First Dreams in Analysis: Their Relationship to Early Memories and the Pre-Oedipal Mother

Since little work has been done on the question of the first dream of the analysand, the following communication must be considered as both tentative and exploratory.

Missriegler 11 showed that all the important events and impressions of a 40-year life were reflected in the first dream of a patient. Saul, 12 studying first dreams as a diagnostic tool which enables the therapist to arrive at a more concise formulation of the unclear conflict, has also written a thought-provoking paper on early memories. 13 Here, he demonstrates that the remarkable significance of early memories lies in the fact that they are of the same nature and structure as dreams; and, further, they are selected and formed in the same way the dream is formed—by the major motivational forces of the personality. For this reason first memories, like the vividly remembered impressions of a childhood dream, are sometimes accurate, sometimes distorted and sometimes built on hearsay. Whether they are true or fantasied is of secondary importance to the therapist; as Freud 3 has pointed out, childhood dreams are a psychic reality:

Dreams which have occurred during the first years of childhood, and which have sometimes been retained in the memory for decades with perfect sensorial freshness, are almost always of great importance for the understanding of the development and the neurosis of the dreamer.

Insofar as early memories and the first dream of the analysand are concerned, we often receive in treatment patients whose first dream or dreams not only hint at the basic elements of their neurotic difficulties but vaguely, also refer to early memories. It is my contention that the first dreams produced by most patients upon entering