**4. The dreamer**

At the time he sought treatment, Carlo was a thirty-two year old academic statistician living in a small town in Northern Italy. Before entering psychoanalysis, Carlo had received somatic and poorly structured psychological treatment for about three years, due to a serious depressive condition.

Carlo had always been a lonely child. Anxiety had prevented him from meeting peers whenever his mother had not been at hand. He had committed all his emotional energies to school, and from his excellent school and then academic performance he had drawn wide narcissistic rewards. He spent his free time playing violin and singing opera arias.

Within interpersonal space, mother had for long been the only meaningful female object. The relationship with her was still very close, but at the same time somewhat stiff and cold. Within professional life, a maternal transference toward his senior female mentor doubled in a way his relationship with mother.

Carlo was unmarried. He never met his peers. His social life showed a definitely asymmetrical quality. He met only younger males or older women. He was particularly keen to establish supportive relationships with mentally ill individuals or early adolescents from deprived backgrounds.

Over the four years of treatment, he never mentioned a sexual interest in women. On the other hand, Carlo acknowledged he was not insensitive to male sex appeal but felt unavailable to homosexual relations. As for sexual interest in underage boys, he was keen to state that it would never be an acceptable option to him.

Carlo invested a lot of time and energy in local church life. In association with a young priest, he was the leader of the local section of a Christian association of preadolescents. At the time Carlo entered psychoanalytic treatment, the little community was troubled by an ongoing judicial investigation for a case of early adolescent sexual abuse. In the following trial, a younger volunteer was to be sentenced for child sexual abuse, and the priest in charge of the association for diffusion of child pornography material. No charge was laid against Carlo, though he had been unwittingly instrumental in getting the victim and the two perpetrators in touch.

At the time we began regularly meeting in session, Carlo's family was going through substantial changes. Over a 6 months period, his two brothers established deep heterosexual relations and left the family house. Carlo's interaction with parents became more and more close and somewhat suffocating. At the same time, meetings with the new couples were frequent and he was overjoyed by the birth of a nephew with whom he soon developed a deep affection.

Depressive complaints were briefly in the foreground at the beginning of our joint work, but soon faded out and were replaced by the patient's pervasive and somewhat compulsive curiosity about his own oneiric activity.

In the segment of analysis which I will comment on here, the patient used to spend most of his sessions in detailed reporting of his dream experiences. Many dreams featured manifest sexual contents, which were restricted to autoerotism and same-sex reciprocal stimulation. In the latter case, adolescent partners were typically included. I will now report brief summaries from two not consecutive sessions in the first year of analysis.

*SESSION A: Carlo opens the session with a couple of dreams. In the first one he is riding a bicycle, his legs are fatigued, and he is never able to reach his intended destination. A second dream immediately follows: "I was inside a garage. It was full of spiders, which used to scare me a lot. My male boss was with me. We were both naked. I would have liked to close the roller shutter, but I was unable to do so as something was getting in or getting out". I feel a strong counter transferential pressure to interpret the obvious partial object material content but realize this will surely usher a manic atmosphere into the session and leave no more room for associations.*

*Then, he reports how he has recently spent a day at a community for antisocial adolescents. It has been an interpersonally rewarding experience.*

*Now I interpret the first dream as evidence of a feeling of loneliness. When he is away from the analytic room his efforts to take care of his own emotional pain prove unhelpful. As for the second dream, I draw a more explicit parallel between the two men in the garage and the psychoanalytic situation, where he feels unable to enforce control of communication, with the associated anxiety.*

*Now he talks about his parents. They are a very close couple and spend most of their time together. This lets him feel cut off and is a source of substantial distress. However, whenever he can be alone with his mother, he feels controlled and manipulated, and his emotional distress gets even worse.*

*SESSION B: The patient announces he will report two dreams. Here is the first one: "I am attending a bizarre striptease. A man and a woman perform on the stage. They cast all of their clothes down on the stage, then proceed to strip themselves of their external sex organs, which they hand out to the audience. Spectators, in turn, hand over the performers' detached genitalia to each other. Now the patient stays silent, having apparently forgotten about the second promised dream. I interpret the dream in light of the session of the day before, where I had questioned him about his masturbatory activity. I suggest he had felt exposed by my curiosity. He now reports the forgotten second dream. In the dream, he is talking about his depressive symptoms with a priest and feels accepted. I interpret the second dream content with reference to the transference relationship.*

We owe to angel Garma [18] a particularly valuable, though undeservedly neglected, integration of Freud's dream theory. Freud believed the wish was the single necessary and sufficient force setting the dream process in motion. Garma called our attention to a second no less basic element in the genesis of human dreams. He discovered that at the very core of each dream narrative a traumatic situation lies in disguise:

*In my opinion, the traumatic situation is at play not only in the dreams of traumatic neuroses and in those reproducing some child's traumatic experiences, but in all dreams. I believe that a traumatic situation is an extremely important factor, maybe the most important of all, in the genesis of dreams ([18], p. 136).*

In Garma's view, a dream, like a bifront herm, would thrive not only on the wish to find drive gratifications but also on the memory of an upsetting past experience. Dreams from both Carlo's sessions include obvious traumatic content. In the second dream of SESSION A, anxiety about control and self-boundaries is prominent, with *Vicissitudes of the Oedipal Organization, and Their Impact on the Anticlerical Polemic DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.107392*

a straightforward allusion to the transference situation. The first dream in session B shows Carlo's severely traumatic experience of the primal scene and its massive impact on his Oedipal organization.

Awareness of the inner parents' ongoing sexual interaction proved so unbearable to Carlo that repression had to strip their bodily representatives in dreams of their sexual characters. Carlo's sexual identification proved so to be highly precarious and relied on purely surface identification processes. The dream narrative showed how he could easily shift between several identities: male and female genitals could be exchanged and manipulated at will, but never really integrated within the bodily self-representation.

Carlo's extreme intolerance to the primal scene was obvious not only in the dream material but also in his conscious experience. As mentioned in the report of SESSION A, a transference interpretation allowed Carlo to acknowledge he was consistently upset by the awareness of his parents' steady alliance and somewhat symbiotic relationship. In front of them, he constantly felt alone and cut off.

As mentioned above, Carlo's depression had deteriorated at the very time his two brothers had entered a stable couple relationship. We need not underscore how much such events may have contributed to his feeling of loneliness, helplessness, and savage jealousy in front of the parents' fantasized sexual relationship.
