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This extremely expensive book is unusual in that it is edited by practicing psychoanalysts in the “greater Frankfurt-Weisbaden-Heidelberg area of Germany.” The authors have gathered together a variety of published articles on dreams since World War II. Many of them are over 30 years old, and reading through these articles is an interesting historical exercise to see what was considered for publication in the leading psychoanalytic journals in the 1950s and comparing it with what is considered suitable today. The papers are replete with many anecdotal reports and essentially unsubstantiated speculations. The reader should be warned that when an interpretation is offered prefaced by the phrase “it is clear that,” a speculation will be presented as if it were obvious fact. The authors themselves note the interesting observation that most of the significant advances in the period covered by these papers came from the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. With a couple of exceptions there have been no new theoretical advances in the study of dreams. In fact, the question arises as to whether some of the papers in this volume were even worthy of publication.
The rationale for this volume is presented by the authors as taken from the paper by Greenson, a paper that I found to be the best in the collection. Greenson points out that there has been a downgrading of the clinical importance of the dream because some psychoanalysts now feel that the dream has no special place in treatment “or they use techniques which indicate that they disregard Freud's theory and overall method of understanding and using the dream in clinical practice” (p. xvi). There are nine sections in the book entitled “Dreams and Their Multiple Uses,” “Dreams and the Psychoanalytic Situation and Process,” “Typical and Traumatic