Chapter 14 Dreaming and Not Dreaming

Freud’s great work The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud 1900), combined with the findings of a hundred years, constitutes what Sara Flanders (1993) calls The Dream Discourse Today. Today we know that dreams are of different kinds, and that not dreaming has diverse origins, and that during analysis the evolution of the transference and the course of dream life are connected. About the patient I shall present here, it would be hard to say which is more important – her dreaming, or her particular way of not dreaming.

Mrs A, in her mid-forties, holds an administrative post and her husband is in finance. She admires him and she is also afraid of and for him. She speaks of his making nasty deals and his disturbing influence on family life, and how it is always she who must do what needs to be done (e.g., for their now grown-up son and daughter). Mrs A sees her parents and her two brothers as disturbed, unlikeable people and herself as the one in her family her mother turned to.

At the time she dreamt the dream, Mrs A had been in analysis for some while. At the beginning she was very anxious, did not like me, and withdrew, suspicious that after she disclosed that she wished she had gone to a different analyst I had turned hostile. As these feelings and anxieties were analysed over some months she became pleased to be my patient, which I think she genuinely was, at the same time as being unconsciously excited by a belief that she was my favourite who, unlike my other patients, was free of disturbance and had a special intimacy with me, just as she had felt she was, and is, the sanest in a disturbed family into which I think her disturbances were, and are, projected and hidden. Over a period, and with much difficulty, this phantasy seemed to give way and Mrs A and I settled into an analysis with more real contact. Relations with her husband and

colleagues improved markedly, and she gained a senior post, though she is currently disappointed at not being offered a promotion sh