ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to suggest explanations for the high valuation accorded to the reporting of dreams in the light of modern psychoanalytic theory. To report a dream means that the patient is seeking the analyst's help in integrating the conflict between psychic structures. It is because a repressed wish is seeking fulfillment that dreams in all ages have been regarded as foretelling the future. It is true that we commonly refer the failure to report dreams, as we do the failure to suggest associations to them, to the patient's resistance, that is, to a disturbance as a result of anxiety of the synthetic function of the ego. The absence of a positive theory of the significance of reporting a dream is especially surprising when we consider that a dream has been regarded as an important psychic event throughout the history of mankind. In recent years the operation of the ego in the dream process has been given increased recognition.
