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In comparison with other anxieties the unconscious fear of being smothered has not received the attention it deserves and yet its manifestations are many and varied. It is a theme, however, to which Lewin often returns, especially in his 1952 paper (17) where he applies the principles of dream interpretation to the analysis of the phobias.1 In this communication it will be discussed as it appeared in two patients: in the conversion symptoms of one and the phobias of the other.
The structure of dreams and neurotic symptoms was stressed early in psychoanalysis and particularly in Freud's 1909 paper (11), as Lewin points out and concludes that a comparison of the conversion symptom and the dream might be useful. In considering the fear of being smothered as it is expressed in dreams one is led, inevitably, to consider the nightmare. The hallucinatory re-enactment of the primitive experience of being smothered distinguishes the nightmare from every other kind of anxiety dream.
Jones (15), to whom we owe most of our knowledge of the nightmare, attached the utmost importance to understanding this phenomenon of the dream world. Since his massive researches into the subject other contributions have been incidental, as, for example, some of the comments on the dream screen. One reason for the apparent reticence on the subject is to be found in the fact which he emphasizes: 'True Nightmare is beyond doubt much rarer than the more complex forms of Angst dreams' (p. 52). He goes on to say that the notion that it is common 'is obviously based on an unduly wide conception of Nightmare'.
In discussing the pathology of the nightmare Jones asserts