ABSTRACT
The dream is the mechanism by which
the ego links the sense data of external experience with the associated conscious awareness of the sense impression;
the stream of unconnected impressions and events are made suitable for storing in memory;
these stored events are reviewed and one is chosen which enables facts already ‘known’, i.e. stored, to be harmonized so that the relationship between them is established and the place of each element seen in its relationship to the whole;
the interplay between paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions is made possible by a selected fact which is known as the ‘harmonizing or unifying fact’ spatially, and the ‘cause’ temporally, or when time is an essential element in the relationship between the elements.
The dream, therefore, is the mechanism by which there comes into operation,the social conscience, associated with splitting of the superego and retreat from the depressive position to the paranoid-schizoid position. This seems identical with the social guilt and true super-ego which can only come into being with the Oedipus complex, but which I think is a highly persecutory super-ego which becomes more persecutory since it is split up. Each split itself becomes a complete super-ego and this leads to further splitting, the fragmentation becoming progressively more minute. This contributes to the state where dreams are ‘invisible’, wet, and being awake is ‘dry’;
the individual super-ego, a murderous object, which becomes manifest if synthesis of the fragments of the paranoid-schizoid 45position is effected by dream-work bringing the depressive position into being.
