ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that the dream-work's choice of manifest symbolism was both clinically important and an intriguing theoretical puzzle whose solution offered the possibility of bridging the gap between Anna Freud's theory and Wilhelm Stekel's findings. Jung stressed the importance for dream interpretation to be based on the choice of manifest symbolism. In his book, Adler claimed that the extremism of neurotics' ideals made the dreams of neurotics easier to interpret than those of non-neurotic people. Jung twice credited Alphonse Maeder, a Zurich psychoanalyst who followed Jung upon his break with Freud, with having introduced two ideas about dreams: the notion that the dream has a "prospective and finally-oriented function". Writing in the pre-war period, Maeder applied Silberer's concept of two types of symbol to the circumstance of dreams. Where Silberer had written of the psychoanalytic and the anagogical meanings of single symbols, Maeder spoke of "the cathartic and the preparing function", "the sexually symbolic" and "the intellectual content".
