ABSTRACT
As we have seen in the first part of the book, Freud often used children’s dreams as easy evidence of his general thesis that “a dream is a (disguised) fulfilment of a (suppressed or repressed) wish” (Freud 1900a, p. 160). Children’s dreams, unlike those of adults, should show the fulfilment of wish in a direct and undisguised form with no need of interpretation or deduction of the dream content. From this point of view, in principle, the wish-fulfilment theory could be empirically tested more easily than in the case of adults, whose dreams require interpretation (disguised wish-fulfilment). Despite these favourable conditions, more than a century after these statements, the lack of systematic studies in literattue conducted with the explicit purpose of verifying the frequency of wish-fulfilment dreams in children is surprising. I have found only a few anecdotal and clinical studies (e.g., Coriat, 1920; A. Freud, 1927,1965; see Chapter Five).
