Children's Dreams

Synopsis

This book aims to present a study on the actuality and empirical value of Freud's dream theory, even if just through the analysis of a specific part of it the hypotheses about children's dreams. It provides a systematic description of Freud's observations on child dreaming and presents the results obtained from four empirical studies on children's dreams that the author conducted during the span of a decade. These studies (two conducted in school settings, one in a home setting, and one based on a questionnaire completed by parents) allow an empirical judgment on Freud's main hypotheses on child dreaming: the hypotheses on formal aspects of children's dreams, the relationship between dream bizarreness and development of the superego functions, and the issue of wish-fulfillment dreams. The author concludes that it is possible to test empirically Freud's hypothesis on the early forms of dreaming and that this test is not irrelevant for an empirical judgment of certain more general statements of Freud's dream theory (e.g. the dream censorship hypothesis). Finally, the implications of the studies on children's dreams for modern dream research and theory are discussed.