Metamorphosis: A Study of A Dream

During His Second Year of analysis a patient in therapy with me, whom I will call F., reported a dream that I consider meaningful, not only as regards his analytical process but also for our understanding of certain psychic mechanisms. In this paper I shall try to make some comments about the dream, the drawing made by F. which represents it, and, more particularly, give my personal opinions about it.

In the dream when I closed the door of the room where my brothers and a doctor (very well-known) were each with a girl, all of them rolled in blankets, I said to them that I was not a fool and knew perfectly well what they were doing—they were trying to hide from me that they were having intimate relationships. I noticed then that I was covered from head to foot by a thick tunic, a kind of plastic, but it covered only half of my body, the rear part. It had the shape of my body and seemed like a kind of bathing gown, like an eggshell. But it left the frontal part of my body completely uncovered.

From a study of the drawing made by F. of the tunic that covers his body we can see that it is analogous to the layer of chitin that covers the back of insects. The word ‘chitin’ is derived from the Greek khiton, which means ‘tunic’.

In the course of natural evolution some arthropods, insects among them, developed as a kind of protection, a thick layer of chitin on the dorsum, the main function of which is to protect them against the hostilities of the environment. In the dream F. covers himself with a tunic and then secludes himself. Here we have to ask, then, for what reason F. came to develop, in his unconscious image of himself, a protective ‘tunic’ like those grown by insects.

The tunic drawn by F. covers only the back part of his body, like a mantle or cloak. It is the back, however, that is our most vulnerable part, the part where we are most defenceless. If we study the development of dress through the ages, we can observe that for a long period knights wore cloaks