Dream and Fantasy in Child Analysis

The contributions to this book, containing talks given at the Conference in Vienna on 'Dream and Fantasy in Child and Adolescent Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy', focus on the close connection between children's imaginative world, their dream life, and play. Is it a dream that a child is recounting or is it rather a fantasy to be regarded as equivalent to a dream? Children's play, too, presents important material that allows us to draw inferences about the subconscious. Indeed dreams, daydreams, fantasies and play were originally treated as of equal importance in child analysis. How do child analysts work with dreams at the practical and theoretical levels? In the practice of child analysis today do we find analysis of dreams and the classic differentiations between manifest and latent content? Is attention accorded to the mechanisms of condensation, displacement etc. described by Freud? The current discussion on working with children's dreams and their equivalents in today's practice of child psychoanalysis forms the central focus of the contributions collected in this book.

Michael Gunter

Introduction , Children's dreams-where the wild things are , The development of children's dreams , A child is playing, a child is dreaming , On not being able to dream: the role of maternal containment in the therapy of a young child who suffered from night terrors , Dream, phantasy, and children's play: Spaces in which a child approaches thinking between wish-fulfilment, mental processing of affect, and mastering of reality , On reflection in dreams or "Do people get lost if they go up in a hot air balloon?" , Dreams and narratives in the developmental process: Dreaming as perceived in developmental psychology and neurobiology