ABSTRACT

The occasions when the patient expresses a number of feelings verbally—“I am anxious, I don’t know why.” “I am feeling a bit better, I don’t know why.”—may be an expression of an experience such as I suggest takes place when he has a dream. That is to say, he has an emotional experience on which dream-work-α is done so that the emotional experience can be made available, stored for use in consciousness. Ordinarily α operates to enable a conscious emotional experience to be stored in unconsciousness; it just occurs to me that this may be very like the function performed by logic in the elaboration of a scientific deductive system in which premises and derived hypotheses are so arranged that they follow each other.