ABSTRACT
This chapter describes some aspects of the therapy with a woman who had suffered a traumatic bereavement, the suicide of her adolescent daughter, her eldest child. It outlines aspects of the management of this case, but will be concentrating on the state of the patient's internal world. This patient from the beginning regularly brought vivid dreams to her treatment. Her dreams were always significant to the patient; she remembered and thought about them. Dreams were first given recognition as important products of our mental life by Sigmund Freud in 1900. He emphasised the dream as a vehicle of psychic work, and as such, evidence of a capacity in the ego to do such work. The flashbacks, although night dreams, indicate the stuckness and inflexibility of thinking about the event, a frozen unmodifiable image in the mind, not able to be thought about or subject to symbolisation.
