Psychoanalysts don't seem to be interested in dreams as Freud himself showed in one of his later books. Perhaps the explanation is that the handling of dream method is very difficult and requires specific skills that one can achieve only thought personal analysis during years, several times a week. But this personal analysis is no more what it should be, that is, it is not concerned with facts but theory. This way, people trained as psychoanalysts today have theoretical knowledge about the therapy but lack the personal experience with their unconscious and the repressed.

So, is Freud still up-to-date? And what about his method and, mainly, about his practice, that is, working with dreams in order to explore the mind and especially the repressed wishes?

As far as concerns my own experience, Freud's method is still accurate. Dream is a fulfillment of repressed wishes and may be addressed only with the help of the free association method and the symbol analysis. The structure of dreams is still the same and the need of dream interpretation in psychotherapy remains a goal to attain if you want to reach good results.

Dream interpretation is via regia (the royal road) to the unconscious, said once Freud. I think he was right. There's no mean or tool (scientific or not) to explore the depth of one's mind other than the dream interpretation and the method of free association. Moreover, I can tell about the expertise of a psychoanalyst (Freudian or not) only on the basis of this method, if he/she uses the dream analysis or not.

In my own country specialists pretend that dream is not important, but the analysis of transference . Though the transference is very important in analysis (one may experience ancient feelings of hate or love projected upon the psychoanalyst and needs to analyze them), its analysis can not replace the dream interpretation, because one must know how the old psychical stuff is handled today and projected or repressed in the life of the patient. Dreams help us reaching this goal!