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Among the important discussions of psychotherapists' countertransference as a source of potentially distortive or constructive emotional responses to the patient, scant attention has been given to the similar capacity of countertransference dreams. There is also surprisingly little discussion of this topic aside from passing mention in the literature on dreams. Of course, there is Freud's Irma dream as well as numerous other of his dreams that became the foundations of psychoanalytic treatment; all of them emphasize the ways in which the analyst's work with patients can serve as the “day residue” for the analyst's dreams. However, a careful review of the entries under “countertransference,” “dreams,” and “self-analysis” in A. Grinstein's Index of Psychoanalytic Writings and the Chicago Psychoanalytic Index: 1920-1982 revealed only two papers on the topic: D. W. Winnicott's “Hate in the Countertransference” (1), and a study by Whitman, Kramer, and Balbridge, “Dreams about the Patient: An Approach to the Problem of Countertransference” (2). In the major texts on psychoanalytic psychotherapy, one finds the general belief that “the dreams the psychotherapist has about his patients…invariably represent countertransference. Any dreams or recurrent fantasies about a patient demand understanding and will provide new insight into the patient” (3). Searles is the only writer I am aware of since Freud who offers detailed accounts of his dreams occurring during therapeutic work (4).
Actually, we are interested in all the dreams that occur to the therapist while conducting psychotherapy, and not only his dreams that are obviously about a specific patient. Yet, as Spence observed, such important data are rarely provided in our condensed case vignettes or even in some of the more detailed case narratives (5). In this paper, I present one of my dreams that did not deal manifestly with any of my patients. I will explore it from the perspective of the interweaving between some persona