ABSTRACT
There can be no doubt that the conditions under which dreams are recorded and analysed have a great influence upon the results obtained in the analysis. Thus, the doctrines concerning dreams held by Freud, Jung and psycho-analysts generally are greatly affected by the fact that most of the dreams they analyse and make the basis of their theoretical views are obtained in the course of psycho-analysis, i.e. in the course of a long-continued process of a complex and peculiar kind in which there is a special relation, again of a peculiar kind, between the person whose dreams are being analysed and the person who is performing the analysis. Freud has even shown reason to believe † that some of the dreams of his patients have been the outcome of a wish on their part that the views on which their treatment is being based should be shown to be wrong. If factors, such as resistance to the views of the analyst, which enter into the process of psychoanalysis can have an effect of this crude kind, we can be confident that influences of a far more subtle kind, influences less easily detected, must be continually in action, and that, on the whole, the influence of psychoanalysis will be to produce dreams which will tend to confirm the views of those conducting the analysis. We can have little doubt, for instance, that an analyser who believes, or who is generally supposed to believe, that all psycho-neuroses, if not all dreams, are due to disturbance of the sexual instinct will through this belief, or supposed belief, influence the dreams of his patients and, if he is known to hold this belief, he will produce this effect even if he is careful not to refer to sex in any way in the course of his analysis. It is therefore by no means strange that such a physician as Stekel, who believes that the context of nearly all dreams is sexual * and evidently discusses this belief with his patients, should find sexual motives so prominent in their dreams. We can also be confident that one who is believed by his patients, or his prospective patients, to hold this belief will have a similar effect even if he says or does nothing wittingly during the analysis to confirm the belief. At the same time the converse must be true. There is the similar danger that analyses of dreams which take place under the dominant influence of one who disbelieves, or is supposed to disbelieve, in the influence of sex will tend to give results in accordance with this attitude, or supposed attitude, of the analyser.
