ABSTRACT
From Freud's denial of the theory of trauma, we move on to talk about his student, Ferenczi, who instead placed a great deal of emphasis on trauma, the actual event, and spoke of post-traumatic personality. The presence of distressing and repetitive nightmares is identified here as a characteristic feature of people who have experienced a traumatic event. With reference to several research studies, we demonstrate how such nightmares have specific peculiarities. This analysis has a twofold objective: First, to identify traumatic experiences in the patient's history and, second, to monitor and facilitate the processing of the trauma by analyzing the evolution of the patient's dream activity.
