Dream analysis has followed psychotherapy from its early beginnings. In fact it is older than psychotherapy. Both Beck's cognitive therapy and different streams within behavioral therapy suppose that dreams clarify aspects of the dreamer's daily life. Both the cognitive and the behavioral traditions propose strategies to use this hypothesized continuity between woken life and dream. The practices of dream analysis are highly similar in the two therapeutic styles. The fundamental difference resides in the causal theories: Daily life problems and dream production are attributed by behavioral authors to contingencies and by cognitive therapists to mental structures and processes.
functional analysis; dream analysis; cognitive therapy; behavior therapy