Dreams and the Growth of Personality: Expanding Awareness in Psychotherapy. Pergamon General Psychology Series, Volume 26. By Ernest Lawrence Rossi, Ph.D.  Pergamon Press, INC. New York, 1972.

THIS is an excellent book. The reader will be rewarded with an original, imaginative, and creative approach to the use of dreams in psychotherapy. The author evinces a great capacity to focus on the constructive and the emerging aliveness; he is not dismayed or frightened by the nature or intensity of the material.

This is a book to be read and reread in order to master its contents. Probably the most valuable inclusion is a list of hypotheses concerning the use of dreams in the work of therapy; these hypotheses are illustrated by clinical material derived from an actual case treated by Dr. Rossi.

The hypotheses are as follows:

1. That which is unique, odd, strange or intensely idiosyncratic in a dream is an essence of individuality. It is an original psychological experience and, as such, it is the raw material out of which new patterns of awareness may develop.

2. Words, messages, or any other form of characterization of one's self in a dream are usually important aspects of personality that may be in a process of change.

3. When one experiences two or more states of being in a dream a process of psychological change is in progress.

4. Self-reflection, an examination of one's thoughts, feelings or behavior in a dream, mediates the phenomenological shift from a state of being to an expansion of awareness.

5. Spontaneous transformations in dream imagery are important psychological changes that provide conditions for self-reflection and the expansion of awareness.

6. The growth of personality is effected through a uniquely personal interaction between one's old self and the new states of being that arise autonomously within the phenomenological realm.