These paper were presented at the Annual Research Lecture of The British Psychoanalytical Society on 1st March, 2000. We are most grateful to the presenters for their generosity in making their work available to our public website. The issues raised are of importance at a time when psychoanalysis and the psychotherapies are responding to the necessity to describe and research into the processes and outcomes involved in the work.   

Papers

In a sense, psychoanalysis began with dreams. The Interpretation of Dreams was first published in 1900, followed quickly by two books, on jokes and on the psychopathology of everyday life, in which Freud demonstrated how his new theory of the processes of the unconscious mind could be used to explain a great deal of everyone’s everyday behaviour.