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Natterson's professed intention in gathering these essays on dreams is to furnish a "readily accessible contemporary work on dreams" and to generate interest in the use of dreams in various treatment modalities applied to psychopathological states. The work is addressed to psychoanalysts and to psychotherapists of various disciplines in the mental health field, as well as to students in training.
In the first section "Clinical Theory of Dreams," an essay is presented which seems representative of the interpretive approach of several articles in this book. In "The Manifest Dream and its Latent Meaning," by Louis Breger, the author presents a Kantian view of the dreaming experience as knowable to the dreamer only through construction by various ego functions such as self- and object schemata, cognitive skills, affect states. The manifest dream is the product of the construction of experience (in Piagetian terms), much as the child constructs his world from the mélange of sensations that form his experience. There is no latent content in the dream. Content is seen only in the manifest dream. What is latent is a series of meanings: "the analyst … provides a construction … and a more meaningful explanation for the dream in the surrounding context of the patient's associations, relationships, and life history." Breger's case illustration shows these meanings as constructed not only from the patient's associations, but also from the transference context, the therapist's total knowledge of the patient's life, his own allegorical interpretations, images, and associations. He decries the attempt of many analysts to find the latent dream thought and force its meaning upon the patient. In my view, substituting a more sweeping selection of data and using a mode of intuitive interpretation or "construction" for the more disciplined procedure of using the dreamer's associations as the main fulcrum for interpretation, will more likely eventuate in misleading dream interpre