Dream between Symptom and Metaphor - Forms of Symbolization

Even since the fundamental book of psychoanalysis, Dreams interpretation, 1900, Sigmund Freud considered that the symbol has a universal value, and E. Jones added in 1919 the difference between the conscious symbol and the unconscious symbol. Enlightening the unconscious wish, the primitive anguish, the archaic conflicts, dreams could be often a metaphoric working through of them, but sometimes they could be also a symptomatic manifestation. In the analytic cure, the patient records his or her significant dreams, he or she is elaborating the nightmares or those dreams that produce pain and grief, and anguish, dreams that exceed the capacity of dreaming or of reverie, as we could find in the works of H. Segal, or Bion or Ogden. Some dreams are reflections of the psychotic aspects or foreclosed contains of the patients personality, other dreams are from the neurotic parts of the patients personality. During the analytic process, of the working together on the day-dreams and night-dreams, the analyst could know and could making known to the analysand the unconscious aspect of his/her mind, and even of the analytic relationship.