Introduction

Psychoanalytic mythology teaches us that psychoanalysis was born in the crucible of Freud's self-analysis. The primary data and experience of that creative self-analytic enterprise were Freud's dreams, culminating in his discovery of infantile sexuality in his (1900) analysis of the Irma dream.* The topographic model of the mind that resulted emphasized the paradigm of discovering the repressed latent wish behind the manifest facade.

The purpose of the workshop from which this book originated was the discussion of the clinical significance of the interpretation of dreams. The focus is the collaborative therapeutic situation rather than the solitary creative self-analytic endeavor. In the twenty-seven years following Freud's analysis of the Irma dream, his clinical experience influenced him to emend his theory of dream formation and his corresponding model of the mind. In 1919 (Freud, 1900, pp. 557-558) Freud described the gratification of a wish for punishment as a motive for creating a dream, presaging his (1923a) formal introduction of the structural hypothesis and adding the superego to the id as an instigator of dreaming. In 1920, in describing an “original function” of the dream work, Freud added a third factor, the ego, to the list of motives contributing to