I don't seem to have made myself very clear. Dreams, as I see them, guide our subsequent waking behavior in relation to our present life concerns. They do this by dredging up relevant past experiences from our memories and then dramatizing the behavioral import of these reality principles in terms of the manifest content we take to be our dreams. Our dreams address all of our life concerns concurrently. What we see as our dream is really a composite entity in which dramas related to each life concern are played out at the same time. Since dreams deal with all of our life concerns and since the clinical setting typically does not, a method of dream interpretation that attempts to include most, if not all, of the dreamer's life concerns is not suitable for the clinical setting. For example, let's suppose that Freud had gone to a psychologist because of a lack of self-confidence and had reproduced the Irma dream during a clinical session. The psychologist would probably pick up on Freud's vacillation in the face of authority almost immediately, and would begin therapy on this basis. That the dream interpretation led the psychologist to the correct therapeutic approach could be taken as clinical validation of that approach even though the approach led the psychologist to overlook 90 percent of the dream's content. So I don't think that clinical validation is really applicable to the dream interpretation method I began to outline. What I began to do in the Irma dream introduction post was sketch out the reality principles that served as a basis for the Irma dream. The next step in the interpretive approach is to investigate how those principles are dramatized. That part of my approach I have not presented here and will not present in detail. My general view of dreams is not new at all. It's virtually identical to that of Joe Weiss. What differences there are merely relate to the attempt to add more detail to the interpretation of a dream than one usually finds in the clinical setting. The act of adding more detail in itself creates rather stringent self-consistency requirements which help keep one's interpretations out of "the murky depths". That's particularly true in my case since I postulate that our mental processes during dreams are similar to our thought processes during the day. I cannot concoct a special mental process for dreaming as Freud did when he invented the primary process. My paramount reason for attempting to analyze Freud's dreams in more detail than clinical psychologists do is to offer evidence that Freud's primary process is a fiction. While it may be true that is dangerous to attempt to say too much at this point about what our unconscious mental processes are, we still have the duty to try to eliminate gross errors in judgement that should have been corrected decades before. That is all I'm attempting with regard to Freud's primary mental process. I certainly agree that "we must be careful about developing the idea that there is another little person in our heads directing everything." That same conviction formed the basis of my problem with classical psychoanalysis. I am referring to the Freudian gremlins -- the id, the ego, and the superego -- fighting it out for control over the person's behavior. I see no dichotomy between a person's conscious self and his unconscious self. These are merely the complementary aspects of the single whole that the person is.
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