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The Dream Discourse Today is one of the more recent additions to the New Library of Psychoanalysis, the series begun in 1987 by Routledge in association with the Institute of Psycho-Analysis in London. It is a series that is intended to create a greater appreciation of what psychoanalysis is really about. Sara Flanders is a practising psychoanalyst and for this book she has selected thirteen papers published in various psychoanalytic journals since 1962. To them she adds an introduction for the whole book - essentially a review of the place of dream in psychoanalytic thinking since Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) - and then a brief introduction to each of the four sections she has constructed.
Going through the book I came to realise what a complex and rather difficult task she had undertaken. It is a task which she has done, I believe, admirably. To present something reasonably coherent about dreams to an outside world, when the psychoanalytic world is marked and sometimes riven by difference, is no mean feat. To achieve this Flanders adopts a strictly non-committal line, attempting to select judiciously, record accurately and balance fairly material from various directions (historical, north American, European, Freudian, Kleinian, Independent perspectives and traditions). While allowing the reader to make up his/her own mind she also tacitly maintains the line that such differences are evolutionary and essentially creative. Some might see this as a little presumptuous or over optimistic; but she is persuasive.
My guess is that the book will appeal beyond the psychoanalytic psychotherapeutic world to people from the other disciplines that Routledge list - history, linguistics, literature, medicine, philosophy, psychology and the social sciences - though I may be misjudging the sophistication and level of interest of non-analytic readers. Certainly there is a nice combination of concise description and analytic map-making in her introduction that sets the