ABSTRACT
Children's dreams can shed light on their ego-development and the knowledge can guide us on whether and how to use dreams in their treatment. The mother's words find their way into the dream and take shape in the wild things Max meets. Later in ego development what happens in the dream is influenced by conflicts with the emerging superego and also by traumatic situations that the child has experienced during the day, and that have involved separation fears, object loss anxiety, or castration anxiety. The period of life in which sphincter control is achieved produces the conflict between the child's pleasure in retaining and pleasure in expelling its faeces, and this conflict may be experienced as castration anxiety. In its turn the fear of losing the acquired ability to control the sphincter is connected with the fear of object loss, which can also be experienced as castration anxiety.
