Dreams in Child Psychoanalysis

Although child analysts are accustomed to dealing with and interpreting the dreams reported by children, dreams, have nevertheless received less attention in the literature on child than on adult psychoanalysis. Child analysis generally lacks free associations, and the child is thus unable to bring them to bear on the manifest dream material. Certain analysts have therefore complained of the difficulty of interpreting children's dreams (e.g. Rambert, 1969). Anna Freud (1927) used dream interpretation from the very beginning in the psychoanalytic treatment of children, and was convinced that it was perfectly easy to get the child to understand the interpretation of dreams and to collaborate in seeking for the significance of the various dream elements. She too, however, later notes that (Anna Freud, 1965): “children may tell dreams and daydreams as adults do, but without free association there is no reliable path from manifest to latent content” (p. 29). A further difficulty lies in the fact that dreams involve symbolic material, which makes the interpretation uncertain.

Child analysts are nevertheless used to working without free associations; even if the child reporting his dream is unable to produce sufficient associations, it is possible to understand the dream by means of other knowledge the analyst has of the child. The analyst is familiar with the childs's development, with his primary objects, with the content of his verbal expression, as also with the symbolic, dream-like material elicited in the child's play, his fantasies and his drawings. In fact it is not always possible to tell whether the child is narrating a dream or a fantasy, or whether the beginning is perhaps a dream and the rest made up. What I am suggesting is that it does not make any difference; all such material is