The Metropolitan Institute for Training in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, The Metropolitan Center for Mental Health and The Metropolitan Society of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapists Invite you to a Scientific Meeting
Friday, April 7, 2017 – 7:30 PM, FREUD’S DREAM THEORY REVISITED, PRESENTER: ARNOLD RICHARDS, M.D.
Freud saw the dream as translating thoughts from their derivatives to their unconscious source. The dream exists first in the patient’s present, in his immediate experience, rather than in his earlier trauma. The link between present anxiety and past trauma may exist, but this has to be demonstrated rather than asserted. For the Freudian, the didactic purpose may be to show the patient his unconscious, unfulfilled childhood wish, but this is also driven by an effort to fulfill that wish in the dream state. In my view, attention to the experience of the dream is the beginning, not the end point, of the task of getting to the analysand’s conflicted wishes. It has been hypothesized that dreams seek solutions for conflicts. I conclude that this view of dreams is more descriptive than explanatory, and does not offer us an explanation of why past trauma or current conflicts should be represented in a dream. Instead, I believe that dreams are an effort to deal with conflicts that stem from a wish/guilt dynamic, and contain a compromise formation in which wishes are fulfilled and punishment is executed. Dreams mediate the realms in which the id- Continue reading Freud’s Dream Theory Revisited with Arnold Richards at MITPP