You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Teach me how to sleep. Catch my nightmares and transform them into dreams.
This is the task that Peter gives to the analyst by asking, through his parents, to start an analytic treatment. It is the same request an Indian girl made to her mother that, according to the legend, originated the invention of the dream catcher. This is an object made of a hoop on which is woven a net that catches the good dream images and filters out the frightening ones through some threads ending with feathers. We follow this image to comment on the clinical section of Christine Anzieu-Premmereur’s work.
Every child analyst knows that, very often, the symptoms that bring a child to analysis signal an environmental difficulty or the partial failure of the psychic functions of one or more family members. It is very important that the analyst’s setting, just like the dream catcher’s main structure, is flexible and broad enough to include all the members of the family.
In this respect, two moments in the clinical account seem significant to us: the explicit request of the analyst for a more active participation of the mother in bringing Peter to the sessions, and the disappearance of the child’s symptoms even before his face-to-face encounter with the analyst.
Something, thus, happened in the first consultation with the parents that enabled them to go back home with a new receptive willingness in relation to their child’s anxieties. The analyst’s dreaming function started to transform the parents’ nightmare—provisionally called Peter—and to convey to them some trust in their own capacity to reestablish a more satisfying relationship with him.
Another particularly therapeutic moment can be identified in the analyst’s capacity to offer to the mother—who was not able to wait for her son in the waiting room—the possibility to enter the playroom. The therapist knows that she needs to take care of the deep loneliness of this mother and her incapacity to play with her child. When Peter asks for a snack