Some Remarks on Anxiety Dreams in Latency and Adolescence

PSYCHOANALYTIC work with children soon demonstrates the truth of Anna Freud's (3) remark that their dreams are not so simple as one might think from the examples given in The Interpretation of Dreams(4). One may find much distortion of the latent dream thoughts in the dreams of young child patients, but even more in those of children from mid-latency on, and especially in anxiety dreams. The degree of dream distortion can often be related to the degree of anxiety or severity of conflictual disturbance and to the degree of resistance. It may very well be that our current delving more into the analytic study of more severe character problems, as with adult cases, brings us more instances wherein dreaming is more distorted and the youngsters have greater difficulty in dealing analytically with their dreams. Dream distortion presents one difficulty to the understanding of dreams. Beyond indicating that greater anxiety will increase the need for a stronger defense, which in turn can stimulate the censoring forces with resultant greater distortion when the dream is created, I can add nothing to Freud's findings about the various factors entering into dream distortion. It might be rewarding to study such factors comparatively among those analysands who work well with their dreams.

The inability to use the free-association method with children is another difficulty in analyzing their dreams. On the basis of this lack, some have denigrated all of child analysis. However, the psychoanalytic