Dear Karen,
Here are some of my thoughts about your patient and dream.
You describe her as  having histrionic and borderline features.
Particularly the borderline features would suggest to me that she possibly
has problems with intimacy.  In such a person the possibility of intimacy
may stimulate unconscious abandonment anxieties.  Since you describe a
history of covert incest as well as a history of her becoming involved with
older men who are intrusive and manipulative it is possible that she deals
with her anxiety around intimacy by projecting the anxiety into sexualised
fantasies which have a incestuous flavor or into situation and experiences
which have an incestuous flavor.  This would serve to give the anxiety a
form in consciousness as well as to protect her from the terror of a real
intimate contact.
By sexualising possible intimate contacts in an incestuous way she resolves
any ambivalent feelings which she may have around the intimate
possibilities in the relationship by being forced to move away from the
object (which has now become dangerous).
Her dream would suggest to me that she was beginning to experience the
contact with you as  intimate.  The male teacher would represent you, this
may be  indicated in part by her feminising this figure (the wearing of
makeup, wearing something pink).  The dream occurs on Valentines day which
of course is a particularly romantic and intimate time for a lot of people.


My hypothesis would not therefor be along the lines that you are becoming
too sexually intrusive for her but rather that she is experiencing  you as
offering her intimacy (the valentine).  Perhaps then what is missing is
interpretations around her fear of intimacy developing in her relationship
with you and how this may be sexualised by her and projected onto you,
creating you  as a sexually intrusive object. The danger to her is that if
she sexualises you in an incestuous way then you become dangerous and she
is forced to move away from you.

One possibility is to check your countertransference reaction to her prior
to the dream.  Had you started to feel more intimacy towards her?

This is an interesting problem thank you for sharing it.

Regards
Martin Yodaiken
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