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In her introduction, Eveoleen Rexford, referred to the 1955 panel on "The Dream in the Practice of Psychoanalysis"2 in which Editha Sterba expressed the opinion that in children the analysis of dreams played a less significant part of analytic work than that of play acting and daydreaming. However, she had noted that children whose symptomatology predominantly involved a single erotic zone (as in bed wetting, soiling, thumb sucking) reported dreams more frequently and used them in analytic work. She also stated that the child is not able to associate freely in a manner similar to the adult because his ego cannot yet differentiate between an observing and an experiencing function.
The ensuing discussion at the 1955 panel disclosed conflicting opinions about the frequency of dreams in analysis, the reporting of dreams, and their usefulness in child therapy. The contributors whose experience was essentially confined to adult cases stressed developmental aspects in children which made the use of dream material in child analysis difficult. Several child analysts stated that in their experience children do report dreams and referred to the techniques that made it possible to use them in analysis.
Rexford continued with a brief but comprehensive survey of the analytic literature on dreams in children. In the first edition of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud stated that dreams of children were simply wish fulfillments and raised no problems for solution. In later editions and in other papers, he indicated that distorted dreams were already found in children of four or five years of age. In "Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy, " Freud reported dreams in which distortion and symbolism were