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Volume 7, Number 2
July-December 2003

Sogni: ieri e oggi.
(Dreams:Yesterday and Today.)
Jacqueline Amati Mehler


SUMMARY

One hundred years after the publication of Freud's monumental book on Dreams the author discusses the role and the importance attributed to dreams in contemporary psychoanalysis , when theory and practice are so diversificated and close to fragmentation.

She wonders whether this contributes to the fact that many analysts today consider dream interpretation less crucial in the analytic work, an opinion that the author does not share. The centrality of free association is discussed inasmuch as it represents the specific way to decipher the "dream work" that links latent and manifest content.

The subject is dealt with from different perspectives although correlated. The author points out the meaning that the Traumdeutung has had and still has by virtue of its containing the foundations of the psychoanalytic theory. Suffice to quote the meaning of remembering and forgetting, the role of regression, the discovery of the two principles of mental functioning (primary and secondary processes), the question of hallucinations and psychosis and the capacity to distinguish phantasy from reality, just to mention some of the issues that were to become fundamental clinico-theoretical tenets that Freud developed over the years.

The paper also discusses the main controversies related to vicissitudes of the dream and dreaming in regards to contemporary theory and clinical work as well as to psychoanalytic technique. In conclusion the author quotes interesting neuroscientific data that seem to confirm some of Freud's early assumptions dealt with in the Project published after his death.