Dream and Fantasy in Child Analysis

Samy Teicher, Michael Gunter, Samy Teicher, Michael Gunter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781780491912
• eBook ISBN: 9780429912979
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The contributions to this book, containing talks given at the Conference in Vienna on 'Dream and Fantasy in Child and Adolescent Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy', focus on the close connection between children's imaginative world, their dream life, and play. Is it a dream that a child is recounting or is it rather a fantasy to be regarded as equivalent to a dream? Children's play, too, presents important material that allows us to draw inferences about the subconscious. Indeed dreams, daydreams, fantasies and play were originally treated as of equal importance in child analysis. How do child analysts work with dreams at the practical and theoretical levels? In the practice of child analysis today do we find analysis of dreams and the classic differentiations between manifest and latent content? Is attention accorded to the mechanisms of condensation, displacement etc. described by Freud? The current discussion on working with children's dreams and their equivalents in today's practice of child psychoanalysis forms the central focus of the contributions collected in this book.

CHAPTER ONE


Children’s dreams—where the wild things are

Elisabeth Brainin

My title, with its reference to Maurice Sendak’s book (1963), indicates the content of children’s dreams. These present us with an intricate interweaving of drive wishes and anxieties, fears of being deprived of love, castration anxiety, fears of bodily mutilation, and aggressive impulses.

In Sendak’s children’s book this is depicted in a playful and imaginative way, which is why the book appeals to children. Aggression, identification with his parents, the wish to be big and powerful, and all oral needs make their appearance in the pictures and text of the book.

I shall give a brief account of the content of the book—the illustrations cannot unfortunately be reproduced here although they express the dream nature of the story particularly well. They can, however, be assumed to be well-known. The mother gets very cross with Max, calling him a wild thing and he shouts back at her with the words “I’ll eat you up!” Aggressive though this sounds, eating someone up can be interpreted as a concealed declaration of love.

The motif reappears later in his dream. The residue of the day that Max processes in his dream would be his mother’s words “wild thing” and his answer “I’ll eat you up”. Max sails off into the wide, wide world, sailing far away and for a long time, and finally reaches the place where the Wild Things are, and they are even wilder than he is, terrifying, noisy, and clearly not tame. But Max is stronger than they are, he can even tame them because he looks them straight in the eye without blinking. Max’s mother could not tame him, he still went on being wild and did not listen to her. The mother’s words find their way into the dream and take shape in the wild things he meets. There is not only one wild thing but many, and they make Max their king and set up a real, wild rumpus.

This represents the wish in the dream: Max’s wish is to be the strongest, to be wilder than all others, king of wild things, and set up a wild rumpus. However, he then sends the wild things off to bed without their supper—so here he is putting himself in the place of his mother! In this we see the reversal of passive into active: what he has “suffered” he now inflicts on the wild things. But then he sinks into sadness and the fear of being alone. He longs for home, particularly when he smells the good food, and this smell finally wakes him.

His hunger can be seen as a somatic stimulus, the smell of the food as a sensory stimulus with both of them acting as a stimulus to the dream. Max no longer wishes to be king, he is not afraid of the wild things (”We’ll eat you up, we love you so”). He leaves them and sets off home, and when he wakes up in his room he can smell his supper (”and it was still hot”).

His hunger, the smell of food, and the longing for his mother are stronger than the dream and finally make him wake up. Oral needs linked to the mother, aggression, fantasies of omnipotence, and desire for autonomy all find their place in Max’s dream. We can also find further features of dream-work: residues of the day are found in distortion, reversal of passive into active, condensation, and symbolisation. Sendak uses all these elements in his story. The wish to be wild, wicked, powerful, and voracious is restricted to the dream. The developing superego is recognisable at the end of the dream: when Max wakes up he is himself and safely at home with real prospects of instinctual drive fulfilment.

Ego development and dreamwork

I shall not go into detail here on the psychoanalytical theories of the origins of dreaming. I wish rather to focus my comments on one particular aspect that we can trace in children’s dreams: the development of the ego observable in their dreams at different ages.

The development of a child’s ego is paralleled by the development of dreamwork and its mechanisms—which I shall go into in detail in a later section. And equally the dreams themselves undergo development. The path from wish dream to anxiety dream that Freud depicted in The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud, 1900a) can almost be termed a developmental line, in the sense of the developmental lines Anna Freud described for instinctual drives. (A. Freud, 1965a). The earliest instinctual drive wishes undergo psychical processing because they inevitably cause conflicts. The frustration over unsatisfied oral wishes in infants is the basis of the first wish dreams and these offer hallucinatory satisfaction. When the hallucinatory drive fulfilment can no longer be maintained the infant wakes up.

I shall not go into Freud’s descriptions of the earliest wish dreams of children in The Interpretation of Dreams as they are sufficiently well-known. I would simply like to choose two children’s dreams from his work “On dreams” (Freud, 1901a).

The first dream: a little girl of one and half years old has vomited because she had apparently got an upset stomach eating strawberries. She is not allowed to eat anything for a day and at night she is heard saying her own name in her sleep and adding “Stwawberries, wild stwawberries, omblet, pudden!”, she was thus dreaming of eating a meal, and she laid special stress in her menu on the particular delicacy of which, as she had reason to expect, she would only be allowed scanty quantities in the near future (p. 643). The dream is attributed to his daughter Anna.

The second dream: Hermann, nearly two years old, is given a basket of cherries and he is only allowed to eat a few of them. On the next day he announces cheerfully “Hermann eaten all the chewwies!” (p. 644)

Both these dreams are completely clear, they are pure wish dreams. These are dreams in which the latent and the manifest dream content are as yet indistinguishable from one another since the wish appears in the dream without disguise.

Later in ego development what happens in the dream is influenced by conflicts with the emerging superego and also by traumatic situations that the child has experienced during the day, and that have involved separation fears, object loss anxiety, or castration anxiety. It can also be the anticipation of a danger or the repetition of traumatic experiences that result in anxiety dreams and in the typical sleep disorders of children of this age.

Sleep disorders in the child’s second year of life are seen by Selma Fraiberg (1950) as derived from the first major conflicts in anal development in a child’s life. She believes the conflicts develop from the child’s desire to soil and the resulting fear of love deprivation. One could also say it is a question of the wish both to enjoy retaining the faeces and to enjoy excreting, and the resulting fear of love deprivation. This produces the first appearance of certain symptoms in the child’s second year. They are the result of new demands on the child’s developing ego, such as the acquisition of sphincter control.

And these demands also produce further conflicts in the oral sphere. For example refusing to eat can be understood as a displacement from the lower parts of the body (defecating and holding back faeces) to the upper parts of the body (eating and refusing to eat).

Fraiberg (1950) regards the sleep disorders in the second year as being the result, among other factors, of the defence against traumatic situations and fear of a danger, both of which are processed in the dream in an anticipatory way. The repetition in dreaming serves to master traumatic situations or to revive pleasurable experiences.

Fraiberg does not make dreams the specific focus of her work, but she describes situations in which sleep disorders occur and sees them as connected with anxiety dreams leading to the child waking up. In her case vignettes the kind of connection between sleep disorders and the dream activity of children becomes clear. The experience of fear in a dream leads to the child waking up and to the sleep disorder just as happens in a traumatic neurosis. The dreamer relives the traumatic scene and the dream-work supports the attempt to anticipate the danger. Reliving the scene matches the tendency to repeat that we can observe in children and that marks both play and dreaming. Fraiberg draws a parallel between repetition in dreaming and the active mastering of a passively experienced danger that the child was threatened by. The transformation from passive into active is the next ego function that is achieved at this age and that helps the child to gain mastery of its fears (Fraiberg, 1950, pp. 308f).

Castration anxiety

The period of life in which sphincter control is achieved produces the conflict between the child’s pleasure in retaining and pleasure in expelling its faeces, and this conflict may be experienced as castration anxiety. In its turn the fear of losing the recently acquired ability to control the sphincter is connected with the fear of object loss, which can also be experienced as castration anxiety. All these are examples for the emergence of new conflicts, of new demands on the psyche, and of the ego developments arising from them. The demands made on the child’s psyche by reality and by the instinctual drives are motors for the child’s development that can, however, come to a temporary standstill or slide into regression. The development of symptoms is to be understood as a compromise formation between the drive-wish and the fear of object loss.

Similarly Berta Bornstein (1935) describes the sleep phobia of a two-and-a-half year old girl who experienced it as castration anxiety in connection with anal conflicts, anger, and aggression. She describes the symptoms of the little girl: how, for instance, she was afraid of lying down or had fears in everyday contexts, such as the fear of breaking things or of hurting herself, which are easily recognisable as castration anxiety. These were connected with toilet training and the discovery, at almost the same time, of the difference between the sexes. Bornstein comes to the same conclusion as Fraiberg: the conflict between the wish to hold back stools and the wish to soil and to defecate into the bedclothes leads to a fear of being deprived of love, and leads later to the anxiety dreams and the sleep disorders of this little girl who stood upright and stiff as a poker in her cot, holding back her stool. Bornstein invokes, among other sources, the work of Melanie Klein when she writes of the child’s desire to steal the contents of the mother’s body and incorporate them, a wish that is accompanied by feelings of guilt and later by fears of retaliation (cf. Bornstein, 1935). Here the content of the body (e.g., food) that was incorporated could also represent the father’s penis or indeed the child’s stool. Bornstein’s interpretation is that in the child’s imagination the toilet training has robbed her of the penis, of her own faeces, and of the pleasure in her own faeces.

Alongside offering the chance to address questions of theory, concerning ourselves with dreams is of practical interest. Can we make use of children’s dreams in clinical practice? Are dreams a completely different instrument from play in child analysis?

Anna Freud repeatedly emphasised that play and dream can be used in child analysis in the same way. Although we cannot make use of free association in our psychoanalytical work with children, typical manifest dreams offer us pointers to their latent content. Anna Freud, too, points out that the presence of a functioning ego in the child is a precondition for our being able to use and interpret its dreams (A. Freud, 1957b, p. 98). And she writes that in child analysis we have to rely on aids such as play to replace free association (1965a, p. 29).

Case studies

If we turn now to two case studies of pre-school children in which dreams play a part, we shall see that the role of free association can be taken over by the observations of parents who are themselves in analysis. The first case is that of Little Hans described by Freud, and the other is that of Johnny, whose mother is in analysis with Niederland. In both the parents report their children’s dreams, and find memory traces and the day’s residues that explain the child’s dream.

And both case studies, Freud’s account of Hans and Niederland’s of Johnny, go into the castration anxieties of the two small boys showing that when the children achieve new levels of development the fear of regression can be great.

Johnny

Let me begin with Niederland’s report (1957, pp. 190–208), which is the description of the dreams of a boy of just seventeen months. Niederland heard of these dreams from Johnny’s mother who was in analysis with him. Dreams are described from the boy’s seventeenth to forty-seventh month. Johnny has a brother, Charlie, two years younger and a sister, three years younger. The fact that the mother describes the child’s dreams in her own analysis forms a parallel to the Little Hans case.

The first dream at seventeen months is non-verbal. Johnny woke up screaming and it was an hour before he went back to sleep. During the day he had been to the Natural History Museum with his grandmother and had been enthralled by the bears and the buffaloes. The mother assumed that Johnny was having an anxiety dream. Niederland reports a further non-verbal dream when Johnny was twenty months old. His mother was already seven months pregnant with the next child. Johnny woke up screaming, standing up in his cot, and pressing his fist against his teeth. After his mother held him he calmed down and went to sleep again. According to the mother they had been playing an exciting game in which she whirled him around and in the course of the game he had bitten her breast right through her blouse. He had never done this before and his mother, who was surprised and caught off guard by the sudden, unexpected pain, hit him on the mouth and put him down on the ground very abruptly. Johnny saw the pain and the abrupt change in his mother’s behaviour; it gave him a shock and he began to cry. His mother thought that during the day while they were playing Johnny had noticed the baby’s movements inside her.

As mentioned before, we owe the knowledge of these two waking-up episodes in Johnny’s life to his mother’s observations. As to the day’s experiences that we can regard as equivalents to associations or as the day’s residues, we owe these to her report too. This raises the question of how we are to understand his fear without knowing what the content of dream was? We have a pointer in the way Johnny was holding his hand against his teeth. This would seem to show that in his dream he was reliving the situation that was traumatic for him. His initial desire, the aggressive and pleasurable biting, and his mother’s unexpected and painful reaction may have been the traumatic elements in his experience. In the first dream what he was probably reliving was the abrupt ending of his pleasure in looking at the large animals in the museum.

From the age of two and half, Johnny began to report his dreams on waking up. The first verbatim report of a dream was when he was lying in bed with acute tonsillitis and a high temperature: “Jimmy was at the waterspray, Jimmy was at the water stream. Estelle was there too” (Niederland, 1957, p. 191).

One can regard this dream as a wish fulfilment dream such as those in Freud’s examples of children’s dreams. But it seemed to Niederland that the dream was multi-faceted: there was not only a play-fellow called Jimmy but Jim was also the name of Johnny’s father: Estelle was not Johnny’s but Charlie’s nanny. At the time of the dream Charlie, Johnny’s younger brother, was eight months old.

But there is also a traumatic element in this dream and that is the water. Two months before he had this dream Johnny had run from the shallow end of the pool right into deep water and gone under. He was pulled out immediately, had burst i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• About the Editors and Contributors
• Introduction on children’s dreams—a brief introduction
• Chapter One Children’s dreams—where the wild things are
• Chapter Two The development of children’s dreams
• Chapter Three A child is playing, a child is dreaming
• Chapter Four On not being able to dream: the role of maternal containment in the therapy of a young child who suffered from night terrors
• Chapter Five Dream, phantasy, and children’s play: Spaces in which a child approaches thinking between wish-fulfilment, mental processing of affect, and mastering of reality
• Chapter Six On reflection in dreams or “Do people get lost if they go up in a hot air balloon?”
• Chapter Seven Dreams and narratives in the developmental process: Dreaming as perceived in developmental psychology and neurobiology
• Index