The Dream Discourse Today

"The Dream Discourse Today" offers a view of key American, British and French papers on dream analysis in clinical practice. The purpose of the book is to show the reader different, well-articulated perspectives, place them in historical context, and invite comparative reading. The cumulative effect of both papers and introductions is to leave the reader with an informed sense of the range of perspectives, and a confidence in the continued relevance of dream analysis to practice, as some striking convergences in the implications of thinking drawn from very different approaches becomes clear. The first paper provides an orientation to the subject, developing the theme of the relationship between the psychoanalytic understanding of dream formation and the psychoanalytic situation itself. It hints at the growing problems in dream interpretation - the necessity to focus on the function of the dream, the patient's use of the dream life, and the potential perversion of the dream in the psychic economy of the more disturbed patient. Virtually all the papers in the third section of the book look at this problem.