Joan's frigidity problem was helped in a few sessions. One day she came to me and was very upset. Her last intercourse had been successful and had culminated in the strongest orgasm she had had up to this time. But as usual, the next day had been an anxious one and she had had a severe backache.
As she talked about it she suddenly said: "I had the most amazing dream; I've just recalled it." She had been on a swing in a playground, she told me, and her father had been pushing her. "I flew higher and higher," she said. "It was like flying. The sensations were delicious. I hoped he would never stop. Then suddenly I looked around and he had turned into some kind of criminal or something. He seized me and I screamed, but somehow I knew nobody could hear me. I then suddenly remembered something a girl friend had actually told me in college when a group of us were discussing rape. She had said that a woman might be killed if she resisted. And she said that if it ever happened to her she would just relax and try to enjoy it. I recalled this now, and the criminal in my dream did rape me and I enjoyed it thoroughly. I came to a terrific climax, a kind I've never had in real life."
She had awakened at this point but then went back to sleep and had the following nightmare. "Women policemen were pursuing me for having committed some crime," she said. "They'd almost catch me, but I'd get away. Finally one of them did catch me, but when I looked in her face she was smiling at me tenderly and she said: 'Don't worry; it's not so terrible after all.'"
Knowing what you know already, it should not be too hard to see what Joan's dream means. The swinging, with her father doing the pushing, represented her very early sexual feelings toward her father. When these became too direct she disguised them by turning her father into the criminal
