Analysing Children's Dreams

Although it took child psychoanalysts a long time to discover the potential dream investigator present in all children when they are passing through childhood, it was in 1926 that Melanie Klein, with ‘Trude’ (3 years 3 months), pioneered the work of understanding dream phenomena within the analytic situation (Klein, 1926).

In this paper I propose to show the little explorers in a progressive sequence of difficulties caused, among other things, by the participation of the life and death instincts. In particular, I will investigate psychic repercussions in children's dreams and their analyses that have the mysterious blendings, unblendings and changing predominance of the instincts.

In The Ego and the Id, Freud says:

This hypothesis throws no light whatever upon the manner in which the two classes of instincts are fused, blended and alloyed with each other; but that this takes place regularly and very extensively is an assumption indispensable to our conception (1923, p. 41).

Camille (7 years of age) described a dream in a confident tone of voice and apparently free from anxiety: ‘There was once a very pretty girl with very pretty eyes. That morning she went to school. A boy had lost his red pencil. The girl saw it and took it. The boy asked to borrow it and the girl told him: “No, I shall not lend it to you. Now it is mine. How am I going to lend you my red pencil if you do not give me anything in return?”’.

Melisse (9 years, 9 months), on the other hand, described her dream with a touch of anxiety: ‘I was leaving the club and entered a wood. I was carrying my tortoise Clementina. I wanted to put her into a little cave. I put her in, but there was a crab! I did not know! With its pincer it bites. It put it here under the little tortoise. I cried, I took her, poured water. It continued to sleep, but then woke up. I put bandages and cream on it and I too woke up. How frightening! Ah … wait! Before that I went to look for the crab to