Approaches to Children's Dreaming
There appears to be no solitary explanation for dreams. However, it seems the various explanations of dreams can generally be categorized into two approaches: psychoanalytic or cognitive. Dream theorists from both approaches focus their discussions on the dreams of adults; this page will be examining children’s dreams.
A. Psychoanalytic Approach:
A psychoanalytic approach to dreams places emphasis on the interpretation of the dream. Psychoanalytic dream theorists might disagree in terms of how to interpret dreams, but the majority of them believe that dreams have meanings that should be examined.
The typical attitude of psychoanalysis towards children is an alarming one. Psychoanalysts seem to carry the belief that children are filled with violent, often sexual, urges almost from the moment of birth. An example of this attitude can be witnessed in The Uses of Enchantment by Bruno Bettelheim. Although Bettelheim’s overall goal for the book is to discuss the positive influence of fairy tales on children, he spends a fair portion of the book focusing on a child’s “oedipal complex”, or the belief that children often have the wish to kill or hurt the parent of the same gender so that they may sleep with the parent of the opposite one. The idea of oedipal complexes does not receive as much attention today as it did while Bettelheim was writing, but it does demonstrate the violent emotions that psychoanalysts assign to children.
These emotions extend into dreams. In What Do Children Dream?, Gerard Bleandonu, a former head of child psychiatry at a regional hospital in France and whose practice is based on psychoanalytic interpretation of dreams, notes that psychoanalysts do “attribute complicated and violent emotions to young children.” (Bleandonu 49) Bleandonu dedicates many pages to the dreams he collected from the child patients he worked with. In the majority of these dreams, Bleandonu believed the dream revealed that the child was disturbed by some violent or sexual emotion.
B. Cognitive Approach:
A cognitive approach to dreams generally gives little attention to the interpretation of dreams; instead, cognitive dream theorists explain the process of dreaming through the biology of the brain.
David Foulkes is a cognitive dream theorist who, during the late 1960’s to the early 1970’s, conducted an organized dream study that focuses solely on children’s dreams. In his book, Children’s Dreaming and the Development of Consciousness, Foulkes describes in extensive detail the dream experiments that he conducted on children between the ages of three and fourteen. Based on the results of his experiments, he concludes that a child’s dreaming process is closely connected with their level of cognitive development. As he puts it, “To dream, it isn’t enough to be able to see. You have to be able to think in a certain way.” (Foulkes 117) Therefore, for instance, a child is not able to represent himself or herself in a dream until around seven-years-old because it takes a certain amount of savvy with visual-spatial skills to dream at that level.
As a cognitive scientist, Foulkes does not spend much time discussing the importance of emotions in dreams. In fact, Foulkes is dismissive of emotions in children’s dreams; he refutes the idea that “dreams [are] dripping with feelings” (Foulkes 68) and sardonically credits the idea to “psychiatry’s century-long infatuation with psychoanalysis” (Foulkes 68).
C. Ernest Hartmann:
Somewhere in between the violent emotions of a typical psychoanalyst’s interpretation of a child’s dreams and Foulkes, who believes that children’s dreams do not demonstrate any emotions, is Ernest Hartmann. Hartmann, a professor of psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine and author of Dreams and Nightmares: The Origins and Meanings of Dreams, points out that
Every two- to five- year-old child who is just developing the cognitive structures to
realize who is who, who’s safe and who’s unsafe or unpredictable, and to realize how
relatively powerful all the adults are, is bound to have some of this sense of vulnerability.
(Hartmann 65)
Hartmann theorizes that dreams are emotionally based; they are also a safe space for a person to act out emotions, especially for victims of trauma. He is not a child psychologist nor does he claim to have personally worked with children, but his theories allow for an emotional element in the discussion of children’s dreams without claiming that children are inherently violent.
Read more:
Introduction
Approaches to Children's Dreaming
History of Children's Literature
Alice in Wonderland
Suggested Readings, Links and Images
About Me