ABSTRACT
Clinical states treated by psychoanalysts do not necessarily require a special interest in the formal aspects of abnormal conscious mental events. The content of patients’ utterances are the primary object of the analyst’s attention. Patients’ communications obey the rules of syntax, abstract thinking proceeds at an advanced level, and memory, although often subject to falsifications, is not impaired. The goal of thought is maintained, and extraneous stimuli do not disrupt the flow of associations. Interruptions may usually be resolved when the patient becomes aware, generally through the analyst’s intervention, of an unwelcome preconscious wish, memory, or (transference) thought. Under these circumstances the dream acts as a reminder that there are mental phenomena whose formal characteristics are distinct from their content. In dreams the content is experienced as a “here-and-now” event. It has an hallucinatory quality.
