April 25, 1990

From time to time dreams reported by my patients have contained Spanish or Hispanic as elements. For example, a resident dreamt that I was lecturing in Spanish before a large audience after seeing an announcement of a grand rounds I was giving at a university hospital. The patient felt that the dream was a satirical one, i.e., it expressed the notion that I would speak in a language hardly anyone in the audience would understand. It occurred to me that the particular foreign language represented in the dream was determined by the circumstance that all the letters in "Spanish" are contained in "psychoanalysis."

Similarly, a woman with an erotic transference dreamt that she was being given a physical examination by a Hispanic physician who made sexual advances and chased her through the suite of offices. The dream element "Hispanic" made sense only as a partial anagram for "psychoanalysis," which linked the doctor in the dream to the