Through this procedure, patients are often enabled to recollect forgotten dreams and nightmares.
Certain patients do not forget their dreams but refuse to report them. In such cases the simplest procedure consists in asking the patient to make up a dream while in the analyst’s office, that is to put himself in the hypnoidal state described above and to tell the images and thoughts that come to his mind. Or if the analyst suspects the existence of a certain complex, he may ask the patient to build up a dream on a topic so selected that it will touch that complex.
A question which audiences have asked me hundreds of times is: “Cannot the patient make up something that will deceive you entirely and throw you on the wrong trail?”
My answer to such a question is emphatically negative.
A study of the literary and artistic productions of all races has shown that in every “story” and in every work of art, the writer or artist was solely bringing to consciousness his own preoccupations, in a form which may have deceived him but which does not deceive the psychologist slightly familiar with the author’s biography.
Brill tells somewhere how his attention was first drawn to the value of artificial dreams and of so called “fake dreams.”
In 1908, he was treating an out of town physician, suffering from severe anxiety hysteria. The patient was very sceptical, did not co-operate with Brill, never talked freely and pretended he never had dreams. One morning, however, he came for his appointment bringing at last one dream. “He had given birth to a child and felt severe labour pains. X., a gynecologist who assisted him, was unusually rough and stuck the forceps into him more like a butcher than a physician.”
It was a homosexual fancy. Asked who X. was, the patient said he was a friend with whom he had had some unpleasantness.
Then he interrupted the conversation, saying: “There is no use fooling you any longer. What I told you was not a dream. I just made it up to show you how ridiculous your dream theories are.”
Further examination, however, proved that the patient was homosexual and that his anxiety states were due to the cessation of his perverse relations with X. The lie he had made up was simply a distorted wish closely connected with the cause of his neurosis.