XIII. The Relation of Dreaming to Learning from Experience in Patient and Analyst

In analysis we usually study dreams to gain access to processes of thinking that concern the patient's emotional conflicts. But every once in a while, particularly with patients who are students of analysis or are professionally interested in the analytic method itself, a different sort of dream arises. These are dreams that seem to reflect the patient's thinking about how his mind works. They are what might be called “theoretical” dreams; they are not about psycho-analysis proper but the patient's own theory about his experience of his mind's operation.

Throughout the history of psycho-analysis, the so-called “theories of the mind” have been the changing models of the mental apparatus that analysts think they are using in listening to, observing and trying to understand their patients and themselves. Freud's own models changed during the course of his work. The first model postulated by him resembled some kind of telephone exchange and this he elaborated, before he started on his psycho-analytic work, in what is known as “The Project for a Scientific Psychology”. This was a neurologist's model and was concerned with the apparatus that conducts messages in the brain; it had nothing to do with the meaning of the messages but only with the way in which the messages were distributed and conducted through the neural network. Once he embarked upon analytic work he elaborated a second theory which was, in a way, a supplement to the first, namely the Libido theory. This was a theory about the distribution of “mental energy” in which mental energy and sexual excitation were more or less equated with one another. But then, in the course of his work, he discovered that the central problem was conflict which had various configurations; conflict between what he called the Ego and the outside world; conflict between the Ego and the Super Ego; and between the Ego and the instincts. So he elaborated the Structural theory (in the 1920's) in which he spoke of the Ego as serving three