[Nightmares of children--causes, prevention, healing].

This paper tries, after a phenomenological description of the nightmare, to expose the different aetiologies that have been attributed to the origin of nightmares and night terrors by the literature of the past hundred years. External and physiological causes for bad dreams are preferred in the older medical and psychological literature, whereas younger authors consider nightmares as psychogenic or mediated by psychic trauma. New impulses to aetiological theories came from the rise of the psychoanalytic theory, but also from ego-psychological developments that base its concepts on the actual conflicts of the ego. Preventive procedures against the constitution of nightmares are then discussed as well as the different intervention methods developed by former and contemporary therapies for the elimination of the nightmare phenomenon.