X. Dream-Exploration and Dream-Analysis

As a science, psycho-analysis is committed to the discovery of the truth about the events in our own minds and also the truth about our own actions. To make public either of these clearly requires the overcoming of an immense anxiety, both persecutory and depressive. What we reveal to the “group” is probably the most terrifying; what hostage we give to our “enemies” is the most intimidating; but what we reveal to our “siblings” threatens to demonstrate the disparity of our internal objects and thus that we are “foster-” brothers and sisters at best. The loneliness consequent upon this realization is surely one of the great deterrents to revelation to colleagues of our actual behaviour in our consulting rooms. But first of all it deters us from discovering what we in fact do, as against what we think we do, wish we did, feel we ought to do or aspire to do. What follows is an attempt to report the monitoring of my work with my patients' dreams and cannot be taken as a recommended method for anyone else. Its crudeness as a statement when compared with the great intricacy of what actually happens will immediately be apparent, but it is the best I can do at the moment. It may help other analysts to monitor and discover what they in fact do; it is of no importance whether this turns out to be similar or different from what I am able to report.

There is no doubt in my mind that I feel pleasure and relief when a patient reports a dream, for I feel that he is “playing the game on my home ground”, so to speak. And, correspondingly, I know that I begin to become uneasy about the nature of the work I have been doing if it fails to elicit dream-material over a protracted period. This is modified in the case of patients who maintain a strong denial of psychic reality and thus a consistent reluctance to come into contact with the dream-life they are leading. I feel that to tell a dream is an act of great confidentiality and inherent truthfulness, made possible by the narrator's opt