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The current “revival of the interest in the dream” (Robert Fliess) as well as the publication of quite a number of excellent textbooks and monographs on the subject has served to highlight the fact that many problems of dream psychology have yet to be solved, and that detailed studies of specific dream problems are needed.
In the presentation to follow, certain psychoanalytic situations are compared with the corresponding manifest dreams. Dreams of various dreamers which show a similarity of imagery and structure when referred to analogous psychoanalytic situations are termed representative dreams. Representative dreams do not constitute a new category of dreams—they are all too familiar to the analyst—but are dreams grouped according to a special methodologic principle.
Emphasis on the manifest dream content is no novelty in psychoanalysis. One has only to think of the endeavors of the Jung and Stekel Schools and, more recently, the Existentialist School Even in the camp of the strict Freudians there has been a tendency of late towards greater flexibility in evaluating the manifest dream content and the role of the ego and the superego in the dream. The panel discussion on dreams held by the American Psychoanalytical Association (7) in Atlantic City in 1955 bears ample witness to this change.
The methodologic approach used here is in many respects a reversal of the classical psychoanalytic interpretation of dreams which might be called the retrograde method. Starting from the manifest dream content, the classical technique is to attempt to penetrate to the latent dream content (also called “dream thought” by Freud) by means of free association and direct symbol translation. My own point of departure is the psychoanalytic situation itself (which will be more clearly defined later on). The crux of my hypothesis is that there is a more or less constant affinity between the unconscious and emotional factors stirred up in the analytical situation, on the one hand, and the