Performance anxiety case example

The need for eros may also arise in situations that are not obviously relationship problems. For example, one sees many people who suffer from performance anxiety, and their dreams may be very instructive about how to overcome this. In one case, a woman was a gifted pianist but was too frightened to perform very often. After a period of suicidal depression, she dreamed that she was part of a traveling circus where she found comfort and security from her fellow performers. Her... 

One of the most popular tests used to measure anxiety in animals are operant conflict tests. The word operant means that the subject, whether animal or human, must perform some task to bring about a specific result. In this kind of test, something that the animal likes or needs (such as food or water) is used as positive reinforcement to teach the animal to perform a task. For example, a rat might learn that pressing a lever brings the delivery of a food pellet. In this case, pressing the lever is the operant behavior and the food pellet is... 

We know that content itself can be repetitive, especially in the case of traumatic dreams, which we discussed in Chapter 6. But when we ask normal inidviduals to produce records of the recurrent dreams they claim to have, we are impressed by the fact that what is recurrent is the formal features, e.g. anxiety may be a common element to dreams. Well, anxiety about what Anxiety about exams, for example. That s not a bit surprising if we think that anxiety or emotion play a large part in dream construction. What things are people anxious about They are anxious about performance and performance evaluation, and what performance evaluation is more stressful or important to people than exam performance Consequently, we may have exam dreams as one of the recurrent themes. 

---