her sensuality becomes increasingly attached to him. At first she is not aware of the conflict in this attachment, but as her little mind becomes a bit more aware of reality she senses, however vaguely and incompletely, the fact that her increasingly sensual response to her father has put her into competition with her mother; another woman has a prior claim on her first man! At this point she begins to develop hostile feelings toward her mother.
The whole thing seems too fantastic! A little child competing with her mother for her father's love? Impossible!
But let me give you a very clear example of a typical dream my women patients have. This is the dream of a frigid woman who had had several consultations with me and in one of them, the day before the dream, suddenly remembered that at the age of five she had been absolutely convinced that her father would marry her when she grew up. She had buried that memory in her mind, only to resurrect it in therapy.
Her dream, then, was that she was lying in a crib. A tall thin man with glasses and a thin mustache was lying on a bed nearby. A stout, florid-faced woman lay next to him. Suddenly this woman had a convulsive seizure and, after a few moments of writhing, became still. The man then looked at her and smiled as if pleased. "She's dead," he said. Then he rose from the bed, went to the crib, and picked my patient up. "We will have four," he said to her, and she felt immeasurably excited and pleased.
My patient woke in a great state of anxiety. In our session she told me that her father had been tall, thin, and sometimes wore glasses to read in bed. And her mother was stout and very high-colored. My patient then suddenly recalled that in the childhood fantasy of marriage to her father she had decided that she would have four children with him.
