Dr. Thorndike's Dreams

AbstractThe fictitious case of a professor having a midlife crisis is used to illustrate several points: 1) that our understanding of patients' dreams expands as more information becomes available; 2) subsequent interpretations don't invalidate earlier ones; 3) consciousness in psychoanalysis means something different than it does in neurology, knowledge and self-awareness being very different things; 4) significant actions cannot be assigned to either the ego or the id, but always to both; 5) concepts such as Ego and Id are ways of organizing aspects of thought and behavior; 6) the tendency to reify so-called psychic agencies and to locate them in specific areas of the brain seems questionable; and 7) the phrasing of interpretations expresses the emotional reactions of analysts to their patients' behavior.