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An in-depth look at the 100-plus-year history of psychoanalysis reveals that the waxing and waning of the place of the dream within the psychoanalytic space is due to a myriad of factors both within and outside psychoanalysis. In our previous paper (Lane & Harris, ), we pointed out the factors “within” psychoanalysis found their early impetus in Freud, who used the interpretation of dreams for his self-analysis. We noted that he was destined to favor dreams and consider them the main avenue to the unconscious, placing them in an exceptional position. However, within the psychoanalytic movement, the shift to ego psychology and the work of the interpersonal and relational schools proved to be decisive in challenging the traditional Freudian elevation of dreams to the status of the “royal road to the unconscious.”
The goal of this paper is to consider how three “outside” factors influenced the changing place of the dream in psychoanalysis. The “rebellion” of Jung and Adler, who did not accept infantile sexuality as the central basis for a dream theory and pressed for an emphasis on the progressive, problem-solving, and “self-righting” (Fosshage, 1997, p. 430) aspects of dreams, was a harbinger of the first factor: the challenge to the psychoanalytic understanding of dreams from other psychological perspectives.