Chapter 8: A Discussion of the Various Theories

I will start with a consideration of the relation of theory to clinical work by presenting some clinical material of my own. Following an excellent but very substantial dinner, coupled with the effects of jet lag, I awoke very early this morning with an anxiety dream. The content of the dream was simply that I was being given an oral examination in German. My associations took me to a paper soon to be presented in Vienna, which I have to deliver in German, a language in which I am far from fluent. I was aware that I had been worrying about this for some time, but then the meaning of the dream occurred to me. It seemed clear that by displacing my anxiety from this discussion to the Vienna paper I was effectively postponing today's presentation. My satisfaction with this piece of analytic work allowed me to doze off again, but I woke soon with sudden recall of a memory of something that had occurred a very long time ago. In order to qualify for my Master's degree I had to pass an examination in scientific German. I was quite confident that I could do this on the basis of my very scanty knowledge, and went into the examination room, with some half-a-dozen others, to find that we had each been given a copy of Grimm's fairy tales in German, and were told to translate the story of Hansel and Gretel with the aid of a German dictionary. I didn't do it very well and was rather nervous about this. The examiner