Potamianou shows how a patient's dreams, and the evolution of the dreams as treatment progresses, provide indications of the patient's improvement and maturation. She

is concerned with patients with physical illness caused or aggravated by inability to deal psychologically with tensions. When patients are thus afflicted, their dreams are likely to be static with no or few associations. The patient she describes progressed during treatment from that condition, and Potamianou writes of the insights—into his defenses and the forces that had shaped him—that accompanied his recovery from his somatic symptoms.