The dream in session: the clinical use of interpretation and the limits of the psychoanalytic procedure
Keywords:
dream interpretation, psychoanalytic technique, free association, transference, countertransferenceAbstract
This article examines the clinical use of the dream in the psychoanalytic session, shifting the question from what a dream means to how one works with it when an analysand brings it. It argues that the contribution of the Freudian procedure does not lie in supplying the analyst with a repertoire of symbolic equivalences, but in instituting a working rule: the meaning of a dream is produced solely through the dreamer's own associations, and no competence of the analyst can replace them. The argument reconstitutes the distinction between manifest and latent content and the four operations of the dream-work — condensation, displacement, considerations of representability and secondary revision — drawing from each the constraint it imposes on the listener's conduct. It then examines three dimensions proper to the clinical situation: the transferential addressing of the account, the status of countertransference as an instrument, and dreams that resist interpretation, whether through the navel of the dream, traumatic repetition, or failures in the capacity to symbolise. Finally, it delimits the Jungian reading as a distinct tradition that cannot be combined without being named. It concludes that the clinical value of interpretation is prospective: it is measured by the associative work it sets in motion, not by the decipherment it proposes.
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