ABSTRACT
In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), Freud extensively examined dream life and formulated his theories about the dream as infantile wish fulfilment, whereby unconscious repressed early memories or forbidden thoughts that evade censorship during sleep can appear in dreams, disguised by the dream work. This chapter presents a patient whose early experience formed unconscious phantasies of the primal scene that were symbolised in a series of dreams. The patient, a bisexual woman with an obsessional personality, slept in the parental bedroom until the age of twelve. The chapter also reviews the dream literature relevant to this patient. For a period in psychoanalytic practice, dream interpretation had fallen into relative disuse as a primary clinical instrument. Studying the form and function of the dream as an indication of the structure of the personality was advocated by Segal (1986).
