ABSTRACT
In A Clinician’s Guide to Reading Freud, Peter Giovacchini (1982) gives some material from his practice,which I would like to borrow in order to discuss some interesting issues it raises:
During analysis, a 27-year-old woman patient of mine dreamed that she was at a dance.The setting was hazy, but she was able to see the grey suit worn by a man who asked her to dance. They danced around the room, and suddenly her partner steered her to a corner and pressed himself against her. She could feel his erect penis. Inasmuch as I often wore grey suits and the transference was clearly erotic, I believed this dream was an obvious allusion to her sexual feelings towards me. I also knew she was struggling with and defending herself against her impulses.Wishing to pursue this theme, I asked her to free-associate to the dream because she was inclined to pursue other seemingly unrelated topics. She hesitantly considered some of the dream elements, such as its haziness. I then directed her attention to the man in the grey suit. She was silent for approximately a minute and then became, what seemed to me, tremendously anxious. She finally reported a sensation of intense dizziness, feeling that the couch was spinning furiously. Gradually these feelings subsided and she continued talking but made no reference whatsoever to the dream. I became immensely curious and had to interrupt her and ask her about the dream.She naively answered:‘What dream?’To my astonishment, she had forgotten it completely. I then repeated the dream to her and was able to help her remember it.Once again I brought her attention to the man in the grey suit, and once more she felt the couch spinning and totally wiped the dream from her memory. I tried a third time and with the same results. As she experienced these spinning sensations, she described a
vortex that was sucking her thoughts into it. Certainly the memory of her dream seemed to be pulled into the hidden recesses of her mind.
