The Child Dream and the Child Transference

Abstract

THE CHILD AS SYMBOL CAN MEAN MANY THINGS. Children can be idealized to represent playfulness, spontaneity, fertility, creativity, immortality, innocence, mystery, and hope. The child can also represent a depreciated image, as when someone is contemptuously referred to as a "child" to imply silliness, ignorance, immaturity, vulnerability, and weakness. There is also a wide variation of personal meanings. The child as sexuality-eros or cupid-helped Freud give mankind a very important general truth, that sexuality begins at birth. Freud had to accomplish his task in spite of opposition from the majority who viewed the child as a symbol of innocence and asexuality. In addition, this personal variation influenced Freud's view that in dreams children symbolize the genitalia.The child is an especially potent symbol to us as psychoanalysts because of our genetic and developmental points of view. For the patient I shall present, Liz, the child was a very important symbol in the formation of her dream life, her transferences, and her neurotic symptoms. For her the child was a frequent dream symbol, occurring in 39 different dreams during her analysis. Even before she entered analysis she had a repetitive dream concerning a child; it was about a neglected baby. In the analysis there were two transferences that involved baby symbolism; these transferences were given expression in her child dreams. The maternal transference was the most common. Here she experienced herself as a neglected child. When the maternal transference predominated, her dreams contained babies representing herself directly-the baby in her that was poorly cared for by her mother. This baby in the dreams was female. The second type of transference in these baby dreams expressed symbolically her attitude toward me as a child. After the establishment of the analysis, nearly one third of the baby dreams related to this transference in which I was seen as the child or baby. In these instances the child was always identified as male.