Dream Recall and Content as a Function of Defensiveness

Abstract

Freud's theories about repression and defense grew to maturity alongside those about dreams. In The Interpretation of Dreams, he wrote, "The forgetting of dreams depends far more upon resistance than upon the fact, stressed by the authorities, that the waking and sleeping states are alien to each other" (p. 559). Repression as a prime cause of the forgetting of dream content continues to be an evident fact in the eyes of psychodynamic clinicians but the repression hypothesis of dream forgetting has not been regarded as having much merit by researchers. Singer and Schonbar and Domhoff and Gerson did find a mild relationship between dream forgetting and the Welsh R. Scale, the latter measuring repression. However, Wallach and Bone, Nelson, and McAllister failed to find any significant relationship between dream recall and the "reversal" scale of the Defense Measuring Instrument (DMI). This scale is designed to measure repression and denial, and thus this finding is opposite those predicted by Freud's repression theory. In a major recent review of the causes of dream forgetting Cohen concludes the repression hypothesis should be discarded.