ABSTRACT
Unconscious wishes excited by events of the day produce disturbances of sleep. Freud postulated a wish for sleep in the Preconscious, which is relative however; what actually occurs is partial wakefulness. One of the reasons that Freud was intent on developing a model of sleep was because it provided a model for psychoanalytic therapy. The parallel between the therapeutic situation and sleeping was worked out further by Lewin. Patients with extreme insomnia tend to have weak egos that cannot afford to give up wakefulness and undergo regression. The process of dream formation makes it possible for intrusions from Unconscious to be handled by dreaming while the rest of the ego continues to sleep. The wish and its fulfillment are close together during sleep, and intrusion of a wish has strong sensory qualities. The defensive activities circumscribe the disturbance, the ego observing and treating it as a foreign body-a process that allows rest of the ego to go on sleeping.
