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A new psychoanalytic book on the dream, particularly one that is integrative in nature, should be considered in the context of the philosophical and theoretical currents prevalent at the time of its writing. Mark Blechner's The Dream Frontier stands on an important new level of philosophical and theoretical maturity in its synthetic view of thought in dreams and dream formation, clinical work with dreams, and the strength of the psychoanalytic method of working with dreams in relation to other disciplines that study the mind.
This theoretical maturity exists in the wake of a crisis in psychoanalysis that is by no means completely resolved. At the end of the twentieth century we saw a long decrease of interest in the dream as the central or even the paradigmatic phenomenon of psychoanalytic theorizing and practice, together with a dramatic upsurge of interest in the links between psychoanalysis and the cognitive and neurosciences. The result might be seen on the one hand as a breaking loose of psychoanalysis from the canons of authority, and an acquisition of sufficient confidence to welcome collaboration with the laboratory sciences. On the other hand, these accelerating trends within psychoanalysis also seem to be reflective of a perplexity in our psychoanalytic philosophy of science—an unresolved tentativeness about what constitutes our method, and what degree of scientific respectability our theory and praxis merit when they are compared to the mainstream “replicable” empirical sciences of mind and brain. We are in an era when the centrality and value of understanding the workings of the unconscious mind, and the vigorous use of the associative method in pursuit of that understanding, are being challenged—some might even say, rejected. As we contemplate our status amongst the disciplines studying the mind and its workings, we are called upon more and more to justify the status and power of our tools of inquiry in the context of putative data from the replicable sc