I am heartened by Dr. Stolorow's positive comments about my paper and by the fact that he found my conclusions “persuasive.” These are indeed welcome words. I am also greatly indebted to him for his seminal ideas on dreaming and the organization of self-experience (Atwood and Stolorow, 1984, pp. 97-117).

However, I take exception to his implication that I am not paying sufficient attention to latent content or that I am excluding or minimizing the unconscious in my conceptualizations. “In emphasizing that the aims of defense and disguise contribute to the construction of dream symbols and that therefore the distinction between manifest imagery and latent meaning continues to be applicable, our views differ from those of Greenberg, Fiss, and Fosshage,” Stolorow writes. “What we need is not an approach to dreams that excludes the