ABSTRACT

Dreams are the best proof that mental phenomena in children and adults are essentially identical. In this chapter, therefore, we shall examine the dreams of children, adolescents and adults.

It would be interesting to trace the development of the theory and clinical use of dreams from the beginning of psychoanalysis to the present day. One could begin with Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) and draw examples from the lucid chapter on dreams in Musatti’s Trattato di Psicoanalisi (1949) in which dreams are ‘worked out’ according to the principles of Freud. One could then pass on to the Kleinian model to reveal and clarify underlying phantasies. Then there is Rosenfeld (1987), who (explicitly citing Langs) shows how the problems of communication between analyst and patient are often clarified specifically in dreams, and Meltzer, who provides some wonderful illustrations of how the analyst’s countertransference and reverie can serve to interpret dreams, as in the fine example of the ‘submarine’, an extremely clear example presented by Meltzer in Tentativo di costruire una teoria del sogno che serva per l’uso nella stanza di consultazione [An attempt to establish a theory of dreams which can be used in the consulting room], a booklet from the Centre Milanese di Psicoanalisi. One would also have to review the latest developments in Meltzer’s work (1984) which are the fruit of his contact with Bion’s original and revolutionary ideas concerning dream life. For Bion, in fact, dream life is a ‘theatre for the generating of meaning’, following the assumption that the external world is meaningless until meaning is generated and made usable. As Baruzzi (1989) puts it: ‘The analyst weaves the patient’s dream material creatively; he does not interpret, but helps the patient, in the highly emotional experience of working with dreams, to complete a transformation from one symbolic form to another.’