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Freud's fundamental work “Dream Interpretation”1 was a milestone in the development of the modern psychology. It not only revealed to the psychotherapist the deeper layers of the patient's mind but also made possible the establishment of a general “psychology of the depth.”
Freud and his disciples put together stone upon stone, until the formerly hazy art of dream interpretation became a stately structure in the science of dreams. Later, however, according to Freud's own statements, the research on dreams came to a standstill. The master complains about this fact in his last book2 as follows:
“Turn with me the pages of the ‘Internationale Zeitschrift filr die drztliche Psychoanalyse' (International Journal for Medical Psychoanalysis’) in which, since 1913, the relevant articles on our science are collected. You find in the earlier volumes a regular section ‘Dream Interpretation’ with abundant contributions to the various problems of the dream. The further you go, however, the less frequent become such contributions, until the regular section finally disappears altogether. The analysts behave as if they had nothing to say about the dream, as if the dream interpretation were an exhausted problem….”
Freud is right as far as his permanent co-workers, the orthodox analysts, are concerned. Unfortunately, however, he failed to pay the necessary attention to the progress in the dream interpretation as obtained by Stekel in the course of developing his “active method”