dreaming on the Couch Viewed From the Perspective of Compromise Formation Theory

The purpose of this brief communication is to emphasize that sleeping and dreaming on the couch are best understood (as are any other data) as enactments motivated by complexes of conscious and unconscious fantasies conceptualized as compromise formations. This theoretical perspective counters an unnecessarily limiting tendency to view these phenomena primarily as resistance or acting out in the transference with predominantly preoedipal determinants—the emphasis of most existing contributions to this subject (for example, Alexander, 1976; Roark, 1970; Robinson, 1974). My clinical experiences with sleeping and dreaming on the couch in two cases revealed prominent erotic transference manifestations; the analytic work was also in keeping with Hurst's (1976) and Inderbitzin's (1988) “multidimensional analysis” of sleep in their patients,1 for whom it embodied “complex, multiply determined compromises with many changing meanings” (Inderbitzin, p. 674).

After several years of analysis, two of my male patients began repeatedly to precipitously fall asleep and dream on the couch. Analysis of their experience of sleeping and dreaming in my presence revealed that the revival of specific aspects of erotic transference wishes was most salient. The act of sleeping had assumed a central place in their histories, which contributed to the prominence of this symptom at particular points in their analyses. Sleeping