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Drs. Tolpin and Stolorow and I share some confusion about each other's comments, but after reflection I think I understand the source of our confusion. My sense of their remarks is that we are all saying essentially the same thing in different languages. If I understand their questions, they had trouble integrating the material from research into a self psychologic perspective and therefore believed that I was saying something different.

Stolorow responds to my hypothesis that dreaming is “integrating information from current experience with past memories in order to produce schemas that are organizers of complicated behavioral tasks. Thus, the dreamer can learn and modify or adapt behavior to new demands of the environment.” He feels this is not directly applicable to the domain of self psychological inquiry—“namely, the organization of self-experience and its vicissitudes in relation to the subjectively experienced surround.” I think his idea is quite similar to mine but is expressed in purely self-psychologic language. Because I was trying to capture the overall function of dreaming, including the evidence of the role of REM sleep in animals, I tried to phrase my hypothesis in broad, general terms. I find his formulation to be a special case but not a different one. Obviously we cannot use the language of self psychology in referring to animals. The clinical example I provided attempts to illustrate how this view of dream function can be applied in a self psychology mode. While in this presentation I limited the discussion to the concept of the self-state dream, elsewhere (Greenberg, 1987) I have tried to demonstrate how