Introduction

The first paper in this book,‘Interpretation of dreams – 100 years on’ (2000) considers the nature of dreaming in psychotic and nonpsychotic functioning. Segal notes the change in her own and her colleagues’ thinking. Now we pay closer attention to the level of symbolisation in the dream (symbol or symbolic equation), noting how the dream functions (representation or evacuation) and what function the dream fulfils in the transference.As Segal puts it, we are to analyse the dreamer not the dream.