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Freud discovered how dreams provide a royal road into the unconscious, revealing man's good and evil, and how the mundane, base metals of dream life can be transformed into precious metals of an enriched inner world. He distinguished manifest from latent contents, using free association, including day residue to reveal latent content. Symbolization, condensation, displacement, and secondary revision are creative mental mechanisms, both disguising and revealing the wish. Later, he elaborated: Dreams are constructed both from “below” and “above.”
In the middle of the twentieth century,1 Erik Erikson (1954) lamented “that the art and ritual of ‘exhaustive’ dream analysis has all but vanished” (p. 5). Wallerstein (1995) considered this paper one of the major new contributions to dream interpretive work. The via reggia, the royal road to the Unconscious, discovered by Freud, had few travelers then. Today, it remains sparsely traveled. As esteemed a writer as Brenner (2006) considers teaching dream interpretation a waste of time.
In this paper I hope to rejuvenate collaborative dream interpretation by examining shifts in associations and interpretative responsiveness at different phases in psychoanalysis. I take Erikson's observation of a dream set within the individual and reflecting his or her sociohistorical context to elaborate how changes in the inner life will show up as changes in dream report and associations, how this influences interpretative response, and how some