Dreams and dreaming in relation to trauma in childhood

The aim of this paper is to show how some childhood fantasies which were part of the early traumas or of traumatic dreams may continue to dominate the psychic life of the adult and be revealed in the transference neurosis. A trauma is presented as an experience which becomes a prototype not only of that which is most frightening but also of that which is sexually most stimulating and gratifying. It is thus doubly invested in a contradictory way. Extensive clinical material is described to show that many of a woman patient's transference fantasies, produced and recounted during her session, were similar to those which had been part of a childhood traumatic dream. A link is established between these same fantasies and her principal symptoms. In particular it is pointed out that her most disturbing symptom, an inability to have an orgasm, was rooted in the fact that she continued to believe that an orgasm was a trauma, i.e. the most intensely desired yet most terrifying experience in which the anticipated consequences, as depicted symbolically in her dream, were simultaneous ecstasy and castration. The traumatic childhood dream exerted an irresistible fascination on the patient who felt it still controlled her in mysterious and unconscious ways. In essence the dream dramatized unforgettably her relations to her oedipal objects and became the model for what she was repetitively seeking, yet dreading, with later substitutes. It is shown how the dream, which became a remembered trauma, served as a point of fixation upon which her drives were focused and around which her fantasies revolved.