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Despite the title's emphasis upon dreams, this is a book about memory, trauma and reconstruction in psychoanalysis. As such, it is both excellent and important.
Share explains that the project began with a patient's dream, dreamed on her birthday, of being given a blue basket. No meaningful associations were produced to ‘blue’, but various features prompted the analyst to wonder aloud whether the patient might have turned blue due to asphyxiation at birth. Although full confirmation of this was never obtained, there was a striking shift in the patient's behaviour following this interpretation, a move from continually enacting life and death scenarios. This led the author to reflect at length on whether very early experiences can be recorded, unconsciously enacted in behaviour and represented in dreams.
She notes that in classical analysis reconstruction of preverbal events was rare but, as analysts have attempted to treat more disturbed patients, interest in preverbal and even neonatal experience has increased. New technology also opens investigatory possibilities. Recently Piontelli's ultrasound studies have shown continuity between pre and postnatal life. In a related example, Piontelli studied a two-year-old psychotic child who was born with the umbilical cord wrapped tightly around her neck; the girl would always wear a heavy chain wrapped around her neck and in the consultingroom would endeavour to wrap herself in the curtain cord.
Some analysts, such as Anna Freud and Donald Spence, have seen the reconstruction of a veridical account of the childhood past as impossible, particularly because of the problem of distinguishing fantasy and actual experience. Share lists eight common arguments against veridical reconstruction. She points out that these problems have tended to lead to (a) a focus on here-and-now transference interpretations and (b) the adoption of a narrative perspective, as advocated by Spence. Share believes that both these solutions are unbalanced an