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Presenter: The patient is a man of thirty, a child psychotherapist. When he came to me he had had four years of previous analysis. At the age of fifteen he had experienced a religious crisis. At that time he had eight months' psychotherapy with a Jungian priest. He is the oldest of six children – four boys and two girls. When he was eleven he seduced his nine-year-old sister; he appears to link that experience with one of a homosexual nature with a cousin of seventeen when he was fourteen, and a second experience with an employee of his father's, aged twenty. During his medical training he had a three-year homosexual relationship which ended violently. He chooses handsome men of good education, and psychiatrists like himself, with whom to have homosexual relationships. Apparently these relationships consist of oral and physical contact, but are without orgasm. It is not clear whether he has engaged in fellatio. The partner has to be young and married; he tries to seduce the young husband by behaving in an intellectual way.
In every session he says, “I had a dream.”
Bion: Whose idea was it that he should tell you these dreams?
P: He is psychoanalytically oriented; he makes interpretations and wants to control me.
B: Such a patient as this thinks he knows what the analyst would like, and since analysts like dreams he will give the analyst dreams. It is one thing to be told dreams if that is the quickest and easiest way in which the patient can talk to the analyst – dreams are very useful if there is nothing better – but does he tell you these dreams because it is such a useful way of informing you of something you cannot know, or does he tell them because he thinks you would like to be
told dreams? What is his motive? Is he mentioning them in order to seduce you, or because it is the best way of talking?
P: He has difficulty in relating to me – except homosexually. It seems that the dreams are used to communicate something he cannot contain because when material comes i