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According to the reconstitutive method, a dream is sufficiently interpreted and explained by having formulated the operation of the several specific factors, as in the foregoing example; that is, no preconceptions as to content or meaning or transcendental symbols are imported into this sort of purely mechanistic interpretation.

Such methods, which belong no less to general psychopathology than to the reconstitutive method, do not leave one free to argue from analogy; a privilege which most psycho-analysts enjoy, and have been known to abuse, as Freud and Jung themselves have done.

The difference between the psycho-analytic methods and the reconstitutive method, in a given case, is that the former assume the validity of sexual symbolism unless it can positively be proved absent, which is rarely attempted; whereas, the reconstitutive method assumes no symbolism and no meaning to be present in the mind of the dreamer except as the probability can be demonstrated by specific investigations and inferences as to the interplay of CUES and CONTEXTS or apperception-masses.

Let me illustrate these points of criticism of the psychoanalytic methods, by the analysis of a sample dream; speaking first as the dreamer giving the simple narrative; next as Freud applying the reductive method; then as Jung employing the constructive method; and finally explaining the dream, as I would myself prefer, by the use of what I may call the reconstitutive method.

The alleged meaning may thus often be the work of the interpreter's mind although not that in the dreamer's mind. The reconstitutive method brings into relief the trial-and-error character of the dreaming process: the organism as attempting the physiological resolution of persisting and unadjusted stimulus-ideas.

This instance, be it said, implies no criticism of Psycho-analysis beyond the fact that its conception of symbols in dreams and elsewhere is transcendental and historical rather than truly psychological as it purports to be; a state of opinion which the use of the reconstitutive method is calculated to correct.

It is now made to mean that the dreamer is impelled to higher biological duties, namely marriage and professional success. The plausibility of these interpretations once shown, they are next proved to be wide of the mark, by the fact that the dream can be more adequately accounted for in another way, i. e., by a proposed "reconstitutive method."

Moreover, by a more delicate and intricate use of the reconstitutive method it is possible to discover the stimulus-ideas in those cases where the dreamer is not able to testify to their character, as I was in this simple instance; purposely chosen, I may add, to outline the method in its simplest aspect.