ABSTRACT

When Dr Pontalis wrote asking me to contribute to this discussion he said it was because I seemed to use dreams in a very personal way, as described in my last book about a patient who did doodle drawings.2 I answered that I did not think I used them in any special way, as I only looked for associations, and if there were none I tried to see if I could find understandable symbols. I therefore asked him for examples of what he meant. He wrote back quoting what I had said in the book, about two of the patient’s dreams; he then said that I had considered the dream neither as a message or text to be deciphered nor as a compromise between repressed desires and ego defence mechanisms, but as a witness of a state of being; in fact as an attempt at symbolization, rather than as a symbolic language to be decoded, and how this makes it possible to work on the manifest content without necessarily considering it as a distortion of the latent content. He said he wants this approach, although it may be ‘usual’ for me, made explicit. I will try, very tentatively, at least to make some comments on this problem.