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In this book, we are presented with still another approach to decoding dreams — the Perceptanalytic Dream Interpretation System. We are told that the usual psychoanalytic mode of dream interpretations is flawed. Piotrowski and Biele contrast their approach with that of Freud's:
More dissimilar conceptions of the role of the manifest dream can hardly be imagined. By reducing the manifest dream's significance to that of a starting point for free, serial associations, classical psychoanalysts assign to manifest dreams a role no more significant than that of day residuals. Dreamers and interpreters contribute to latent content; interpretations are dominated by the desire to identify the wishes that were expected to have been fulfilled in dreams but that were concealed from dreamers' conscious perception by means of disguise. By contrast, perceptanalysts pay careful attention to manifest dreams because these dreams constitute their most valuable data. They do not ask for additional associations, but they preserve the emotional, logical, irrational, and dramatic unity resulting from dream figures' involvement in developing dream plots. (p. 129)
Freud focused on the wish-fulfilling function of the dreams, but Piotrowski and Biele conceptualize dreams as unconscious attempts to clarify the dreamer's “personal intrapsychic conflicts” and to find solutions to the conflicts. They provide detailed “rules” and “axioms” to guide dream interpretation. For example, they state that all traits appearing in a dream and attributed by dreamers to themselves are “assented” (seen as acceptable); whereas traits assigned to dream figures other than the dreamer are “dissented” (experienced as ego alien). The greater the difference between the dreamer and any other figure in the dream, the greater is the rejection of whatever qualities that other figure represents. In essence, the Percept-analytic