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Psychoanalysis, in its essence, is a hermeneutic and historical science whose principal research method is and always has been the in-depth case study. Psychoanalytic propositions do not readily lend themselves to experimental procedures, and it is a rare and unexpected yield when data culled from the laboratory are found to bear meaningfully on psychoanalytic theory and practice. Greenberg and Fiss present two such welcome harvests, summarizing a variety of data from sleep and dream research that they believe offer support for a self-psychological understanding of dream function. Fosshage also offers important ideas about dream function, his data coming not from the laboratory but from the consulting room, where, I must confess, I also feel more comfortable.
Greenberg's contribution gave me some difficulty. According to him, the results of REM studies lead to a view of dreaming as “integrating information from current experience with past memories to produce schemas that are organizers of complicated behavioral tasks. Thus, the dreamer can learn and can modify or adapt behavior to new demands of the environment.” “The dream,” he continues, “portrays problems and also the dreamer's efforts at coping with these problems.” Thus, if I understand Greenberg's argument correctly, he believes that the REM data show that the function of