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This book is the product of a two-day workshop sponsored by the American Psychoanalytic Association in 1986. Eleven psychoanalysts contributed their thoughts and experience, addressing the topic of how today's psychoanalyst interprets dreams in his clinical practice. The editor of the monograph, Arnold Rothstein, suggested that the contributors focus on broad issues such as whether dream interpretation occupies a special place in psychoanalysis and can still be viewed as “the royal road to the unconscious.” Contemporary psychoanalysts are divided over the issue of whether dream interpretation provides an open window to the analysand's unconscious or whether it has no more special significance than any other data uncovered in the course of a psychoanalysis. Another important issue that was carefully examined was the relative importance of the manifest content of the dream and the dream's latent content.
In his early work on dream interpretation, Freud (1900) warned that the manifest dream can be misleading and must be converted into latent dream content by deciphering the censorship of the dream work (e.g., the dream's condensation, displacement and symbolization). In contrast to contemporary dream interpreters, who were applying the cookbook approach to the dream's manifest content, Freud devised his own logical scientific approach to dream interpretation. It involved decoding the manifest content and understanding the latent dream's meaning. The more orthodox psychoanalysts still believe it is important to adhere strictly to Freud's methodology. They deemphasize the manifest dream content and work with free associations to find the latent dream