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Kohut's (1977) major contribution to our understanding of dreams consists of the idea of the self-state dream. He considered this to be a special type of dream in which the images portrayed the self as under threat and for which no associations that might increase understanding of underlying latent content could be evoked. He likened these dreams to the posttraumatic dreams with which we are all familiar. I find it interesting that, like Freud, Kohut wished to separate off this special group of dreams from other dreams, for, as is well known, Freud (1920) discussed posttraumatic nightmares as “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” and not subject to the same theoretical understanding as “ordinary dreams.” I would like to show that the results of recent sleep research and the formulations of other psychoanalytic thinkers point to a more unified understanding of dreams in which these apparently special cases are part of a spectrum of dreams rather than exceptions to the rule.
The observations of sleep researchers have raised questions about classical psychoanalytic dream theory and lead to a view of dreaming that can also be applied to Kohut's definition of the self-state dream. These questions also fit with revisions that self psychology itself has suggested about psychoanalytic theory in general. In the late 1960s several investigators (Newman and Evans, 1965; Breger, 1967; Dewan, 1970; Greenberg, 1970), inspired by the newly emerging findings from the EEG study of sleep, suggested that REM sleep, that phase of sleep associated with dreaming, might play a role in the processing